"Cold Cracking" Encrypted Data

I was told years ago that if my car stereo stopped working because the battery had been disconnected, or died, that if you couldn't find the security code, putting it in a deep freeze worked. Are Princeton only just discovering what street kids have known for a decade.

Never tried it myself as I am sufficiently unelectronic that I can't even get the stereo out of the dashboard.

"Are Princeton only just discovering what street kids have known for a decade."

I don't think so; I think the deep freeze technique was intended to make the unit "forget" what it knew to permit reprogramming, and the new technique is to keep it remembering so that the information can be pilfered (the security depends upon it decaying after a very short time, but cooling preserves the data).

I am relieved to hear it, but it shows how easy it is to denigrate the scientific community as the difference in the two is sufficiently easy to disguise by referring to "hyper cold memory discontinuities" or some such nonsense which would apply to both cases. Erich Von Daniken was always the ultimate exponent of such linguistic nonsense.