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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.
what the fuck?
Full service?
"Flickr is having a massage." The hell?
I hope they post pics! Especially if it's one of those really FUN massages!!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I hope they're using the Linux massage API and not trying to tickle the ioctls themselves...
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."
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.
"...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!
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.
There's a piece of software called shozu which does the automatic uploading. it runs on your phone as a j2me application in the background and everytime you take a photo, it resizes it to your specifications and uploads it to your flickr account.
Ewan
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.
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/.