I suppose they could do that, but I don't know what it would accomplish. Telegram is already written and functional; murdering Durov wouldn't uninstall it anywhere. I suppose it might intimidate the next guy who is considering writing a secure messaging app, but I don't think Russia is playing that kind of decades-long game anymore. Their main goal now is short-term: figure out how survive the Ukraine debacle without getting strung up by their own citizenry.

This could have been avoided; instead of erasing the drive, the duress password could have been set to load a "clean" partition with nothing on it that the defendant didn't want the US government to see.

... but Dear Leader will keep us safe from the dangerous and corrupt outside world. Juche!

The whole bury it for 100,000 years seems to be FUD anyway. That figure leaves the waste less radioactive than the uranium rocks the fuel came from ever were. If we applied the same standard to natural sources we'd be up in arms about banana peel disposal.

Just wait until you try to download the bootleg video and end up with a copy of Musk's AI-generated "historically accurate" version instead. D'oh! :)

Timeline hopper here, just through the gate from funny laugh lady land. Believe it or not in that line Musk is still the richest man ever over there - richer even - but he's a woke social librul because he knows which side of his bread has butter on it.

Notably, President Harris also prefers rockets that will launch to rockets that will not for some reason.

But don't eat the fish. Just in case.

Replacing garbage trucks burned by angry villagers can get expensive.

The key point here is that data's security isn't enforced by the OS, but rather by the encryption algorithm itself. A non-OS forensics terminal would see the raw contents of the hard drive, which is to say, blocks of random-looking bytes that might be encrypted data or might just be truly random; without the corresponding password, there is no way to to tell.

Without any password (and assuming a robust encryption implementation), that's as far as they'd get. With a password, they'd be able to decrypt the blocks associated with that password and view the files for that account, but not any of the other blocks/accounts.

At that point, the FBI's nerds might well suspect that there are other accounts on the phone that they don't know about, but short of coercing the phone's owner into providing additional passwords, that's as far as they could get.

On the other hand, it is actually common to make the duress password VERY similar to the correct password so it looks about the same when you enter it. Especially on something like a phone where you can generally re-load the data later if you want. The consequences of an accidental wipe may be quite small.

Other posible explanations include the defendant remembering the wrong password under pressure. The defendant having any history of mis-typing is irrelevant.

>[T]he oligopoly seems to be facing the first credible challenge to its capacity discipline...

What an interesting way to describe that. A disciplined way, you might say.

Wait, uneducated people can't get high now? Things sure have changed since I was young. Back then, it was mostly the uneducated kids getting high. :-)

Watching was a thrill ride from beginning to end. Still issues with Booster landing but they will sort it out. The re-entry tiles did great. The satellites did great. Ship did so well they will try for a catch next time, if there's nothing counter in the flight data.

Hardware rich development proves itself again. The next one is built and being fitted out for a launch just a couple months away. Behind it, the factory has begun several more.

It's hard to believe they started building this on a beach in tents, with a flying water tower.

The goal would be to have a device OS with no concept of "correct blocks", i.e. there are only a bunch of blocks, all equally correct, and the OS uses some subset of them based on the password that was entered. Ideally the OS wouldn't even have the ability to tell anyone how many viable subsets there are.

Of course, "more cost-effective than SLS" is a pretty low bar. The actual goal would be "more cost effective than Falcon 9".

To me, it sounds like "well, we thought we had it isolated..."