My memory is that I had joined Apple the first time right after Jobs stepped down as CEO, when he remained as Chairman... right before he passed away. Then the Steve Jobs interview was released and I saw it at the Aquarius Theater in Stanford and Cringely was there in person at the showing. Stylish as ever.

To me he represented a whole era of computing, when it was exciting me, before I had really started making a living with computers yet. Back when I really did learn a lot by reading physical magazines.

It is kind of shit, mainly because it's increasingly out of touch. If they wanted to make a culturally relevant game, it should be Grand Theft America, where the goal is to rename everything America, alienate all of your friends, and start fights you can't win.

Problem there is false positives. I know I'm not the only one who periodically has to make multiple attempts at biometric unlocking because the reader decided my finger wasn't good enough today. I'd hate to put my finger on the sensor and instead of being taken to my PIN prompt (three cheers for multi-factor unlocking), my phone commits seppuku instead.

Now explicitly registering a separate "duress fingerprint" ahead of time is another story. That could be quite useful (and perhaps more plausibly deniable?) if you have a traveling companion or if you think you can maintain the presence of mind, in the stress of the moment, to use the duress finger instead.

I'd rather see it linked to a dummy profile, though, or at least have the option for a real fingerprint, a dummy fingerprint, and a break-glass-nuke-everything duress fingerprint.

GrapheneOS also has an auto-reboot feature that causes the device to restart automatically if no input is detected within a certain timeframe, and that timeframe is user-configurable. Under system settings, Security & Privacy, and then Exploit Protection, the reboot deadman-switch interval can be set as long as 72 hours and as short as 10 minutes, with numerous options in between.

Rebooting restores the device to BFU mode where keys are not in memory and biometrics are not accepted for unlocking the device. So if the reboot interval was set to something like 8 hours (or even the system default of 12, which may be preferable as one could claim that they weren't aware of it and didn't make any setting changes) then by the time the phone gets to someone with an interest in forcing it open, it's going to be a lot harder to force open, but nothing will technically have been deleted.

Computers and phones restart themselves all the time, sometimes user-directed and sometimes due to a crash or other unexpected failure. Considering that the only way to verify auto-reboot was even in effect would be to unlock the device and inspect the system settings (a process now rendered difficult to the point of practical impossibility) plausible deniability should be in effect.

It's a Sony marketing video "addressing" the concern behind PS4 game sharing with a Sony exec turning to his colleague and handing him a PS4 game in a case.

Great Scott! We just need 0.21 gigawatts more!

Class of '26, in before proctors!

I'm guessing not a state actor. They already have enough other backdoors that Microsoft already put in for them, and plaintext is just too obvious even for them.
My bet is that this is just one more example in the already giant collection demonstrating Microsoft's utter incompetence around good engineering, robust security, and properly testing products before releasing them.

exactly - at best that means the officer can't be charged for a violation of others rights - not a free card to violate their rights and then use the fruit of that illegal activity.

People act like life expectancies have been getting shorter.

They romanticize historic and prehistoric diets alike, as if they were utopian; as if people somehow intuited what to eat, or else that the constraints of supply somehow shaped digestive evolution like an intelligently designed metabolic symphony of symbiosis. That ignores the plain reality of volatile supplies -- even after the advent of agriculture, but especially before it -- and the reality that evolution is not driven by perfect health or life expectancy; only by surviving long enough to reproduce.

Even if modern diets are "unhealthy" (whatever that means), that doesn't imply that people were eating healthier at any point in the past. In fact, skeletal records clearly show that human existence has been rife with scurvy, rickets, iron deficiency, and stunted growth. Nutritional deficiencies were the norm, not the exception. Now (many people) have abundance, and that presents its own challenges, but the notion of an ideal, historic nutritional baseline is pure fiction. It's turtles all the way down.

There's already far too much evidence showing the real purpose of AARO is to further obfuscate the issue rather than conduct any legit investigations.

If he just left a potato at his desk would anyone notice any difference?

2015 huh? Maybe the chimps watch FOX News?

..."classified a family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 in 2024 dollars as upper middle class"

The median income in 2024 was $45,140. So a family of 3 all earning the median income would now qualify as upper middle class. Baloney.

This is clearly a rebranding of "upper middle class" than anything truly informative.