Thing about DuckDuckGo is... they promise I'm anonymous to them. There's value in that, at least to me.

Google's move is certainly welcome, but all it means is - going forward - only Google will be collecting my information as opposed to Google + NSA.

If you're texting while stopped, you're not paying attention to what's going on around you. Around my university, I see plenty of instances where kids are still in the crosswalk when the light has switched - or even will dash across as the light goes red because they think they can make it (and apparently assume they are invulnerable). If you're paying attention, you'll notice them. If you're texting, odds are you're at most keeping a partial eye on whether the light has changed.

Sure the kids are stupid when they behave like that... but if you hit them, you're also at fault for not paying attention. You're operating a large, dangerous piece of equipment. The social contract requires you to not just be thinking about yourself, but to be taking reasonable care not to hurt or endanger others.

No, but it made the poster feel better about his personal biases.

Or there are a bunch of young boys living nearby.

Plaid.

I don't have a 5S - can it be easily shown that there are no fingerprints stored in it yet? If so, I'd think one could fairly convincingly demonstrate, using two people, that this exploit works.

I wondered that as well. It would have been more conclusive if he'd had a second person come in and use the fake to unlock the phone.

Yup - I have no argument at all with your statement.

I think the NSA believed it was okay to weaken cryptography because they assumed they would be the only one who knew about what they'd done and specifically how they'd weakened it.

So really, what I believe is they were very clever and, at the same time, very naive... Or perhaps sophomoric and arrogant would be a better fit.

An interesting scenario just came to mind...

1) RSA intentionally weakens their crypto at the behest of the NSA (this is fairly certain)
2) Chinese hack RSA - the only question is just how thoroughly (a known fact)

Now comes the speculation.

3) China analyzes what they got from RSA and discover the crypto is weaker than expected.
4) Quietly, China also begins to take advantage of this breakable crypto the NSA foisted on US companies and citizens.
5) China deduces why it was done and starts looking for weaknesses in other US crypto products - possibly succeeding, given they have a decent idea what to look for.

Followed by

6) China successfully and quietly penetrates most US defense contractors and financial institutions.

Well, if you choose to ignore the fact that the US has successfully used two nuclear bombs in war...

Yeah, I went looking that setting pretty quickly because you're absolutely right - it went from "interesting" to "meh" to "how the heck do I disable that?" over the course of a couple hours.

It perhaps works better with their own wallpapers, but I use my own photos and it got annoying pretty quick.

As long as the killbots have a preset kill limit, I think we'll be okay.

Given all the other contraptions the Professor managed to put together - do you really think a bicycle-powered electric razor was out of the question?

When I tried it (on an iPhone 5), it does seem - as in the demo video - the apps have to have been opened very recently.

This seems to be related to how iOS 7 handles multitasking. I wonder if disabling background updating of apps would fix it? Later yesterday (after I played around trying to replicate this bug) I disabled background updating, mainly to try to address the poor battery life suckage iOS 7 seems to have introduced on my phone...