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.
Archive: http://archive.today/gfTg9
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)