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Congressman's phone password is 111111

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Re: Congressman's phone password is 111111

#181

Post by droithomme »

abstractbeliefs wrote: post #32
wayneftw wrote: post #25

I don't lock my phone at all. Never have. However, with the new iPhones that don't have a home button, I believe that Apple is forcing you to either use face unlock or a passcode. There is no choice to just leave it unlocked. So, as soon as my iPhone 6s stops working, I will have to choose to: 1) Give in and use my face to unlock. 2) Use a dumb passcode like 000000. 3) Upgrade to the newest iPhone that still has a ho…

Why is it that you choose not to? I think it would be helpful to understand your use case and how you balance your personal tolerance for risk and consequences so we can better consider users like yourself.

Not him but I also leave my iPhone wide open.

I primarily use it as a camera and tape recorder. And mobile wifi web browser with retina resolution in rare cases, all in which I specifically avoid using it to use any sites that require logging in.

I have a fake name on it. There are no contacts or email accounts set up on it.

It's not ever been activated as a cell phone.

Basically, I see no reason to have a password on it, and a password slows things down slightly and has the risk of forgetting (since I never reuse passwords), so why bother.

My Android phone that I do use as a cell phone though I have a password on it. It has similarly few personal details, but the call logs would make it easy to identify me.

Granted the iPhone's location logging though disabled might be storing info anyway, and probably the photos are GPS tagged, so those things would identify me.

Re: Congressman's phone password is 111111

#182

Post by netsharc »

netsharc wrote: post #75
duxup wrote: post #10

I tell this story a lot. But I think in the time of smartphones and such it also represents the only real secure site I thought was truly secure from what I knew of it. This was before smartphones were common, but I think it was ahead of its time in that way. I worked for a company that occasionally would service some of our hardware onsite. One customer was a company that did a lot of work for the military and they…

The boindfolds seem like extra work, I would just get a SUV and totally black out the rear, or well, put in some seats in the rear of a delivery van. But I guess the boindfolds also had a psychological effect of "we mean business".

How did I misspell "blindfolds" twice!

Re: Congressman's phone password is 111111

#183

Post by komali2 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #38
komali2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where was this? What was the "site?" What country? And what kind of work were they outsourcing to outside the military?

Given the intensity of the security described, I strongly suspect the answer to each of those questions is "I can't say". We outsource pretty much anything to contractors, though.

Sure but never bad to ask :)

Re: Congressman's phone password is 111111

#184

Post by dang »

slg wrote: post #174
dang wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads into political flamewar. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21344785 and marked it off-topic.

Just trying to be a better HN citizen, so is there something specific I did wrong here that crossed a line or is it just a "know it when I see it" situation? I didn't reference anything partisan and was simply relating a recent political event to both the general topic of poor congressional cybersecurity and the specific topic that duxup was talking about regarding securing a site from electronic devices. It was the…

I hear you and appreciate your wish to be a good community member!

The value of an HN comment is the expected value of its future subthread—i.e. itself, plus the sum of the probability distribution of the responses it may receive.

In this case the EV of your post was negative: first because it brought in a partisan stunt that was still hot from the news of the moment; second by framing it one-sidedly ("barged into...without authorization...such a problem"); third by linking to a political source that one side is overwhelmingly likely to agree with and the other side to be unimpressed or offended by.

You're right that the flamewar was more in the responses to your comment than in your comment itself, but that's true of most flamewars. Flames get hotter as they spread. From a fire prevention point of view, the issue isn't where the fire burned hottest but where it started.

By the way, there are some deeper, interesting issues with this 'expected value' model of comments. It implies that commenters are in some sense responsible for the behavior of others and not just what they they themselves post. That's weird. And it implies that one needs to consider not just one's own post, but future replies—also weird. Yet it is the model that works the best in practice.

Re: Congressman's phone password is 111111

#185

Post by dang »

zests wrote: post #141
grepthisab wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly awful take. Enough with the "both sides" nonsense. One side is objectively bad. Even accidentally taking electronics into a SCIF can be grounds for losing ones security clearance and getting in major trouble. These people planned it, and executed that plan, for a publicity stunt. Enough has been said about why it wasn't necessary in any way for them to act like this, so I won't go into it, see other responses t…

I feel like HN is becoming more explicitly political and I think that this is a poor direction for the site to move.

Fear not. It fluctuates, but the range of fluctuation has been stable for many years. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 from 2010 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 from 2013 as reactions to previous swings.

More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

Re: Congressman's phone password is 111111

#186

Post by arpa »

duxup wrote: post #157
Simon_says wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you stick the flash drive up really far up your bum? Wouldn't the saltwater in your body form a Faraday cage around it?

Trips to the bathroom involved no privacy at all. So you'd have to pull some sort of slight of hand to manage that.

Why,I always wipe like that! Yup, all the way to the elbow as if I were looking for a flash drive that somehow managed to get up that far! Yessiree, and it's completely normal that i keep a small memento in a wrap of TP in my pocket after a good visit to the bathroom!

Re: Congressman's phone password is 111111

#187

Post by [deleted] »

moviuro wrote: post #76
gambiting wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine a more annoying feature. My bank already does this where I cannot use the keyboard to type in digits, I have to use their own on-screen keyboard that's scrambled between every digit(!!!) and I can't imagine anything like that anywhere near my phone. Either pin-based protection is good enough for you, or if you need more security then switch to full a-Z password.

Bank's security relies on reports of the past decade/century, and also, that kind of setup can't be okay for the blind users... how the hell are they supposed to interact with this monstruosity?...

[deleted]

Re: Congressman's phone password is 111111

#188

Post by kobayashi »

breakerbox wrote: post #112

If I were giving a security recommendation to famous people and congresspeople I would recommend using a password like this. You might think it’s incredibly insecure, but imagine this GIF contained that 6 digit number that the congressman uses for all of his accounts. Suddenly, a ton of other services and passwords are vulnerable to an attacker. In reality a lot of iPhones now require authentication at the app level…

This is itself bad advice. The proper solution is a truly random password, committed to memory, and all others being stored in a password manager, which is itself secured by a separate strong password

Re: Congressman's phone password is 111111

#189

Post by xnyan »

ceejayoz wrote: post #117
Roark66 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "localised EMP" you mention could simply be a low power microwave oven of same type we have in our kitchens you have to walk through. Waves of that frequency would not harm a person if they were fairly low power, but it would mess up every bit of non-metal-shielded electronics. If you want to destroy a piece of electronics quickly put it in a microwave oven and hit start (also don't expect to eat from that oven l…

Remember to switch it off if you invite Dick Cheney in for a visit, though. Frying his pacemaker would be a bit of a PR hit.

Or boon depending on your judgement of the 46th Vice President.

Re: Congressman's phone password is 111111

#190

Post by nacs »

samanator wrote: post #166
chooseaname wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. This appears to be an iPhone, so it would be all 7s.

What does it being an Iphone have to do with the orientation of the numberpad?

The number-pad unlock is higher/centered-vertically on the iPhone unlike Androids which tend to have it on the lower half of the screen.
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