Your video, Macklemore & Lewis' iPhone Video For "Brad Pitt's Cousin", has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

He should have smacked that IPhone right out of the attempted murder-douchebags hand, then taken his video straight to the police. That moron needs to be in prison.

The video was funny, but when I saw this phone announced, I said right away that this is the perfect phone for me. I still have an iPhone 5, and I love it. This new SE is the right size, and has the same tech specs as the 6s (for the most part). Why not?! Im excited about it.

[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]

Why do all the non-effects shots look like they were shot with an iPhone? Is that a style now? Is there a professional cinematographer who is going for that syndicated cable drama look?

You're right, the FBI did reset the iCloud backup password on the phone, which Apple claimed was the easiest way to get at the data without any new software needing to be written. Who knows if they're being honest, but the FBI now says that wouldn't have worked anyway.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3044025/apple-ios/terrorist-changed-icloud-password-disabled-auto-backups-on-his-iphone.html

On top of all this, according to several sources, including Edward Snowden, the FBI already have the ability to reset the number of attempts to unlock the phone. Here's an ACLU post about it:
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/one-fbis-major-claims-iphone-case-fraudulent

According to the article, if there are too many attempts to unlock, the data on the phone doesn't get deleted, just the key to unlock that data. It's possible (and not all that difficult for an organisation like the FBI) to take a copy of the key ahead of time, and restore that key if they cause it to be wiped.

The money and manpower that have already gone into this case would easily cover the effort to go through this process. For those of you so inclined, this raises the question (and obvious answer) of why would the FBI go to so much bother to force apple to do it. You don't get a locked mass-murderer's phone and public support like this too often.

I've been watching for a good counter to that claim since I read it about a week ago, and haven't seen one. Anyone out there able to enlighten me?

@00Scud00

Apple has said it is planning to build a future firmware that cannot be flashed as the FBI has asked for in this case on an older iOS iPhone 5C (removing the time lock on password fails). That will likely be the more important legal case when it comes up - must a firmware be built to be potentially unlockable by officials to facilitate law enforcement.

From what I understand, serious terrorist organisations simply avoid using technology directly with their leaders (e.g. Osama avoided phone and email). Anyway as I said, this debate is not about that. It's about pressuring Apple to revert back to not having strong encryption enabled by default.

There will always be foolproof software alternatives for encryption but the aim of the FBI here is clearly to be able to decrypt the lowest common denominator. They know that most criminal or even terrorist suspects will simply have the default level of encryption.

The fight here is really against Apple turning on encryption by default which is something it only started doing after the Snowden NSA revelations. If I recall right, previously Apple would unlock iPhones at will for law enforcement. The change was to protect their reputation given the pervasive assumption that US based tech companies were all in collusion with the NSA. Also they would have probably been miffed that while co-operating with them, the NSA was also hacking trans-continental cables to get access to communications more directly.

I also think that Obama had a point when he recently said at a tech conference that it is likely some ugly law will be rammed through Congress with very little debate after the next major terrorist attack, and that it will be much more draconian than anything proposed now. However, that doesn't really get past the fact there is no good software solution here. Encryption is math. You can no more build a foolproof backdoor than you can make 1+1 equal 3.

There is also a face swap function on Snapchat. Face Swap Live is better, but iphone only and paid for.

The hilarious thing is that all of this is completely unnecessary.

Firstly, it's of questionable value anyway. I have seen little evidence that Farook wasn't acting pretty much alone. Even if the unlock his phone, they'll probably just find he likes ISIS on facebook or follows some well known twitter accounts.

But more importantly, all of the data on the phone would have been backed up to iCloud, which Apple does have access to and was willing to turn over to the government.

But then some muppet in the FBI changed the password

Yeah, these are really the kind of geniuses we want deciding how companies should write secure software.

And forget taxes, Apple should use some of their $18 billion profit (for a quarter!!!!) and pay their workers in China a decent wage. Seriously, it works out at just a few percent of their profits.

Well, I left the company in 2012, so I had to double-check with a friend that still works there. Apparently the situation is that while they can reset the password limit, it will still do the auto-erase if you reach the attempt limit.

So in the case of any iPhone running the latest OS, the data would be non-retrievable. He also told me that they plan to remove the option to reset the password limit completely in the next version, meaning that if you screw up enough times, it is an auto-erase and nothing can be done.

I can only imagine how the support call is going to go the first time they have to tell the customer that.

On a serious note, that was really quite good. On the other hand, it is perhaps a little easy to convince people to stick up for Apple, considering how ubiquitous iPhones and other iThings are in the US.

Someone that could really use this sort of supportive message campaign is Edward Snowden, without whom we wouldn't know just how *much* the Government and all the 3-letter agencies are trying to skirt the constitution. He doesn't have the benefit of the degree of public appreciation that Apple does (even though I think he is *more* deserving of it -- not to take anything away from Apple doing the right thing here)...

Impressive way to use an iphone to film yourself skiing http://videosift.com/video/Centriphone-an-impressive-iPhone-video-experiment