Unless you’ve counted every single calorie & macronutrient in and compared them to times you’ve been balanced versus imbalanced, I frankly don’t believe you that you’ve seen large swings in weight while eating the same number and makeup of calories.

I definitely agree with the imbalance aspect. There are days when I’m low on protein or for whatever reason really craving some carbs at the time or needing potassium or something. I’ll eat everything in sight and still not be satisfied until I find the one thing that I needed, then I’m good. I’ve been getting better at consciously recognizing that “EAT ALL THE THINGS!” mode and either recognizing that a particular “off” feeling equates to a particular nutritional need or else just nibbling a little of the common triggers to see what makes me start to feel better.

Bottom line though is that when you’re not eating the nutrients your body needs, you just feel starved and eat waaaay more calories until you satisfy whatever the nutrient need was. It’s really easy to not notice that you’re eating way more calories since they tend to be snacks rather than meals, but it adds up in a hurry.

I’d be willing to bet that’s what caused you to gain weight when doing the veg thing. You were eating more calories than you realized trying to meet (or is that meat?...) whatever deficiency your body was feeling. And ESPECIALLY going veg, you’re inevitably going to fill up on sugars and starches. Compared to eating more of your same-number of calories from proteins and fats, just about everyone would gain weight eating the same number of calories in mostly carbs.

the game doesn’t have much going on it unless you make something happen

But... But...... Then children might learn that they can make their own entertainment without needing to pay Hollywood to imagine it for them! You monsters! What are you doing to our children???!!!!

=)

Of all the things my 14 year old could have gotten hooked on, Minecraft doesn’t even register in the “lesser of evils” category. A little moderation is a good thing, but compared to having his brain rot in front of the TV, I’ll take Minecraft any day. He’s imagining & implementing the things he imagines, and he’s communicating and cooperating with his peers. Most of them are even in our geographical area and/or in his school which puts his online social interactions a good bit better than my own at his age where my closet emotional connections were to people I’ve never seen who lived on the other side of the country.

And as far as TFS’ assertion that, “Setting a child free on the Internet is a failure to cordon off the world and its dangers,” may I just say, “Fuck you!” I’ve never once felt the need to shield my son from reality. We’ve talked to him throughout his life about the fact that there are bad people and that there are things you should never do online because they could put you at risk in the real world (sharing personal information, arranging to meet people, etc.). I think my son is a much better adjusted young human being for the trust and faith that we’ve shown that we have in him. Teaching, guidance, and trust are much better tools than surveillance and censorship. It’s the same approach that my parents took with me (admittedly more out of ignorance of what the Internet was at the time on their part). It worked out alright for me, and my son has never done anything to make me regret taking the same approach with him.

There are two things you as a soon-to-be defendant can do:

1) Power down your phone if you believe you are about to be detained. On power-up, the device requires your passcode to unlock. TouchID doesn’t work after reboot until the passcode is entered once. You can do this without unlocking the device by holding the power & home button for 10 seconds.

2) Either before arrest while you can still surreptitiously access your phone or after when they’re trying to get your finger on the screen, use the wrong finger (one you haven’t enrolled in TouchID) or move your finger enough to smudge and get a bad read. You only get five attempts before the phone stops accepting TouchID, and you need to provide your passphrase again. If successful, the screen will say, “Touch ID does not recognize your fingerprint,” so it’s detectable to someone who knows what they’re doing, but also confirmation to you that it worked. As far as I know, there’s no timeout to this status. You will not be able to use TouchID until the passcode is entered.

Either way, TouchID is disabled and they need to get your passcode out of you. Assuming you’re still in ordinary LEO territory, a $5 wrench isn’t going to work out when it comes to admissibility. If you’re already in TLA non-citizen territory, you’re done for anyways. Your call if “making it easier on yourself” is a good play or not...

You can only be charged with contempt if you refuse to do something that you’re actually capable of doing. If it’s not possible for you to do it (and the court can’t prove that you can), contempt isn’t an issue.

Apple’s announcement states that they are not capable of unlocking users’ devices. You can’t (yet) be punished for creating a secure computer system that you can’t break into yourself.

Prior to iOS 8, Apple was capable of subverting their own security and did so when compelled to do so by law enforcement. Starting with iOS 8, it’s not possible for them to do that any longer.

A judge can’t hold you in contempt if he orders you to fly and you don’t (unless you’re Superman). Ordering Apple to break the raw 128-bit AES key on the flash chips is equivalent to ordering them to fly for all intents & purposes.

I’m not sure if you’re a US citizen or not; but if you are, please leave now.

I’ll gladly buy your plane ticket to any country that considers it acceptable to use punishment to coerce someone into assisting police so they can prove a crime and punish them some more.

You have to prove a case against the person before you can throw them in jail. If you could prove that the device contained evidence against them, you wouldn’t need the device & could prove your case without it. If you can’t prove that, you have no case.

Decisions are conflicted at US Federal district court level, but recent statements made by several SCOTUS justices suggest that they will come down on the side that compelling an individual to reveal a password is compelling testimony and thus 5th Amendment protected.

If you believe you may soon be under arrest, power off or hard reset (hold power & home) your device.

Only the OS itself is accessible immediately after reboot. All user-level flash is secured with a different key than the OS, and that key is secured by your passphrase, not your TouchID. That’s why you need to enter your password every time you reboot & can’t TouchID unlock until you do. If you reset your phone, the cops can hold it against your thumb all day long, and it won’t do them any good.

For an in depth discussion of how the crypto in iOS is implemented, see:
http://www.apple.com/ipad/busi...

Security questions only get you into your iCloud login. They can’t remote unlock your phone. They can remote WIPE it, which is concerning, but it’s unlikely to help the cops gather evidence against you.

It does look like there are reset venues that would allow iCloud to restore data back to your phone after you force wipe it without the passcode (see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT...). That doesn’t appear to be the case if you backup locally to iTunes and enable encryption on that backup.

Today’s lesson: Cloud backup is generally a security risk.

I look forward to Apple stepping up and enabling client-side encryption of iCloud backups like Crashplan & Co. do with your data.

You are correct, sir. That’s exactly what the crypto chip on iDevices does.

There’s no way to direct dump encrypted flash, so you’d need to desolder the flash chips, then you’re busting 2^128 keys for the raw AES key, not just looking for my luggage combination...

I *think* iOS 7 on TouchID capable devices also pressed you to use a complex password.

It’ll take you longer than 60 seconds. You get six tries for free. Between 6 & 7, you have to wait a minute. Between 7 & 8, it’s five minutes. I think it goes up to an hour before the 10th that wipes it is accepted.

(I just verified up to the five minute wait on my iPad. Six minutes total research is more than enough for a /. article, never mind a comment...)

Case law is slightly conflicted in different US Federal districts, but the majority are that you can’t be compelled to provide your decryption keys. They’d need evidence to throw you in prison for 30 years, and your lack of providing the key is NOT evidence.

Recent statements made by several SCOTUS justices relating to warrantless phone searches suggest that as cases involving compelled key disclosure reach the Supreme Court, they will likely be decided in favor of the defendant. IE that the 5th Amendment protects you from being compelled to turn over an encryption key to information that would be used against you.

The legal situation outside the US is of course different. In the UK in particular, you CAN be compelled to provide the key under penalty of indefinite detention.

Loading the CPU with custom software would either require a ROM-level vulnerability in the bootloader or for Apple to sign your alternate firmware to load in.

To my knowledge there have been no bootloader vulns since the early production runs of the iPhone 4S. All jailbreaks since that time have depended on vulnerabilities later in the software stack. The bootloader will not accept a firmware older than the one currently installed on it, so downgrading to exploit since-fixed bugs isn’t possible.

There’s no existing precedent that I know of, but conceivably Apple could be compelled to sign your mal-firmware. Then you’re down to the bigger problem. The bootloader only maintains the user flash session key in the cryptochip during upgrades if the user’s key is available. If you don’t have the key, installing any firmware blows away the cryptochip’s contents, destroying any ability to access the user flash contents. So the ROM-based bootloader won’t allow you to update the OS to install your alternative version without either clearing user flash or having the user’s key in the first place.

The software that’s on device does implement brute force attacks and (if so-configured) blows away keys in the cryptochip after 10 bad guesses (with an increasing back-off delay before accepting additional guesses after the first six, making it time consuming for someone to DoS your phone by guessing keys until it wipes).

So it’s not possible to load software that ignores the brute force check without wiping what you’re trying to extract in the first place, even with Apple’s (compelled) assistance.

For the AES encryption used on the iOS flash, you need advances in the discrete logarithm problem, not factoring large numbers. There’s no RSA involved in protecting the flash contents.

Additionally, there’s no known way to make the boot loader just dump an image of the encrypted flash for you to start brute forcing on. You’d need to disassemble the phone, desolder the flash chips, and read them out in another circuit.

That’s certainly do-able, but not something that can be done to a phone that needs to continue to remain intact for any reason. IE they couldn’t just dump your phone while you’re in the tank & give it back to you when you’re released, planning to work on it later.

One of those 100+ lbs overweight(*) people buying diet soda would be me. Around the beginning of 2012, I was 200+ lbs more overweight than I am now. I’ve been drinking on average two liters of that diet soda pretty much every day since then and yet managed to shed a significant percentage of my body weight.

I’d say that for most of those “severely disabled” folks you’re complaining about, the other contents of their shopping carts (lots of sugars and starches, especially in “diet” foods), and probably even more so the food not in their shopping carts — IE restaurants / fast food / etc — are far more likely to be the source of the extra weight they’re carrying around.

As far as severely disabled goes, I run 5k’s for fun, a woman I know who’s also 100+ lbs over her “ideal” weight runs marathons for fun along side her (also technically overweight) father who’s in his late 50’s.

But please, do continue to spout off about how diet soda makes you fat with no reasonable (IE sufficient sample size, double blind, etc.) studies to back up your assertion.

That said, I’ll give you the neurological function bit. I definitely get sugar-stupid when I have too much starch/sugar, but non-sugar soda has exactly nothing to do with that.

(*) Assuming you accept BMI as a reasonable measure of ideal body weight. Personally I have some issues with it, and I’d consider myself more like 70-80lbs overweight based on what I consider to be a healthy weight. I’ve reached the conclusion of what I consider to be healthy by observing people of approximately my height and general musculature and their weight. BMI charts say I should be 20-30 lbs lighter than the absolute bottom of what I consider to look “healthy.”

Blame that on ‘murka if you like, but I think 140lbs on a 6’ reasonably muscular male (that’s the bottom end of “normal” according to BMI charts) would look emaciated, not healthy.