What the Fifth does here is prevent the government from compelling you to turn over a password or PIN or whatever if knowing you can unlock the phone will have any value as evidence. If they know a certain phone is involved in a crime, and they don't already know it's yours, then compelling you to unlock it would be compelling you to admit your phone was involved in a crime, and that's self-incrimination. (If you've got a passphrase that's a confession on some device, they can't force you to reveal the passphrase. If it's found legal to compel you to provide a password, they can force you to type it in yourself.)
The choice for most people is not between more or less security, it's between some security and no security. People use the fingerprint unlock, including those who wouldn't stand for entering a PIN each time. An actual passphrase would be really awkward to type on the device, and almost nobody would ever use it. (It's still an option, I believe, but just having the phone wipe itself on ten failed logins and having a four-digit PIN means an intruder has only a 1% chance of getting through.)
The Apple fiasco was actually the FBI trying to compel Apple to produce that modified OS (after thoroughly muffing the evidence collection), and Apple argued that it couldn't be compelled to cooperate in that way. The FBI's dropping of the legal action suggests to me that Apple would have won. The FBI claimed that it had found another way to read it.
The technique the FBI tried to get Apple to do would work on an iPhone 5 or earlier, and not on any phone Apple currently sells.
In the US, you can be compelled to provide physical evidence and do certain things, such as allow a cheek swab or have your finger pressed to a sensor. Whether the courts can compel the use of a password isn't really settled. It seems that it's allowed if it decrypts something already known to exist, and it's certainly not legal to compel someone to give up the password to a phone if it isn't known that the person has used the password. (Example: a phone is found at a crime scene. If I demonstrate that I can unlock it, I'm incriminating myself by tying myself to an object at the scene.)
Sure, they can do that. On an iPhone, anyway, what they'll get is the contents encrypted with a random 256-bit key using encryption that is pretty much universally considered uncrackable. In other words, it's secure from anything short of a Kardashev Type III civilization with ultra-efficient quantum computers, and if one of them wants to get me they will anyway.
The key is held in a separate piece or area of silicon, and can only be extracted from it with extremely exacting physical analysis of the chip, which is likely to destroy the key permanently. The Secure Enclave is perfectly capable of erasing the key, and then nothing is recoverable. It handles the verification of the PIN itself. There's got to be ways to breach the security, but Apple is trying to remove them.
Having your iPhone set up to delete itself after ten failed logins is the sort of nice unequivocal policy that companies use, and as a policy it provides protection against other potential intruders. You'd have to deliberately fail to login ten times to do anything really wrong, and that will take a long time because of lockouts. Therefore, according to a pseudonymous guy on the Internet who will assure you he's not a lawyer, it should be fine.
Conspiracy charges are even sneakier. If the FBI agent provocateur talks a bunch of morons into making a plan to do something illegal, like rob Fort Knox under cover of a pizza delivery, and one of the morons does something perfectly legal that clearly furthers the plan, time to arrest the guys and charge them with conspiracy to do something illegal.
It can get silly. When I was going back to grad school, we bought a house. I had to write letters explaining that I didn't quit my job and go to grad school to get benefits from a housing program, and exactly why, as a two-adult family, we only needed one car.
I don't think they cared much about our reasons, just that we had some.
And that's because, from centuries of historical practice, a very large number of people think gold is valuable beyond its physical properties. It's just the same as US dollars: both have value because people think it has value, and there's plenty of evidence to show that people will continue to value USD and gold.
Or a Sanders voter, or a Clinton. GP is talking about real problems, acknowledged by a lot of politicians, and it's possible to think that one person talking about certain problems would be reasonably effective, while another would be a disaster.
You're not going to run an e-commerce site like that, not for long, anyway. If you've got a nice easy way to make extra money, other people are going to catch on, and the profit margins are going to drop fast. It'll wind up with the only people making money being the ones who put real work into it or have some sort of special angle.
I went to college in1970-1974, my son in 2012-2016, same institution, and by my calculations his education was about 4 times as much in constant dollars.
I used to know a guy, old enough to have served in Vietnam, whose life was basically side hustles. His wife had the "real" job, and he went out and ran various money-making schemes that were profitable enough to be useful. One of his schemes got him his house, for example. I had an uncle who hated regular work, so he got in with the local entrepeneur communities and made his living with over-the-counter stock trading. This isn't exactly new.
Working a "day job" and trying something else at night was fairly common for artistic and performer types, hence the phrase "don't quit the day job".
What's making part of the difference is computer capability. I have a non-computer wargaming hobby, and in the 1970s or so it took big bucks to make something look professional and finished. Despite the collapse of the hobby (after it became computerized), I can get better-looking and better-made games and such from people working out of their garage and able to do this for fun than I could from the business in the 70s.
Personally, I blame the parents of the millenials (i.e. my generation). We insulated them from failure as they grew up, teaching them that they could be whatever they wanted to be in life, ignoring how good or bad they were at it, and whether or not it was actually a job someone else would be willing to pay them to do. And when they moved out on their own and real life threw failure at them, they didn't know how to handle it because they'd never experienced it before while growing up.
Get off my lawn, sonny. I was born in 1954, and I got that crap in school, along with "don't blow your own horn". I was once thinking of writing something about "Everything that held me back, I learned in kindergarten". My son, a millennial (had him late), was actually challenged in school, and by his advanced math program. He's in better shape than I was to succeed.
Windows 10 came with my laptop. I have no confidence that there are good drivers for Windows 7, and I'd have to pay extra for that. I need Windows because this is my gaming machine and Visual Studio and, basically, Windows-compatible machine.
So far, it's making me feel nostalgic for the days when Vista was the worst Microsoft could do.
7. I fired up Minesweeper, and it gave me this full-screen version that said it would disable advertising for a small fee. It's not as important as the privacy settings (which I don't trust anyway), but it annoyed me.
Also, due to political pressure, the ACA was set up to not allow downward pressure on the profits of insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies. I don't think that it's the profit model that's at fault here, since we've all got to allocate resources somehow, it's the looting model that sucks.
I know one. She once complained to me that she lost money on Medicare patients (her overhead was larger than what Medicare would pay - I'm not sure she's all that good at running a business), but she treated them anyway.
You know which President as far back as I can remember (and that's a long time, sonny, now get off my lawn) got an actual balanced budget? Some guy named Clinton. If we're talking about keeping the US solvent, I favor Clintons.
In business, bankruptcy isn't just another tool. It's a way to screw people over, to get out of inconvenient obligations, and leave lots of people asking where their money went.
Clinton lied about the emails, yes, but that's par for the course in politics. She mishandled a fairly small number of classified documents, with no intent to cause harm, and no apparent harm. That's not praise, but the fact is that nobody's been prosecuted for such relatively innocent mishandling. For that matter, nobody got prosecuted for some Republican scandals that look similar.
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What the Fifth does here is prevent the government from compelling you to turn over a password or PIN or whatever if knowing you can unlock the phone will have any value as evidence. If they know a certain phone is involved in a crime, and they don't already know it's yours, then compelling you to unlock it would be compelling you to admit your phone was involved in a crime, and that's self-incrimination. (If you've got a passphrase that's a confession on some device, they can't force you to reveal the passphrase. If it's found legal to compel you to provide a password, they can force you to type it in yourself.)
The choice for most people is not between more or less security, it's between some security and no security. People use the fingerprint unlock, including those who wouldn't stand for entering a PIN each time. An actual passphrase would be really awkward to type on the device, and almost nobody would ever use it. (It's still an option, I believe, but just having the phone wipe itself on ten failed logins and having a four-digit PIN means an intruder has only a 1% chance of getting through.)
The Apple fiasco was actually the FBI trying to compel Apple to produce that modified OS (after thoroughly muffing the evidence collection), and Apple argued that it couldn't be compelled to cooperate in that way. The FBI's dropping of the legal action suggests to me that Apple would have won. The FBI claimed that it had found another way to read it.
The technique the FBI tried to get Apple to do would work on an iPhone 5 or earlier, and not on any phone Apple currently sells.
In the US, you can be compelled to provide physical evidence and do certain things, such as allow a cheek swab or have your finger pressed to a sensor. Whether the courts can compel the use of a password isn't really settled. It seems that it's allowed if it decrypts something already known to exist, and it's certainly not legal to compel someone to give up the password to a phone if it isn't known that the person has used the password. (Example: a phone is found at a crime scene. If I demonstrate that I can unlock it, I'm incriminating myself by tying myself to an object at the scene.)
Sure, they can do that. On an iPhone, anyway, what they'll get is the contents encrypted with a random 256-bit key using encryption that is pretty much universally considered uncrackable. In other words, it's secure from anything short of a Kardashev Type III civilization with ultra-efficient quantum computers, and if one of them wants to get me they will anyway.
The key is held in a separate piece or area of silicon, and can only be extracted from it with extremely exacting physical analysis of the chip, which is likely to destroy the key permanently. The Secure Enclave is perfectly capable of erasing the key, and then nothing is recoverable. It handles the verification of the PIN itself. There's got to be ways to breach the security, but Apple is trying to remove them.
Having your iPhone set up to delete itself after ten failed logins is the sort of nice unequivocal policy that companies use, and as a policy it provides protection against other potential intruders. You'd have to deliberately fail to login ten times to do anything really wrong, and that will take a long time because of lockouts. Therefore, according to a pseudonymous guy on the Internet who will assure you he's not a lawyer, it should be fine.
Conspiracy charges are even sneakier. If the FBI agent provocateur talks a bunch of morons into making a plan to do something illegal, like rob Fort Knox under cover of a pizza delivery, and one of the morons does something perfectly legal that clearly furthers the plan, time to arrest the guys and charge them with conspiracy to do something illegal.
It can get silly. When I was going back to grad school, we bought a house. I had to write letters explaining that I didn't quit my job and go to grad school to get benefits from a housing program, and exactly why, as a two-adult family, we only needed one car.
I don't think they cared much about our reasons, just that we had some.
And that's because, from centuries of historical practice, a very large number of people think gold is valuable beyond its physical properties. It's just the same as US dollars: both have value because people think it has value, and there's plenty of evidence to show that people will continue to value USD and gold.
Or a Sanders voter, or a Clinton. GP is talking about real problems, acknowledged by a lot of politicians, and it's possible to think that one person talking about certain problems would be reasonably effective, while another would be a disaster.
You're not going to run an e-commerce site like that, not for long, anyway. If you've got a nice easy way to make extra money, other people are going to catch on, and the profit margins are going to drop fast. It'll wind up with the only people making money being the ones who put real work into it or have some sort of special angle.
In which case a minimum wage increase won't destroy fast food jobs, since fast food workers create enough business value to justify $15/hour.
I went to college in1970-1974, my son in 2012-2016, same institution, and by my calculations his education was about 4 times as much in constant dollars.
I used to know a guy, old enough to have served in Vietnam, whose life was basically side hustles. His wife had the "real" job, and he went out and ran various money-making schemes that were profitable enough to be useful. One of his schemes got him his house, for example. I had an uncle who hated regular work, so he got in with the local entrepeneur communities and made his living with over-the-counter stock trading. This isn't exactly new.
Working a "day job" and trying something else at night was fairly common for artistic and performer types, hence the phrase "don't quit the day job".
What's making part of the difference is computer capability. I have a non-computer wargaming hobby, and in the 1970s or so it took big bucks to make something look professional and finished. Despite the collapse of the hobby (after it became computerized), I can get better-looking and better-made games and such from people working out of their garage and able to do this for fun than I could from the business in the 70s.
Get off my lawn, sonny. I was born in 1954, and I got that crap in school, along with "don't blow your own horn". I was once thinking of writing something about "Everything that held me back, I learned in kindergarten". My son, a millennial (had him late), was actually challenged in school, and by his advanced math program. He's in better shape than I was to succeed.
Windows 10 came with my laptop. I have no confidence that there are good drivers for Windows 7, and I'd have to pay extra for that. I need Windows because this is my gaming machine and Visual Studio and, basically, Windows-compatible machine.
So far, it's making me feel nostalgic for the days when Vista was the worst Microsoft could do.
I figure that, if the NSA really wants my data, they'll get it. They're not among the threats I consider when deciding on security measures.
7. I fired up Minesweeper, and it gave me this full-screen version that said it would disable advertising for a small fee. It's not as important as the privacy settings (which I don't trust anyway), but it annoyed me.
Also, due to political pressure, the ACA was set up to not allow downward pressure on the profits of insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies. I don't think that it's the profit model that's at fault here, since we've all got to allocate resources somehow, it's the looting model that sucks.
I know one. She once complained to me that she lost money on Medicare patients (her overhead was larger than what Medicare would pay - I'm not sure she's all that good at running a business), but she treated them anyway.
A seven-figure salary for a company that big is huge?
You know which President as far back as I can remember (and that's a long time, sonny, now get off my lawn) got an actual balanced budget? Some guy named Clinton. If we're talking about keeping the US solvent, I favor Clintons.
I'm not an anti-Trump astroturfer. I'm anti-Trump for my own reasons and don't charge a penny for it. He'd be a disaster if elected to public office.
In business, bankruptcy isn't just another tool. It's a way to screw people over, to get out of inconvenient obligations, and leave lots of people asking where their money went.
Clinton lied about the emails, yes, but that's par for the course in politics. She mishandled a fairly small number of classified documents, with no intent to cause harm, and no apparent harm. That's not praise, but the fact is that nobody's been prosecuted for such relatively innocent mishandling. For that matter, nobody got prosecuted for some Republican scandals that look similar.