I’m just wondering why they bothered with a robot like they did, other than it’s freakin’ cool looking. If I were building this I would just put 10 linear actuators on a pad, wait, scratch that, I bet you could just use 10 wires touching the surface and change the capacitance via some switching. I’m no EE and my expertise on capacitance is vague at best, but I bet I could build this with no moving parts. But again, not as cool.
I can’t remember what 11 was - other than “OK this is a hand me down iPod with no important data - time to reset to factory settings”
It depends on the phone. It’s fairly typical to have the phone only willing to behave as detachable storage when the screen is unlocked.
If the phone has a removable SD card, you can of course pull that out and get at what’s there, but access to data on chips soldered to the phone’s own motherboard generally has some level of protection.
Oppressive governments and the manufacturers of your hardware can see literally anything they want to on your device but ‘Turn on your “erase data after x failed attempts” option!’ so robots don’t crack your pin!
The iPhone security is reasonably advanced - there’s an AES key built into the Flash driver that encrypts the whole storage, and whose key is hardwired into the silicon. There’s no way to read the AES key directly, only to observe input and output of encrypting with it. This means the hash on the iPhone lock screen can only be calculated by the chip physically installed in the iPhone, and there is a maximum rate of 80 milliseconds per password hashing, which means about 15 minutes to crack a 4 digit numeric password, or 2.5 years to crack an 8 digit password.
Turn on your “erase data after x failed attempts” option!
Or, ignite plastic explosives option. Makes the phone thicker, but it’ll give your attackers a nice kick in their pants.
If paranoid people had power over Apple, it is possible they could so something similar to this without having to bulk up the phone and have it set off explosives detectors. All they need to do is add a tiny software controlled jumper that shorts the battery and disables the safety fuse on the battery. Do that and the phone will catch on fire in a few seconds with just the stored energy in the battery, and it would not add a millimeter to any dimension or increase the weight of the device.
I’ll take the impact of plastic explosives over a battery fire any day. 
Michael!!!
What?
Get some Febreeze or something!
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
