It pretty much sucks

+1

ROT13, see you can rotate that for ever!

I don't get it either but it's not "stupid" per say since it will get you (if you use the standard 2048-bits size) a password with a length of 372 that is infeasible to crack. It doesn't solve the key storage problem though since he apparantly stores his public key only and one cannot extract the private key from the public which is what makes it kind of stupid.

Why is it ok if it's a company issued phone? Just because it's a company issued phone does not mean that they have the right to do whatever the want with it.

We better get on Kickstarter to fund a company bashing tire iron then.

Which makes the attack vector kind of infeasable. Or atleast way more time consuming than the 10 minutes promised by AC.

Good luck breaking an AES256 encrypted block of data in 10minutes. There have been flaws discovered in AES since it's NIST approval that makes it weaker than initially thought yes but there is still no known exploit of a full 256-bit AES than to use brute force.

He is 8, he is definitely a minor :)

Exactly

Instead of writing these made up answers to the "secret question" it's far better IMHO to just have your password generator generate a new 40 random character string and use that.

Kindergarten might have been the wrong word, I'm not a native English speaker. Over here you can have you child on child care / day care or whatever the proper English word might be from more or less the day it's born.

However, why I brought up the study done on the "Kindergarten" was that it showed that we adults treat girls and boys differently even when we ourselves believe that we treat them equally.

And having such a big external factor kind of skews the "my boy choose X himself" big time.

I have a 12 year old boy who loves to cook, clean and likes to watch My Little Pony. I have also a 13 (to be 14 in august this year) year old girl who likes to watch slasher horror flicks and working out in the gym (power lifting) with me.

Should I take this as evidence that all girls likes power lifting and that all boys like to cook and clean? Or can it have more to do with the fact that the kids gravitate towards a "favourite" parent, in this case my boy gravitates more towards my wife while my daughter gravitates more towards me and that this explains quite a bit why they like the things that they like (regarding the Brony-stuff I suppose that the bright colors and happy stories somehow plays well with his autism).

Granted. But let's say that that you have an armed murderer in your house holding you at gunpoint. Would you rather that the police would be stampeding in or would you rather that they tried to negotiate with the murderer first?

If the negotiations would fail you still have the full stampede option left, the assailant should be very very unstable if he executed you just by spotting the police (has it even ever happened?).

What if you store some classified information on the phone that you know is secured by the password as long as the phone is locked. In that case you have no problem handing over the phone but might have a problem handing over the password.

Or for whatever reason you might have, the important point here is that with the phone locked, YOU have a choice of giving away the password or not. With the phone unlocked you no longer have that choice. That's simply a fact of life and not the same as saying that this is highly important or not, just that it removes your choice.

Of course he could say "hand over the password" but the difference is that I could refuse to do so. With this new locking scheme I no longer have that option. Yes I might be stupid to not hand over the password at gun point, but at least I have the choice.