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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.
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."
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.
I'm not sure why you ask about automatically taking pictures with a "cron" function - because that is not part of the story. Apparently the photos were manually snapped by the alleged thief, or someone in possession of the phone. The phone just automatically uploads new images taken by the user. As for the automatic photographing - why not? You can get software to do just about anything with your phone - time-based things like alarms are available. So I don't see why you couldn't do the autmatic picture-taking.
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.
Depends on what phone you have, and who your provider is. My Nokia runs the Symbian OS, and I can write software, or buy/download thousands of different applications for it. Not sure why this seems so far-fetched to you.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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.
"...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.
I wouldn't be so quick to pin the quote on him (in fact, it's not a quote at all.)
Saying someone "just wants their life back" is hack reporting 101, especially when the deadline is near and the writer needs a quick line to tie everything together.
true not everyone looses or has their phone stolen, I did, a rather nice phone too, filed a police report, the officer that did the report told me not to hold my breath, they get 50-100 reported stolen phones a week, and thats just the ones that get reported. In 1 town.
Er, well, if that were true, then this means that there are at least 6.2 billion phones in use in London, UK. If you assume most people keep their phone for, say, 18 months, that actually works out at 18.6 billion phones. And that's just phones that are lost, not even stolen. And only the ones lost in black cabs.
FYI, there are approximately 10 million people in London. I think your estimate may be off.
Shozu is a 3rd party java application that uploads photos from your mobile phone to your flickr account. I started using it last week and it's pretty handy really. They do have a website http://www.shozu.com/.
GSM phones are identified by their IMEI number to the provider. The providers usually have a black list of stolen phone IMEIs. Of course, not all providers block a zeroed IMEI (000000000000000), which is stupid because once you have equipment to change the cell phone, you can change the IMEI. (Then again, you could just change it to another random IMEI number)
A crappy ending to what could have been a pretty neat story, if you ask me.
The problem is, the story essentially already happened. Sure it's kinda neat in that justice sort of way, but it's not that original anymore, and most of the reason people bag on him for PR stunt is because of the connections they make between his place of employment and his photo service of choice.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."