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U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

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Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#251

Post by mdpopescu »

studentrob wrote: post #134
mtgx wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but I think Americans want a semblance of representation. When The People have close to 0% sway in Congress' opinions on bills, and corporations have like 70%, I'd say that's a pretty big freaking deal, no? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig Every time there's an argument about wanting more democracy in the US, it seems someone always appears to say "but that's mob rule!". No, nobody wants mob rule. But…

> When The People have close to 0% sway in Congress' opinions on bills, and corporations have like 70%, I'd say that's a pretty big freaking deal, no? There's plenty of time to undo the actions of the past 10, 20, even 30 years. If you sit back on your heels, throw your arms up in the air, don't vote and say nothing, then you won't be participating in democracy. But if you do use your voice and vote then at least you…

Personally, I don't believe that "at least you can say you tried" is morally superior to not participating in a rigged game.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#252

Post by winstonewert »

eru wrote: post #238
studentrob wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frankly, I think we should not only abolish the electoral college, but the states as well. I was with you until this part. States gave us a path to gay marriage, and allow people to move to different areas that hold different values than the whole nation. I'd suggest trying instant runoff voting before moving to something as drastic as abolishing states. I think IRV would allow people to express their votes and opi…

Approval Voting is much simpler, and without the perverse incentives that come with instant runoff voting.

Here's my problem with Approval Voting: Let's say you are left-wing, and there is a left-wing, centrist, and right-wing candidate running. Do you approve the centrist candidate? If you approve the centrist candidate, you may block the right-wing candidate, but you also may block the left-wing candidate. There is no clear and obvious way for the voter to translate their preference into an approval vote.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#253

Post by exodust »

cmurf wrote: post #52

Who wants to take bets on how? My bet is they copied the flash, and are iterating passcode guesses until it slows down too much (or implodes, however it's configured) and then they reflash and iterate again. And it was only a 4 digit passcode, so it was pretty easy to do this. The next bet is whether they find anything relevant? My bet is no. Next bet after that is whether they admit it? My bet is they won't. But the…

> My bet is they copied the flash, and are iterating passcode guesses

Sounds reasonable. No trivial task I bet, but with the world's attention on the case a lot of kids would be having a crack at the trendiest break-in job going right now.

The guys who cracked the iPhone probably earned the equivalent of signing a record label deal. At the very least, the FBI liked and subscribed.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#254

Post by winstonewert »

panarky wrote: post #115
snowwrestler wrote: post #101

I'm seeing a lot of comments to the effect that the government will just try again at some point. Well, welcome to life in a democracy. Nothing is ever settled with finality because there are plenty of ways for future generations to change the laws we cherish today--for good or ill. We could revoke the 13th and 14th Amendments and have slavery again--there is no legal impediment to that. That we don't do that is a re…

> Well, welcome to life in a democracy. The problem is not that things change in a democracy. The problem is that the change we get does not represent the will of the people. A majority of Americans is dissatisfied with the Patriot Act [1] yet it keeps getting renewed. A majority of Americans thinks political spending is corrupt [2] and that the political system is rigged, yet we get Citizens United to pour even more…

Actually, neither candidate got a majority in 2000 election, either nationally or in Florida.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#256

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

jameshart wrote: post #232

So in the last week, a lot of media reports around the Brussels attacks have focused on how, in the immediate aftermath of the arrest of an alleged Paris conspirator, the Belgian authorities were premature in announcing that they were learning information about his co-conspirators, which caused those people to bring forward their attack plans. Now, the FBI has just announced to the world that any information locked u…

AFAIK didn't the San Bernadino person not use their work phone for this? The iPhone the FBI wanted into was their work phone, already Government-controlled. Not their burner phone, which was destroyed.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#257

Post by fsck--off »

rayiner wrote: post #209
fsck--off wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the 2000 election a disingenuous example? Bush lost the overall popular vote and it is almost certain that a majority of people tried to vote for Gore in Florida.

We also don't elect presidents based on who people "tried to vote for." Bush won the first count, and he won the automated recount. It should never have progressed further than that. 7 of 9 justices agreed that the ad-hoc recount that applied different standards to different counties violated the equal protection clause. Moreover, we have no way of knowing whether Bush or Gore "won" Florida. Voting is a mechanism for…

The butterfly ballot funneled thousands of votes to Buchanan. Recounting miscast votes would not have helped.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#258

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

nodesocket wrote: post #164

The reality is that the FBI accessed it, so they no longer required Apple's help. "The Justice Department said Monday it has accessed data on the iPhone used by a shooter in last year's San Bernardino, California, attacks and no longer needs Apple's help in cracking it." Apparently a 3rd party from Israel ( http://www.cellebrite.com/ ) helped the FBI which begs the question, how did they do it? Do they have universal…

One suggestion I heard was to reset the state of the NAND constantly to evade the PIN input limit.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#259

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

icebraining wrote: post #77
airza wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not how the security enclave works as far as i know, you can't copy that part off and so you can't copy off + bruteforce the drive?

From what I understand, the iPhone in question is an older model, without the secure enclave.

The person in question had an iPhone 5C, which is very similar internally to an iPhone 5, and it doesn't have the Secure Enclave because it lacks Touch ID. The 5's successor, iPhone 5S, has it, I think.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#260

Post by eru »

winstonewert wrote: post #252
eru wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Approval Voting is much simpler, and without the perverse incentives that come with instant runoff voting.

Here's my problem with Approval Voting: Let's say you are left-wing, and there is a left-wing, centrist, and right-wing candidate running. Do you approve the centrist candidate? If you approve the centrist candidate, you may block the right-wing candidate, but you also may block the left-wing candidate. There is no clear and obvious way for the voter to translate their preference into an approval vote.

That's an interesting point. Yes, approval voting, like all other voting systems, requires voters to not only know their preferences, but also to play a little `game' (in the game theory sense of the word).

The optimal strategy on who to vote for depends not only on preferences, but also on what you know about the other voters. Polls help here.

The nice thing about approval voting is that, even though their might not be one single, clear and obvious way to translate your preference into your vote; but there is a clear and obvious family of ways to do so. And they have nice properties.

In-first-past-the-post, people often elect to give their vote to the lesser evil, instead of their preferred (third-party) candidate.

In approval voting, you will never have to give a compromise candidate more `vote' than any other candidate you prefer.

Ie all families of sensible voting strategies for approval voting look like this:

- sort candidates in order of preference - figure out a cutoff - approve anyone above the cutoff

The optimal cutoff depends on the peculiarities of the election (polls etc).

In practice, people manage this quite well intuitively. (I have run approval votings for small things, like which restaurant to take the team to.)

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