There is a back door already called iCloud Backups. Because if turned on, all the user data is sent to a remote server and it can be restored to a different phone. So that data is obviously not encrypted using the same highly secure hardware based encryption.
Not really. All of the advice is very generic without any causal links between winning or losing a hackathon. It's mostly an advertisement for Rails and upsell for the service.
Additionally, it appears that someone is rigging the votes to this HN submission.
