That is all.

Except, it seems that it isn’t true. The gory details are here, courtousy of a group at Princeton University, who claim to be able to hack many forms of hard-disk encryption with little or no exotic technology.

The video is well worth watching, and the research paper itself remarkably readable.

What the Reg does not quite put its finger on is this: ISPs have been merrily selling customers ‘bandwidth’ that has been all but theoretical. Now they face the horrible prospect that people other than teens sharing illegal music are going to want to put that ADSL to full use. And unfortunately, they are renting the same bit of ‘pipe’ to hundreds of other people to.

Which is not to say that they are evil, bad or malicious, but just that it is a market where the prices have been low because of spare capacity in the network, and that someone had better start putting down more cable.

All that seems to have changed – someone has clearly flown over Oxford on a sunny day taking some nice pictures. Who’ll be the first to find a red tricycle?

We have become very used to storing data in what Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and others refer to as “the cloud“. Data stored ‘somewhere on the internet’ – on servers managed by someone else – is terribly convenient. We can access what we need, from wherever we are, on whatever computer or device is closest to hand. Some people get very excited about this sort thing.

And yet it is (mostly) a very bad idea, from a security point of view. All the data we store online is generally stored unencrypted, meaning that whoever happens to be storing it in the “cloud” or moving it around for you can read it.

With a service like Google, you cannot be certain at any given moment exactly where your data is being physically stored – and so what legal rules cover its handling. It is this that has the French worried.

Why does it make sense for Google to provide email, calendar and other online applications for free? In part, because in so doing it can gather more information about it’s customers – such as their names, for a start. Which is not to say that they have evil or nefarious intentions, but that doesn’t mean that putting information about yourself into the hands of web companies is a great idea either. Between security holes, poor implementations, deals to sell data, company acquisitions and the like, it’s hard to know where that data will end up eventually.

And data stored online may not even have the legal protections that data stored on your disk has. It is only this week that the Federal Government in America was told it might need a warrant for data stored in online email accounts, for example, a debate that I’m sure I’ll comment on as it unfolds.

If only the data was encrypted, sent to the internet, and decrypted when we need it. But for three reasons, protocols like this are rare: they can reduce functionality, can be difficult to present in a user-friendly way and make the make offering to store the data less attractive to service providers.

But while we’re being cynical, let’s also note that a French ban on official use of the Blackberry, even if it makes good technical sense, also opens the door for a more French for the provision of mobile email.

He made much of the fact that games are being ported to OS X. Now it seems as if what he meant was that some Windows games will be released running under some kind of emulation. Not exactly the same thing, really, or nearly as significant. It is, for one thing, hardly new.

Then he made much of the fact that developers would be able to write “Web 2.0″ applications for the iPhone. It wasn’t, he said, full access to the phone (which is what developers wanted), but it would enable programmers to write software that integrated well with phone functions. It was a way of allowing development that Apple had thought long and hard about.

But re-watching the video and really reading the fine print, it looks as this too was an effort in spin. A web-browser had already been announced, so the ability to use web applications was hardly new. Jobs avoided promising that ‘web applications’ could be downloaded onto the phone, meaning that third-party applications will only run when an internet connection is available. It is noticeable that within the demo, the application show was accessed via Safari, not via its own icon. And ‘access to the phone features’, such as sending email or making a call, does not seem to mean ‘tell the phone to send data’ but rather ‘launch Apple’s own email program when you click on an email address’.

We’re not even talking, then, about ‘widgets’ in the OS X sense – mini web pages that appear to the user to be individual applications; we’re talking about viewing web pages on a web browser. If they’ve thought long and hard, then, they haven’t come up with anything new.

Jobs had some of the most important members of Apple’s developer community in one room, and then tried to impress them with not one but two rather misleading announcements. I am not an expert, but that doesn’t seem like a very smart move to me.

All of this misses the real point, I suspect. Apple has announced that it will allow limited development of third-party applications for the forthcoming iPhone. Developers will be allowed to develop “web” applications that run within the Safari web-browser.

Allowing Windows users a version of Safari gives them the pseudo-SDK needed for iPhone application development. If Apple manages to persuade a few Windows users to use their browser, then so much the better – it will certainly get the Apple fans cheering, but a futile attempt to re-open and win the “Browser Wars” is hardly worth developer-time.

While we are on the subject of yesterday’s keynote address at the Apple developer conference – my personal UI peeves are needless transparency (why make my eyes work hard?), icons that look very similar except for subtle, artistic differences, and file managers that display previews of files instead of icons.[1] Leopard looks set to deliver all three. Terrific.

[1] The latter has been attempted by every major operating system, and everyone can get it to work well for demos and poorly in the real world. It looks good in a folder of very different documents, but in a folder of letters that all look very much the same at 20x20px, it simply sucks up computer resources without providing any utility at all.