Yes, but the vast majority of criminals and terrorists didn't have access to cheap, easy, and fast cryptographically secure communications and data storage 20 years ago either.

The vast majority of a criminal's data and communications was unencrypted (it was likely on paper in a readable language, maybe in a safe that could be cracked with enough effort or specialized equipment) and thus was realistically possible to access. Yes, state-supported agents had manual one-time pads, and maybe there were some computers that did some stuff, but the amount of data you could realistically secure wasn't that much or wasn't fast enough to run a full criminal or terrorist enterprise on it.

Coordinating a criminal or terrorist enterprise thus was not realistically possible without some risk of your data or communications being seen by law enforcement. One person gets caught, and law enforcement would look at any related stuff in their apartment or house or whatever, and that's how law enforcement followed leads.

Today, assuming that criminals adopt cryptographic best practices, it's impossible for law enforcement to follow leads the same way. Nothing is accessible without a password. They would need to "extract" the password from a human, which the EFF also gets up in arms about.

Backdoors aren't the solution but (again assuming criminals adopt best practices) I don't see that there is a solution at all.

Thank you for doing their job. +1.

Gender is a linguistic construct to communicate a biological necessity. If people could not communicate easily if a person was male or female then we would fail to be a species for long.

We have social norms of behavior based on gender because men and women have some very basic and inherent physical differences. These differences will dictate how people act whether you like it or not. Calling gender "irrelevant" is debasing what it means to be a man, woman, or even a human being.

Part of being an adult is understanding that men and women are different. As a child this distinction might not mean much since the differences in physical capability are minimal to nonexistent. Once an adult though these differences take on meaning, and even as children this meaning is important to have taught to them since at some point they will become adults and will have to know how to act. A very important distinction between men and women is one can be a father and the other a mother.

That sounds like the kind of nonsense someone could only learn from liberal arts graduate program.

what is old is new again.

Will the Real Mel please come back... Itâ(TM)s time to train youngsters.

A specification is not an implementation.

That's pretty amazing. No one has developed a semi-solid electrolyte before.

I clicked "report"

Shirley, you're not serious! You get off on that kind of shit?

You can back up an iPhone to iCloud, then use that backup to initialize another device. The key can't be tied to the original device.

I thought that's exactly how modern news worked.

Remember that SuperMicro story from Bloomberg?

But at least it's closer to realization than most of the "battery breakthrough" stories we've been seeing the past year or to - or so they claim. From TFA:

'To that end, Jenax has recently developed a special semi-solid electrolyte. “We went to one of the biggest causes of battery explosions and made it non-flammable,” says Shin of the new gel polymer, which will be incorporated into all J.Flex batteries this year. Jenax looks to set up its first production line for that battery in South Korea by the end of 2020, a move that will make it cost-competitive with traditional lithium-ion batteries, says Shin.'

You can perform a firmware update from the phone's recovery mode. From the last step on that page, "When you see the option to Restore or Update, choose Update. Your computer will try to reinstall the software without erasing your data." It makes sense from a device design perspective that you'd design such that a botched upgrade won't erase your data, and give you the chance to use recovery mode to fix it even if you don't have the ability to log back in.

That is a very good point, I agree with you. It's why I prefer it if Apple uses it to unlock phones given a warrant, and never actually give it away to anyone else. That said, it can certainly make its way into the hands of those that shouldn't have. Honestly, that's ok. It goes back to the convenience vs security tradeoff. The feature to erase phones after 10 incorrect unlock attempts is like the lock to your front door. It can be picked, but it's still effective against the opportunistic thief. For most of us, that's all we really want out of locking our phone, we want to know that if we lose the phone and the average person retrieves it, that they won't have access to all the data in it.

If you want actual security, put a real password on it, and put your faith in the encryption, not in the security feature that aims to give your weak password a little boost.

"but wouldn't last that long if the battery was powering a display"

I would think maybe seconds...

Storing photos and videos in the built in storage where they will be instantly lost forever if the phone dies, instead of on the removable SD card that you can pick out of the crushed wreckage, pop into a new phone and move on with your life?

"It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see how it works out for him"