Slashdot Mirror
It's Time To Start Taking Stolen Phones Seriously
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."
When a phone is stolen, another phone gets purchased. Reducing phone thefts will cut into new phone sales!
It's Apple's fault that NYC is a crime ridden shit hole. If these disgusting companies would stop making products that people actually want New Yorkers wouldn't have to resort to robbing each other! Why can't Apple and Google be more like Microsoft!
After a $150 deductible
Burn FAT not OIL
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.