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Comment by hereme888 | Hacker News Reader

So the TLDR is that a beta version of Cellbrite unlocked the phone, and it can't yet unlock iOS 17.x or later.

But we don't know what version of Android his phone had, or what "newer Samsung model" means.

There's nothing surprising about state actors being able to quickly unlock the phone of a [failed] presidential assassin.

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No, we expect phone locking to work, even against state actors. The news here is that some Samsung model has an otherwise unknown exploit.

If they can crack his phone they can crack your phone.

> No, we expect phone locking to work, even against state actors

But that's an unreasonable expectation because software is universally such garbage. Some is just less garbage than others.

State actors have the resources to find the holes in anything that isn't utterly perfect.

> If they can crack his phone they can crack your phone.

And not just them, anyone with access (legal or otherwise) to these tools can.

It’s a bit of a futile strategy though, kind of like trying to build a wall thick enough that a state actor can’t bust through. That is impossible because the state has access to nuclear weapons, gigantic drills, thousands of intelligent people whose sole mission in life is to break down that wall, nearly infinite budget, etc.

The only strategy that might work is to make it expensive or unviable to crack every single device. But in the case of something like this, an assassination attempt, then it’s a given that all stops are going to be pulled to crack it.

> That is impossible because the state has access to nuclear weapons, gigantic drills, thousands of intelligent people whose sole mission in life is to break down that wall, nearly infinite budget, etc.

Those generic statements are great and all until you realise that every year, dozens (hundreds, thousands???) people disappear without a hint of a trace and the government is powerless to do anything about it and can't find them.

Or when a large, wealthy company commits crimes (or just government officials sometimes), all they have to say is "we lost the data" and suddenly, there is nothing that can be done about it, it's lost to the ether for ever without any possibility to find out anything about it.

But that is my point - you can make it unviable to go after _everybody_. But if the state is targeting one person in particular, and has a super strong motivation to break the wall, like specifically in this case of domestic terrorism/attempted political assassination, there is no technology that is gonna stop them.

In those cases that people get way with crimes, it is much more likely that there is no political motivation to go after them for whatever reason du jour. I don't think it's because the technology is so strong that they can't.

When enough budget is allocated, the person is always found.

Saddam/Osama

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