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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

> If you lose access to your laptop or pairing record then you will also be locked out of connecting to your phone.

I never understood why people do this. What if you pour coffee over the laptop and it'll never boot up anymore? Buy a new phone too?

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I would assume this supervision identity is part of your keychain as usual on macOS and could even be exported. It is not bound to any physical property of that particular laptop. A backup should be enough to avoid the scenario you are describing. You should be able to acces the iPhone after importing the supervision identity on any another Mac.

It's not in the keychain. You can back up /var/db/lockdown, though.

That's why you make backups, so even if you lose your laptop, your pairing record is safely backed up somewhere else.

If you want to look at it that way, the pairing record is just a digital token that lets you unlock (for reading, the data in) your phone. So it's effectively a kind of password then. It's like having an unlock password in a password manager on your laptop.

I don't think it would fly to say at the border that "sorry, can't unlock for you because I don't know my password, it's in a password manager on my laptop".

What you say is "Sorry, I can't unsupervise that".

If you wanted to lie, you could say "Sorry it is supervised by my company, I can't unsupervise it"

Alternatively you could encrypt the key or whatever, give that to a friend on a USB stick. Then, at the border, you say "I can't unsupervise that, the keys are managed by a third party." Which is technically the truth... the best kind of truth.

They'll just find you are causing trouble and put you in the little room where you'll sit for a number of hours and learn to stop thinking you could pull stunts at the border. They don't really care why you can't show a normal phone with a history of a normal life. They just want to see a normal device with normal data. There is no scenario where a technicality means you don't hand over a device they can read and they go "oh, well if you can't you can't!".

Any of: no device, wiped device, locked device, is just seen as suspcicious and you'll be harrassed. Their whole idea is to make anything non-normal uncomfortable for you, so you'll comply (because most people do almost anything including giving up any data, to not have to fly back home or spend hours in a little room).

But a supervised device is neither wiped, locked, nor extremely uncommon, nor does the device owner usually have the means to break the pairing, so I reckon you're off base here. It is a normal device with normal data, it just can't be imaged. They can still go through it.

Exactly. The worst part of the situation at the border is the images they capture. If a person looks through your phone right then and there, the worst part is them looking at your personal stuff, which is already bad. If they take an image there is no knowing where all of your personal data will end up.

I thought the process was more or less automatic. Plug phone in, image it. If the computer says no, that’s bad. They don’t want to skim read your phone contents they need to keep it to make it searchable if it is to have any real value beyond psychology.

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