Slashdot Mirror
Stolen Cell Phone Shares Thieves' Photos?
eastbayted writes "A man from Berkeley, Calif. had his cell phone swiped. Soon after, the ShoZu starting uploading pictures to his Flickr account taken by the thieves — for the world to see. There's one of an unidentified woman eating something chocolatey, and a couple of either a chihuahua or a large rat. Seems this guy had installed some software on his phone to automatically perform those photo uploads, and whoever took his phone didn't realize it That's his story, anyway ... some people doubt it. He's a Yahoo employee. Yahoo owns Flickr. This is all pretty good PR for the photo site, no? He claims: 'People assume I'm doing it for self-promotion, marketing, a hoax or something like that. I'm talking to you because I want it to be known that it's not a hoax. I'm just too ordinary. I'm just too unclever for that.'" Update: 09/02 05:48 GMT by Z : Made the quote more obvious.
what the fuck?
"Flickr is having a massage." The hell?
Too bad flikr is down... ...scheduled maintenance my arse -- they were /.-ed...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
Hmmm I wonder if they went down because of Slashdot or just out of coincidence? Odd timing.
And yes, this is a strange story.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
No I think Flickr does its regular maintainance very late on weekend nights (EST). I've run into this before and it's a bit frustrating.
Just some rather bad timing in posting the story here, I guess.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Summary admittedly doesn't make a lot of sense, and the Flickr page is down, but the InfoWorld article isn't too bad.
Apparently the guy (allegly -- assuming you don't believe it's all some sort of elaborate PR hoax) had some software on his phone that caused photos taken to be automatically posted to his Flickr account. This is pretty reasonable, actually: Flickr lets you post photos via email, so it would just involve programming the phone to automatically send photos to an the address for this. His phone was stolen, and a while later, photos of random people started showing up on his Flickr page, taken by the thief, we assume.
The real interesting part of the story is not all this, though, it's how it turned into an Internet phenomenon and in particular how a lot of people really tore into him for being a PR flack. Personally I think that the story is probably legit, particularly in hindsight, but a lot of people didn't.
Apparently after he took so much crap about it being a stunt, he disabled the software and has written off the phone.
A crappy ending to what could have been a pretty neat story, if you ask me.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A man from Berkeley, Calif. had his cell phone swiped. Soon after, the ShoZu starting uploading pictures to his Flickr account taken by the thieves
Well, for $5 a month, Sprint offers a full replacement plan. If someone steals your phone, they void the ESN of the stolen receiver, and they send you a new one. problem solved.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
I guess I'm just out of the whole cell phone thing so I have to ask... is it even possible to install software on a cell phone that will automatically take pictures and upload to Flickr? First of all, do phones have a "cron" type functionality that can fire off programs on a schedule? Do users have access to any of this? I Can a user upload an arbitrary program to their phone and have it run? I thought your provider pretty much controlled what your phone can do and what programs are on it.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I'm talking to you because I want it to be known that it's not a hoax. I'm just too ordinary. I'm just too unclever for that.
.. and taking my above post one step further, this has to be a hoax, because when you report your cell phone stolen, the phone company will void the ESN so it can't be activated for service.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
"just too unclever for that"
and
"having a massage"
I can't imaging what's next
-Tim Louden
http://www.evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick/
A similar thing happened a few months ago when a T-Mobile Sidekick was stolen. Apparently, T-Mobile stores a copy of all of your data and photos on their servers so that if you switch phones you have access to all of your data and photos. The "thief" apparently wasn't aware of this and was soon identified because of the photos that she took of herself and her neighborhood. It's a long story, but an interesting read.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
That is $60/year. SO if you expect to have a phone stolen once every 3 years, it is equivalent to $180/per phone stolen.
Spending $60 on a "no questions asked" replacement policy for a $600 phone is kind of a no brainer. And I do mean "no questions asked". Theft, destruction, malfunction, airline shenanigans with your luggage, basically *whatever*. Believe me, it's worth it.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Wired ran a story similar to this one last year about a Sanyo 5500 phone that had the ability to upload photos and movies to the Sprint site.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Steal cell phones... take pictures of my balls... throw cell phone away...
Hillarity ensues.
"...he is not seeking justice, revenge, or even his mobile phone. He would quite like his life back" Oh yes, a stolen phone ruined his whole life. Now he has to go live in a box in an alley wishing he could have his life back. Is it just me or does everyone think it's odd that he should have logically not told anyone about what was going on until the thief took a picture that would give enough evidence to get himself captured? If my phone got stolen (well okay, I don't own one and never have) I'd be kinda pissed and want revenge, especially if it was likely it would be handed to me as easily as having the offender take a picture of his car or house or something.
now stop reading and go play Dance Dance Revolution!
I can't believe nobody else remembers this other event happening just months ago. It ended with arrests and stuff.
It was not a phone that was stolen, but rather story credibility here. Perhaps this is a Lojack PR stunt, not a Flickr one.
Table-ized A.I.
People assume I'm doing it for self-promotion, marketing, a hoax or something like that. I'm talking to you because I want it to be known that it's not a hoax. I'm just too ordinary. I'm just too unclever for that.
O RLY? Take a look at this pic, supposedly taken with the stolen camera phone, then at this one, the first result for "Chavelle" on Google Images. Looks familiar? And I'm not taking his lame excuses.
Signature has left the building.
The length to content ratio of the Reuters/InfoWorld article is way too high. Here's a more succinct version:
The phone, the thief, his wife and a Chihuahua?
September 01, 2006
(Reuters) - "Me too!" said Web designer Ben Clemens.
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.
GSM phones also have an ESN. And yes, that ESN can be disabled.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
I was checking out the pics again. The rat-huahua shots are still there, but the picture of the woman eating the brownie, which had been marked as taken by the thief, is now "private" and thus unviewable. Not that it's that great a shot... Still curious.
tagging beta == hoax
Yeah, I don't know if anyone else has noticed but there seems to be a rise in the general "OMG it's a conspiracy" reaction for every news worthy event these days. I find it bothersome that if a real world anomaly pops up the automatic reaction is for it to be either a government or business conspiracy. What happened to enjoying stories like this one for what they are worth? It's a pretty cool story IMO. Those vanguard conspiracy types are the first to admit to being "critical thinkers" and "heroes of truth" yet they are the first to destroy a critical element of humanity - the story.
> 'I'm just too unclever for that.'
I wouldn't trust a guy who speaks newspeak and has a camera-phone, uploading pictures automatically. IMO he's thought-police..
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Didn't this happen before or is this the same old boring story? I didn't even bother reading it because either way the perpetrators are morons.
HINT: If you steal a phone, do not take pictures of yourself and make them public. This is almost the same as leaving your wallet at a bank after you rob it.
Well, for $5 a month, Sprint offers a full replacement plan.
That's the idiot tax.
In a 10 years period, you would have paid 600$. You
would have to lose phones pretty frequently to break
even.
Presumably the photos on the site are in some sort of order - order of taking, or order of upload perhaps? This might be wrong of course.
But what strikes me is that there are photos that are obviously his both before and after the "thief's" photos. So either it's a hoax, or Flickr for some reason inserts your latest photos halfway down the list. Or he got his phone back. Any other options?
The picture of the husband has just arrived : http://pix.nofrag.com/28/4b/68359f899f1cd65ff0f073 fc993f.html
Can anybody tell me what a ShoZu is? I could barely make sense of this and the site is down right now. I'll actually come back and check to see if I have replies this time, promise.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Stop takin' pictures with "borrowed" cell phones.... Wonders.... Are tech crooks really stupid too???
Sure, he uploads to Flickr, but had he installed some sort of update mechanism (manual from his own website or 3rd party tool), it might have activated the GPS features (if available on his phone) and location tagging now available on Flickr. Then maybe he'd actually get that phone back. As it currently is, it's most likely the thieves will just laugh when they read this, and start uploading more graphic pictures (and break into his Flickr account now that they know the password is on there somewhere).
Hmm, note to self: Next cellphone, make sure it has working GPS & API so I could code my own anti-theft system. Remember to buy "Louisville Slugger" for the "final step" of anti-theft system add-on pack.
I8-D
And, apparently, can be disabled remotely somehow? Just curious, as the infoworld article mentions that he has disabled 'the software' - it doesn't exactly say whether that's on the phone or at the Flickr end, but if it's on the phone.. then wtf?
Hes running ShoZhu on his Nokia 6682 - its a nice phone and is maybe 250-300 bucks with a contract so I'd get pissed if it was stolen. I don't see why this would be a hoax - its a previously released cell phone so hes not trying to do some new product hype. There would be simpler ways of getting an upgrade for it. This is classic name-n-shame like the sidekick guy from a few months ago. Maybe he'll get it back and it doesn't hurt to wish him luck. A cell phone got stolen though - big deal. Eds why is this on /. again... I've not had my coffee yet.
mutter mutter ed hitting accept button instead of reject mutter mutter
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Yahoo's financials have not been that great lately. They recently overhauled their message boards, and the result is so bad that their message board traffic plummeted.
Yahoo has a problem - not enough traffic to their content sites. This lame ploy is some marketing person's failed attempt to drive up traffic.
Modern phones run software. Most users have control over devices they own .
I thought your provider pretty much controlled what your phone can do and what programs are on it.
Only if your phone is tied to your service provider and your agreement with said provider / firmware controlled by them prevents you from running your own software. Would you be surprised to hear that some people can run arbitrary code on their own computers without being prevented from doing so by their ISP?
If your way of thinking about this is common, it seems consumers have already accepted "trusted computing" in the mobile world.
Um... this was all proved as just a bullshit publicity stunt on digg the other day. People found the pictures of the dog and car in stock photos on the net, and a lot of the times didnt' match up. Maybe this has already been pointed out or slashdot made a deal with shozu, but whatever.
Know him pretty well, used to work with him during the dotcom boom in NYC and almost worked with him in London during the fallout.
I doubt, very much, this is some kind of marketing ploy or otherwise, it would be well below Ben's character to participate in such a thing. Besides, I believe he's just a creative director and why would Yahoo tap their CD to do such a thing, doesn't make any sense.
So put the tin foil hats back on, I can 99.9% for certain say this is legit.
Or you could just pay the $5/month. Jeez!
damaged by dogma
Blame the marketing companies, who jumped on "viral marketing" starting with "leaners" years back. They are just taking advantage of the same naivete that phishers do and spammers do. And when people start getting burned, they also get more critical.
It's a natural response to being tricked, you begin to take fewer things on faith.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If his cell bill and service were canceled (i.e. he notified the carrier about the stolen phone) then how did it send the pictures.. eh eh?
It's only the matter of time before these people will be correctly identified by face recognition software on the internet. Check out free face recognition software at http://www.myheritage.com/
I doubt, very much, this is some kind of marketing ploy or otherwise, it would be well below Ben's character to participate in such a thing.
Wouldn't that make him the perfect target?
After all, don't enough people work at Yahoo for them not to all know each other?
I think someone else at Yahoo/Flickr (who knew his phone was stolen) gained access to his account information [sysadmin?] and started uploading the photos...
Makes a great PR ploy...
or even makes a great prank....
The sincerity and integrity of thus guy only make the PR more powerful and/or the prank more fun.
It's not really a "no-brainer" when you consider that $600 phone would be wroth MAX $300 12 months from now.
Cell phones are pretty much the fastest depreciating things around. They lose about 50% of their value every year. Does your insurance premium go down by that much?