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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a coworker who had their iPhone set to "wipe after 10 bad pins". Took about 2 days before their 5 year old happily typed the wrong pin 10 times and wiped it.

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There should be an exponentially increasing delay for such a system, so that the phone would make you wait hours (or days) before letting you make your 10th guess. That would require the 5 year old to not get bored of the useless phone, and the owner to not find the phone (and enter the correct code) for those days too.

Also, it would make sense to include a simple proof-of-intentionality system, like the old Nokia keypad unlock feature to prevent pocket dials. The phone could prompt you to type a displayed 4 digit code before typing your actual PIN attempt, for example.

There is an increasing delay on iPhones. After 6 attempt it stops accepting input for 5 minutes. It gets longer each time after that.

My old job had wipe after 3 (or maybe it was 5) bad pins within N minutes as the required security setting for company phones. The thing I learnt from it is that wiping your phone actually isn't that big a deal and if you've set it up right you can pretty quickly be back up and running.

I'm getting closer and closer to this reality... iphones are basically there, with icloud backup. Have been trying to get less attached to any OS installs, and be fast at building up from a fresh install. Seems hard to even trust your own desktop after a while.

Is this convenience worth sending unencrypted backups of your data to Apple?

Do they allow truly offline backup and restore?

For most people, yeah it's worth it. Afaik, yeah they do allow fully offline backup/restore, you don't need to use iCloud for that.

I switched away to an Android, so this isn't something I'm taking advantage of personally.

> Is this convenience worth sending unencrypted backups of your data to Apple?

iCloud Backups are not "unencrypted backups"

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

I do wish they would bump the backups to "end-to-end encryption" category though, at least as an option.

For most people, availability is the key part of security instead of confidentiality, since for them losing their data is both much more likely and much more painful than someone getting a warrant to take their data from Apple.

The stress I had on 3rd attempt just to discover it is actually 5 attempts... Kind of helps being more conscious about having backup of everything regularly

Blackberry required you to enter the word "Blackberry" after the fifth try, which would at least prevent butt-dialing from wiping the device. Some kids might figure that out too, but at that point I suppose you had the choice to use a condom and decided not to...

Here a story. I got BB RIM 850 when I was 15ish years old, it was my first communication pre-smartphone device. I stupidly set up to wipe my blackberry if input incorrectly after a few times, and I did this within minutes of first time using it. You can imagine what happened in the next 10 minutes... Yes, I forgot my complicated password and it got wiped. And that rendered my brand-new RIM 850 useless. So, I have to wait 10 days to get a new one.

Useless? Perhaps the functionality changed later; when I used one, entering the password wrong 10 times was the easiest way to factory-reset the device prior to handing it to a new owner. It wasn't useless, just palimpsest.

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