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How Not to Steal a Sidekick
timmit was one of many readers to point out the story of a stolen Sidekick, writing with this excerpt from the site: ""When my friend realized that she had left the Sidekick in the taxi she asked me to immediately send a message to the phone saying that we would give a reward for the phone. There was no response. After a day of waiting, she had to go to the store and spend over $300 on a new Sidekick. When she put her SIM card in, she saw that the person(s) that had taken the phone had not only signed on to AOL leaving their name and password in the phone, but they had taken pictures of themselves." I can sympathize, after someone with the address Rmluckyguy@aol.com tried to sell me back the Visor Deluxe stolen from my car last year in Philadelphia. I hope Evan has better luck.
Has he heard of the Google cache?
Does he know about the Wayback Machine?
Putting up a "public humiliation" web site is an irrevocable action. All it would take would be one post on those boards and there could be a "flash lynch mob" of people angry about having lost their phones and this vigilante "shamer" would have no control of what that mob would do. The people depicted, their families, friends, and neighbors are all going to be affected by this and it isn't going to go away even if the shamer begs people to stop harassing them.
That's what happened in China just a little while ago. A guy got mad at a student whom he suspected was fooling around with his wife. The student and his whole family were harassed to the point where they just hid in their homes. The wife was harassed too. Threats came from people who had read postings about the postings about the shamer's site. The shamer replaced his page, begging that people would just forget about it and leave them all alone... but apparently nobody was even reading his original site any more.
I think that such "shamers" are irresponsible and dangerous. Putting up a site like that is akin to inciting riot.
Aside from her losing it not making it stolen, that is.
Here's how it would play out.
She leaves her phone in a cab. Someone uses the phone to sign into AIM and take a couple pictures. Those pictures and that password are stored in the phone or on the SIM card in the phone she lost. Unless given back to her, she wouldn't have the pictures or that info because she doesn't have the phone or SIM card.
This is on par with me losing a digital camera, buying a new one, popping in a new memory card, and having the pictures the "thief" who found my prior camera had taken after I lost it.
The SIM card outside a phone isn't going to be able to send info to a new card, and right now the info on SIM cards made for Sidekicks (through T-Mobile only right now, unless I'm mistaken) can't be transfered from one card to another anyway by any means on the market.
A more believable story would be that she checked to see what calls she was billed for and tried calling whoever the finder called.
It's a girl!
Don't be silly. Obviously, as the comments show, different parts of the country treat 911 differently. Regardless, there's a big difference between knocking down someone's door and someone who has handed you your property back and is WALKING AWAY from you BEFORE you've called. This guy's story had the guy walking away, not running him down, before calling. If the caller was truly scared, he wouldn't be following the thief.