If youre attempting to break into it, you wont do it using their input mechanism, you'll do an offline brute force which completely ignores failure wipe limits.

Step 1: Pull the storage
Step 2: Image the storage
Step 3: Attempt to bruteforce it offline
Step 4: Wait 30 seconds
Step 5: You now have the 4 digit PIN

The presence of a security question on any service indicates immediately that they almost certainly have access if served with a warrant.

There are not different keys for every file, or if there are they are tied to a master key. The only way you can view an encrypted device with a single passphrase is because that single passphrase is tied to a single master key somewhere.

And I visualize this thread as being filled with more fact and less opinion, but somehow its not changing reality :(

Yea, you gotta be careful. 1 watt of absorbed energy might heat your tissue by up to 0.001 F.

Im not clear how that would work. NFC is NFC. Apple pay / Google wallet should interoperate.

They open offices overseas because theyre global companies, not because the US sucks. If the US sucked they wouldnt be headquartered here.

To clarify, 100PB is a number I pulled out of thin air. On reflection, you would not expect your SSD to do 100PB of data; II simply meant that a number IS usually provided, and that those numbers have been validated by multiple parties as generally being ballpark accurate.

Honesty time: Didnt read the article, but to say that TRIM fixes write endurance problems is highly misleading.

TRIM does impact endurance in that it CAN reduce write amplification (I believe) which can reduce the lifetime of your SSD, but it does not really change the fact that erase cycles are REQUIRED in order to reuse a cell. Again, all TRIM really does is schedule when that erase occurs-- directly prior to when it is needed, or at some idle time. Apparently (according to Wikipedia) SSDs using their own internal garbage collection instead of TRIM could cause write amplification, which may be what the article is alluding to-- Micron is no longer doing that, thus increasing endurance.

Read up on TRIM here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Anandtech disagrees. Techreport. So, in fact, do huge numbers of user reports which suggest that SSDs really do last a long time.

I have seen this happen, but its not due to endurance of the flash cells but on the quality of the firmware / controller. The actual cell failures apparently cause reallocations (according to techreport's tests, and to common sense). And you create an interesting dichotomy; what does it look like for an SSD or HDD or CPU or RAM to fail "not totally"? You get most of your bits back? All tech generally tends to fail catastrophically.

Theres a lot of misconception here, so I'll try to address them.

TRIM has nothing to do with endurance. TRIM erases cells that are scheduled for erasure anyways; all TRIM does is try to time that erasure such that it occurs at a time that will not effect performance. What affects endurance is wear leveling, which is an entirely separate technique that does actually work. As capacity increases, wear-leveling ensures that the endurance of the drive as a total increases.

When tape manufacturers (or organizations, like the one behind LTO) cite a compression factor like 2:1, it is based on a standard body of data like the calgary corpus which includes both compressible and uncompressible data. This allows you to compare different technologies with different compression standards.

In the real world on LTO (which I assume you are referring to) I have seen compression factors ranging from ~1.5 to 2.5, so its not really accurate to call it marketing BS. They also always (as far as I have seen) mark the tapes something like "800GB/1600GB" with the subtext explaining that the smaller number is native, and that the entire thing is 2:1. Its not dishonest because the compression is part of the (well-defined) standard, and the native capacity is right next to the compressed capacity. Its also not the manufacturer doing this; those numbers are explicitly defined in the spec.

Which begins to make sense when you realize that thats because LTO itself defines the compression factor of 2:1 based on calgary corpus.

But, as we've established, TRIM has literally no effect on endurance, so its irrelevant what they might assume about it.

Not to be harsh, but there is if you actually took the time to understand the tech. They usually do provide endurance stats (ie, "100PB data endurance") and tests by Anandtech and others have often validated that as being realistic.

It does when capacity increases faster than durability decreases. This has been addressed many, many times at each process shrink. The net effect is generally that you're better off spending your money on the newer process SSDs, they will last longer per $ spent.

Whats really bothersome is that so many of the comments hop on the "NSA thats why" or "corporate greed" bandwagons despite having no functional knowledge of the issue.

Thought people here were supposed to be rationally minded geeks; guess not.

When you say "cruising on empty", how do you explain the huge number of top-tier tech companies that are US based? Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Red Hat, Google, nVidia, AMD, Qualcom...

Dunno, I kind of think capitalism does quite fine at providing ideas. Let me know when everyone else catches up to Intel's current process tech, till then maybe we shouldnt write off capitalism as "cruising on empty".