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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.
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."
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.