you wouldn't steal a policeman's hat!

Well, not before coming across Netflix's Jeeves and Wooster videos. Now I'm not so sure.

Give it another 2-5 decades and that quality-level may be reached. At this time, the smartphone software makers are just making all the mistakes that have been made on desktops.

I completely agree.

I'm not jumping to conclusions, but the people who have been making the case for historical alien visitors claim that the written record specifies liquid mercury rotating at high speeds as part of their antigrav drives. The Mayan writings are the most-often cited.

You nicely demonstrate a huge problem with duress passwords even in the relatively benign circumstances you are talking about: They are very difficult to get right.

In you case, the "mild BDSM" cover may be worse than what it hides. From Wikipedia about pornography in China: "Possession of pornography is punishable by up to 3 years in prison, a fine of CN¥20,000, or up to life imprisonment for large underground distributors."

Quite possibly. I do not know where the name came from and certainly there are torture methods that leave less or no physical evidence, for example water-boarding. Still, this is the established term in the crypto-community and the idea is to torture you. The idea to not leave marks is just a bonus.

When you have shot yourself in the foot with a duress password, remember me. That is all I ask.

Excellent point! In the case of data, there are almost always ways to access it remotely after the danger has passed. As to the original story: Yes, I get it, it is convenient to store your customer records electronically on a device you do not hide, but it is also really dumb.

Even worse: Criminals into this sort of thing are people with poor impulse control and limited rationality! (Criminals with good impulse control and good rationality become bankers, politicians and CEOs...) Hence there is a very high risk you you getting killed or seriously injured just because you did resist by using the duress password.

Duress passwords work under one condition: You actually have superior force, you just need to alert it. That includes silent alerts in banks and the like. Your ATM example is a valid one. (It fails because most people are already challenged handling one 4 digit pin, after the first few times the police was called by accident, the duress-PIN would get disabled pretty fast...) The usual scenario is however that you do _not_ have superior force (border crossing, the story here, etc.) and then they do not work or rather do more harm than good.

As a border condition, if you are willing to die that can count as having "superior force" of sorts. Still, even then a duress password is unreliable enough to not be a good solution and you should do something else if at all possible.

Events can appear at same time or not regardless of whether they occurred at the same time or not however there is never an observable ordering disagreement.

If I appear back on "earth" from "earth2" and announce discovery of a supernova 100 years before that information reaches earth such information at no point traveled superluminally. It went with me thru my shortcut slower than light. Any observer astute enough to know this would not see a problem. Those who see problems are naively drawing out a diagram and concluding a problem because they know only points in space and time without knowing or considering the history of what actually took place.

A much different example of this are twins in rocket ships starting off together yet each going away on separate space adventures. Later they turn around and meet back up in the same place they started. Clocks in each spaceship will read differently based on which spacecraft actually does acceleration and has experienced associated inertia acting upon it. You need the full inertial histories of both crafts to calculate what those time difference would be. In the same way an outside observer needs the full path history that information actually propagated to know whether FTL propagation has actually occurred.

If one of the spacecraft were to go through a wormhole their inertial history would not be changed as a result and neither would their clock or energy not in their frame or relative to their twins frame or anyone else's as a consequence of traveling through the wormhole.. not when their inside of it nor when they emerge on the other end of it.

Ah an attempt at legal sophistry! Nice. That has universally failed in history. Know why? In any state that actually has laws with the name, you can refuse to hand over the password in the first place. The others are just police states and they are in effect not bound by laws when they decide what to do to you.

Excellent, you just have added terrorism charges against yourself.

And ever wondered why it is called "tamper resistant" and not "tamper proof"? Simple: It _was_ called tamper proof, but nobody managed to pull it off, so anybody with a clue stepped down to "tamper resistance". Against experts with time, it has no real value.

That is exactly the problem. Sure, if you do not expect to walk away, a duress password has some use, but a cyanide tooth would be far better. (If those actually exist, I somehow doubt it.)

Ah, yes. I misread your description. Sorry. This is the one situation where a duress password actually works, namely when you have superior force, you just need to alert it.