ampfixer
The iPhone has a bug right now that causes a users phone to become "bricked". Apple has told those people affected that they are out of luck. Why should the government do any better than paid customers.
Avoiding the bug is pretty simple. Just don't set the date to before May 1970. Resetting the date has to be done on the phone itself and can't be done remotely. Compared to buffer overflow exploits in web browsers, Flash and Acrobat, the bug in Word that meant even if macros were switched off in preferences Word could be told to switch macros on and run them automatically by a macro in a malicious Word document or web file, this is a very minor bug.
Apple are working an iOS update to fix the bug.
ampfixer
I guess they don't want to push this issue into court. However this goes, the winner will set a legal precedent about access to personal information. It's obvious that technology is moving faster then the law and there will only be more of these cases in the future.
It's already in court, that's the problem.
Any encryption system becomes useless as soon as a back-door gets into the wild. The UK government's having one of its sporadic "encryption available to the public is evil - peadophilia! Terrorists! Only the guilty have anything to hide!" fits at the moment as well. Seems to happen about once per government since 1994. What usually happens is the civil servants, banks, Microsoft, Apple, Sagepay and various other companies go and have a quiet chat with the politicians to point out that any ban on secure encryption means no more internet banking, no more buying stuff online, no more computerised BACS system, no more SSH or VPNs so companies no longer able to communicate internally securely across the internet, no more international instant stock trading etc.
Then ask if the minister is quite sure they're brave enough to want to make the courageous decision to take the UK back to the 1970s.
The history of hacking shows that once its known that there's a back door possible, even if it requires using a version of the OS that in theory only the manufacturer has access to, the bad guys will put a huge amount of effort into getting hold of it or reverse-engineering it.
Meanwhile, those who really want to send short messages not only encrypt them but use stenographic techniques to make it near impossible to detect there's a message to decrypt in the first place. Is that normal noise and jpeg artifacts in that low-quality image or a message encrypted using some encryption algorithm or other?
And single use one-time pads, such as the ones used to encrypt secure information between the UK and US governments are still uncrackable for all real-world intents and purposes, so outlawing digital encryption gets them nowhere when it comes to bad guys determined their messages will not be read by anyone they're not intended for. A combination of one-time pads and stenography and you have an almost undefeatable encryption system, unless the cryptologists get very, very lucky indeed.
What is particularly interesting is that the FBI could dismantle the phone and probably pull all the 0s and 1s off the SSD. What that gives them is the encrypted data. So I guess one thing that the FBI is confirming by this action is that modern encryption methods are still for all intents and purposes secure even when the computing facilities of the FBI, GCHQ, CIA or major universities are available.
Unless it's all a double-bluff of course, or maybe it's a triple bluff.... No doubt the conspiracy theorists will be making up all kinds of complicated stuff.....