Johnny Bravo
The Western model was doomed to failure from the start. The only barrier to entry was being able to download thousands of TBs of internet archives/books and to have a lot of compute.
The math for these models isn't proprietary and most CS students are exposed to machine learning and neural networks while in school.
The only advantage western companies had was the ability to buy up the entire hardware market, pricing out domestic competition, and to use their politicians to manipulate trade policy in order to restrict sales of critical hardware to China.
Every US tech company has dumped billions investing in an unsustainable business model with the hope of buying a global monopoly by strangling competition.
China can destroy all of that by making their models open weight. The real money is in finding and implementing custom AI solutions... not in charging for access to the models. By having freely available models, they're making the barrier of entry as low as possible.
Not to mention that the insane amount of money being poured into hardware by US tech companies has created an environment where building fabs has a much shorter ROI, which also helps China's development in that sector.
US companies are playing Monopoly while China is playing Civilization.
That being said, what the law says and what some random asshole does during a stop are not always the same thing.
Depends
Most phones can be accessed by forensic software. The more secure phones are protected as long as they've just been restarted but before they're unlocked for the first time.
Some phones, like an up-to-date GrapheneOS on a supported Pixel, may resist forensic imaging after first unlocking but the information is in memory so there could potentially be zero days or other exotic methods of obtaining the data.
A duress wipe lets you know 100% that the data is not accessible.
It probably won't work, at least (US)domestically. The requirement for obtaining a warrant before searching a phone is part of training because there is a clear Supreme Court ruling to that effect.
That being said, what the law says and what some random asshole does during a stop are not always the same thing.
In addition, the law that he's charged with relates to knowingly destroying property that the police have a warrant to sieze.
There is no precedent of it being applied to border searches where they may not even have reasonable suspicion of a crime and can stop people for questioning on a whim.
The State has absolutely no claim over your personal property at that point and destroying property that the police hope and dream of siezing isn't the same as destroying property where they've demonstrated probable cause to a judge.
This argument from the border patrol that you can be arrested for destroying data that is in your possession without ever been given due process and 4th amendment protections isn't supported by precedence.
Their mood isn't your responsibility. Carrying a blank phone is perfectly legal.
Write the duress PIN on a piece of paper in your wallet. Someone searching your phone is probably also searching your wallet and may try the PIN.
The profiles are independently encrypted with a key derived from the user's profile PIN. If the other profiles are not logged in then their keys are not in RAM (and they get zeroed beforehand so they can't be read out of unallocated memory).
Even if the bad guys get root via a LPE in a dummy account there are no keys to find and the profiles' storage are not mounted.
You couldn't trust the device after that however, who knows what kind of persistent spyware they could have installed.
Suddenly a bunch of Americans have to apply for passports to vote. Many will have trouble gathering the required documents, including birth certificates and marriage licenses (for name changes). Many won’t get it done in time.
In addition, the agency that processes the passport requests can use voter data to selectively deny applications.
Oh, you're a democrat voter in a battleground state... Sorry it took us 6 weeks, but it looks like you forgot to write the date in MM/DD/YYY format so we're going to need you to to re-apply.
Red voter? Crayons are fine, sir.
For the new folks.