OTish: Hard Drive recovery after 8 years

Oh, I know. Even if the algorithm is rock solid, the data used to generate the ciphertext might not be. As has happened.

As I understand it he offered them millions to be allowed to do it. Apparently they exactly which part of the tip it should be in.

Jonathan

They'll only get the "millions" if they find the HDD and he gets the money.

And Apple were made a fool of when a third party decrypted the phone data.

Apples policy is now to allow US agencies access to phone data:

That is conflating a number of issues though - the original FBI request was for backdoor access to the phones themselves, and also to unlock a particular phone. Something that Apple (rightly IMHO) resisted since backdoors work for bad guys as well as good.

The above article seems to be talking about access to data held in the Apple cloud - which is s slightly different matter. Although even there its seems that the FBI want access because its easy rather than strictly necessary.

only if he finds it

the LA have to cover the costs of the inconvenience if he doesn't

Suppose the Winklevoss twins were to rock up at a Bitcoin exchange wanting to trade their bitcoins in for dollar notes... as one would do at a bueraux de change prior to going on holiday?

Where would the billions of dollars physically come from?

Suppose the "bitcoin whales" started cashing-in huge amounts of BTC to USD, what percentage of their pile do you think they could sell before the exchange rate reached zero?

From people wanting to buy BitCoins.

If you don't understand BitCoins, you don't understand money. And when you put it like that, all of a sudden a lot of things make sense.

WRT the BitCoin algorithm, I don't think you can exchange at zero. However the distributed nature of the ledger means it would be difficult to flood the market in a single go.

Or claimed to.

I thought the FBI admitted in court that this was the case, or certainly the case against Apple fell, because the FBI initially claimed they couldn't hack the phone.

To be honest I was surprised the FBI couldn't as I thought the code was

My memory was the FBI mysteriously withdrew it's legal action to force Apple to decrypt the device after *alleging* that an Israeli company had done it. Apple simply "refused to comment" so we were all left wondering if it had really been done, or whether the FBI decided to back down rather than create a court precedent that effectively permitted uncrackable encryption.

The problem is the memory gets wiped after so many incorrect tries.

Any exploit was to stop the erasing of data through too many tries. Brute force was still used to decrypt the data:

Something I didn't realise before my post.