It's Time To Start Taking Stolen Phones Seriously

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday June 6, 2013 @02:05PM from the something-worth-stealing dept.

itwbennett writes "'Find My iPhone' is neat, but it's time for smartphone makers and carriers to stop pretending their anti-theft measures are anything more than minimum viable products, says blogger Kevin Purdy. He's not the first to point this out: As reported in Slashdot, 'NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said overall crime in New York City was up 3.3% in 2012 due to iPhone, iPad and other Apple device thefts.' And now San Francisco and New York attorneys general are calling a 'Smartphone Summit' where representatives from Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft are due to meet and discuss the implementation of a industry-wide 'kill switch' system."

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Re:Cerberus is free today through AppGratis by pruss · 2013-06-06 14:58 · Score: 5, Informative

This may be rather good, but I've felt rather uncomfortable with closed source apps that are track a phone or wipe data, and especially ones that can survive a hard reset, so I spent a few hours and rolled together a super-simple, no-UI app (passwords are hardcoded into the source, so I am distributing this source-only: https://code.google.com/p/roottracker/ ) that does basic phone tracking and wiping via SMS. I tried to make the source simple enough that one can easily verify the lack of backdoors.