The FBI has been unable to access a Washington Post reporter’s seized iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode, a sometimes overlooked feature that makes iPhones broadly more secure, according to recently filed court records.
The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. It also provides rare insight into the apparent effectiveness of Lockdown Mode, or at least how effective it might be before the FBI may try other techniques to access the device.
“Because the iPhone was in Lockdown mode, CART could not extract that device,” the court record reads, referring to the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team, a unit focused on performing forensic analyses of seized devices. The document is written by the government, and is opposing the return of Natanson’s devices.
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That’s the same thing stopping me from switching my friends from Linux. I know one of them would if I pushed.
I’ve been daily driving Linux for almost 2 years and also always have a minor issue daily. “Oh. Bluetooth module decided it just didn’t want to work. Better reload. Oh. Reloading doesn’t work? Got to restart. Oh. Now my Wi-Fi has completely crapped the bed and restarts every 5 seconds”.
Then the major issues are catastrophic, even though rare. I once had a system just start… filling up empty storage at a rate of 1 GB a second with an empty log file. I couldn’t figure out why. Ended up reinstalling everything.
I don’t mind fixing these issues. And hell, I have fun, but I’m the only computer guy in our group though so I’d be playing tech support for these people if they ever changed.
What distro are you using? This seems bizarre and the sort of thing you see on a less stable rolling release.
I’ve hopped around. The 3 main ones I’ve touched though are:
All of which are the Stable Versions. I believe Bazzite and CachyOS are both Rolling Releases which would explain the issues. I don’t think Ubuntu is as far as i know which makes it’s storage issue especially interesting.
I also have an issue with Debian on my media server where despite telling it everywhere possible not to go to sleep, it decides it wants to go to sleep anyways. But i don’t really consider that under these same issues because that’s a media server and i expect it to be a little more “Tinkery” than my Main use PCs.
That’s weird. Ubuntu has two tracks, the standard that gets updated every six months and the LTS track that updates every two years. I think the developers recommend the LTS versions, and it’s the version I see that tends to get better corporate support. But even on LTS you can find some oddities sometimes I suppose.
I have a hypothesis that it was some niche hardware compatibility issue, because streaming was that machines bare minimum. It had a 32 bit dual core CPU, an iGPU, 4 GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 500 GB HDD. All this was in the year 2020 and this PC was made in 2008, so suffice to say it wasn’t winning any awards.
Like i said though, this is a hypothesis, so it’s entirely possible it was just Ubuntu deciding it wanted to freak out on me.
It could’ve also been a snap issue (we’ve seen an issue recently with the VSCode Snap eating up storage) and IIRC Firefox on Ubuntu is a Snap (by default, obviously you can install it any other way as well but you shouldn’t be expected to).
I’ve been on Fedora for 3 or so years and it has pretty much worked flawlessly (the only exception to that is it used to sometimes have issues with automatically sleeping correctly when I closed the laptop lid, but that hasn’t been an issue for about a year)