There are lots of exceptions for copyrights. No one is going to sue you for humming a tune, because the money they would recover would be unworthy of the effort. Your lack of knowledge of the law isn't a reason to dispose of it.

If a joke is parody, yes. If it's merely told again, no. Parody is taking an expression that exists, and modifying it in a way to prove a point (such as exposing silliness, illogic, bad character of the author, etc.) If the modification doesn't prove a point or carry a message of its own, it isn't parody.

I can't agree. Jokes aren't recipes for laughter. Copying a sequence of steps won't violate anyone's copyright, that is true, but copying an expression of something uncopyrighted is infringement. It's the expression that makes the joke funny, in most cases.

Are jokes covered by copyrights? The answer is a resounding "yes", because they are "works of authorship" covered by the USC.

Can you "copyright" one? That's nonsensical, because the rights begin the moment the joke is told or written down. The author of a joke doesn't need to apply anywhere to get copyrights.

Did O'Brien infringe Mr. Kaseburg's copyrights? Well, perhaps, but proving that O'Brien got his material from Kaseburg might be difficult. Proving similarity isn't enough, because O'Brien could have come up with the jokes himself, or gotten permission from someone else that came up with the jokes. Kaseburg would have to prove the value of those jokes, which could be much less than his costs of prosecuting a law suit in federal court, even if he were awarded lawyer fees.

And that will be different than what we have now? Obama isn't held in the highest regard, either.

Dyson's true discoveries are to find people predilected to believe silly things and spend lots of money on fads. He claims his vacuum cleaners produce more "suction". The vacuum of any air-moving machine is limited by the natural air pressure, not by a fancy impeller design. It's like making an empty bottle more "empty". My grandma's Kirby from the 1950s produced just as much "suction" as a Dyson, and it had a metal housing that you could hit with a cannonball with no dent.

Now Dyson would have us believe that he has done what no one else in any company has been able to do for 50 years with the hairdryer. What he does with it is akin to putting gold-plating on a dump truck. The non-plated version does the same job for a whole lot less.

I'd be curious to know what kind of water that guy used. Distilled water is actually not very conductive. Salt water is. The phone might not work as well in something other than culinary water.

The fact that Galaxy S7 Edge worked at all underwater is impressive! The guy was able to swipe the screen with his finger, but I don't think it worked every time. I'd be interested in seeing a single-press test, and seeing if the phone can accurately locate the finger (XY) on the screen. Swiping is one thing, but if you can't press the visual buttons on the display, you're phone won't work under water.

Capacitive touchscreens work great ... until they get wet. With the recent push by Samsung into the water-resistive phone/tablet market, I imagine we'll be seeing an Android device that works entirely underwater within 12 months. Imagine taking your phone into the surf or the pool. It's coming!

No matter how "properly" you wash your hands with soap, you're never going to eliminate the population of germs on them. Germs grow exponentially: unless you get all of them, you're only delaying the infection. Soap reduces their number, leaving your immune system time to react.

If you want to eliminate the germs, you have to sanitize the surface completely. Restaurants use bleaches for that purpose; hospitals have their own methods (heat, steam, chemicals, etc.) Soap is only a surfactant, removing oils, not a sanitizer.

Washing your hands with soap and water doesn't remove the germs. It removes some of the oils on your hands that harbor the germs. Unless you're going to use a sanitizing solution before drying your hands, those germs will still be there.

So Dyson says: "Independent research shows that before they even reach the washroom, paper towels can contain large communities of culturable bacteria."

Yes, but those bacteria aren't likely to cause disease in humans. As I understand it, infectious viruses don't survive for long periods of time on dry surfaces, like paper towels. If one person having a cold or the flu uses a Dyson dryer, he aerosolizes the virus into tiny droplets hanging about in the air and splashing about on the doorknob. That's where the infection of the next visitor happens.

I'm assuming that the function that produces the key used by the decrypter is well-known or is obtainable through experimentation (on other instances of the same model of phone). Even if Apple was using AES, it could still vary the function in non-cryptographically significant ways to obfuscate what it was doing (add a constant to the key, XOR particular bits, etc.) Provided that function is in hand, the set of 256-bit keys isn't numbered 2^256, but the number of likely/possible passwords. Where the password is a 4-digit PIN, that is a set comprised of 10,000 elements, which is trivial to brute-force.

Yes ... and now that I think about it, it would make more sense to place that into EEPROM, because there would already be that kind of memory on the SoC part (or perhaps something close by) that would hold the firmware. To convert EEPROM to PROM, all the designer would need to do is prevent the erasing voltage from reaching the memory bits. That's as simple as leaving out the path from the charge pump (or whatever is used) to the UID memory cell. I have no idea whether an EEPROM can be read without turning the circuit on. There may be no color change (in an optical/UV/XRay wavelength) to pick up on with the state change of a bit. Bummer.

An SEM must be a fun toy to fiddle with ... a lot more fun than the microscopes in Biology class.

Your article is well-thought out. I would wonder, though, if the UID could be read with a simple optical microscope. Presumably the UID is written to a memory cell on the SoC using links that open (like a fuse) when a high current is passed through (like the old PROM memories used to). Those links wouldn't be embedded in layers of silicon: the opening of the link would heat up and perhaps emit material that would need to be dissipated. (The link would look like this ===-=== or this === === if open.) If such a cell is on the top, then its links are exposed and can be observed. If one didn't know the pattern used for that cell, then one could use the procedure you suggest on separate phones to deduce what it is. If one could get to that point, then one could read the UID on the target phone without modifying the SoC part (but the 'lid' would still have to come off). That makes the procedure I'm thinking about much more viable.

Interesting...

Those unique keys are probably recorded at the time of manufacture and saved to a DB (against the serial number of the phone or board). Apple complained about modifying their firmware to put in a backdoor bypassing the PIN entry procedure. I don't think they complained about handing over that CPU key when subpoenaed, or perhaps merely upon a request by the FBI. If the attacker knows the encryption function used by the NV memory controller, then they should be able to emulate that too.

For an attack using an emulated PIN entry, I would wonder how fast that could be done: I'd expect the software would filter out touches less than 10ms or so. (The touchscreen scan rate would have a period around that.) Using a single phone, I'd imagine you'd wind up with less than 10 potential key tries per second. Add to that the time needed to reset the emulated NAND, whatever that is, every 5 attempts or so. I think your procedure would work for a short numeric pin (with 10 possible characters, sequence length 5 or less), but more than that would seem impractical to me.