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Comment Re:Congress won't act (Score 1) 201

Getting the votes to impeach is easy. Getting the votes to convict is de facto impossible.

I agree that has historically been the case, but OTOH Trump is deteriorating so rapidly (both psychologically and in terms of his level of popular support) that after November's bloodbath (and whatever Trump's unhinged response to that will be), the remaining Republicans may well decide it's in their own interest to get him out of office sooner rather than later.

Comment Re:So it's purely symbolic? (Score 1) 89

Russia has assassinated former Russian citizens outside of Russia before, it would be unsurprising if they did it again.

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.

Comment Ed Zitron is a hypocrite (Score 1) 135

His podcast Better Offline is squarely targeted at people who are very much online. Indeed his entire gig is the epitome of online living.

If Ed Zitron really felt better offline, he wouldn't be making a living off of a podcast and constant AI bashing.

Not that I necessarily disagree with him though... It's just that the messenger doesn't really befit the message.

Comment Re:Plausible deniability is better (Score 1) 218

They don't usually do this at a border check, but if they use a forensics terminal it's not running the OS, they basically do a backdoor boot and look at what the hardware reports.

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.

Comment Re:Plausible deniability is better (Score 1) 218

If they plugged it into a forensics terminal they'd likely see right away that the device OS isn't reporting the correct blocks.

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.

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