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Prosecutors Push For Anti-Phone-Theft Kill Switches

Posted by Soulskill on from the who-doesn't-love-a-kill-switch? dept.

New submitter EdPbllips writes "Law enforcement officials nationwide are demanding the creation of a 'kill switch' that would render smartphones inoperable after they are stolen, New York's top prosecutor said Thursday in a clear warning to the world's smartphone manufacturers. Citing statistics showing that 1 in 3 robberies nationwide involve the theft of a mobile phone, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced the formation of a coalition of law enforcement agencies devoted to stamping out what he called an 'epidemic' of smartphone robberies. 'All too often, these robberies turn violent,' said Schneiderman, who was joined at a news conference by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon. 'There are assaults. There are murders.'" Apple described a system like this in their presentation about iOS 7 at WWDC.

2 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What a great idea! by BasilBrush · · Score: 1, Troll

    Remind me, which party was it that disenfranchised voters by skin colour in the 2000 election? Oh yet, I remember, it was the Republican party. The same party that had a brother of one of the candidates deliver the key state.

    You have no room to be playing the victim. Your party is evil.

  2. Stupid people, away! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Ok, I have been reading this thread with mod points, and the sheer wall of stupid I am seeing is massive.

    This isn't the sort of tool a government would used to stifle freedom of speech, or shut down a protest with. For that, you need to kill communication in a zone or shut down a users account. If you brick a single phone, their account is still active and they can just switch to a secondary phone to keep doing whatever you are trying to stop. Also, because this would use some sort of hardware id in a specific phone, you can't shut down all the phones in an area. You would need to know the phone id in advance to deactivate it. Also, it would be killing the phone itself, and not the SIM card, obviously killing a SIM card would then just cause a thief to put a new SIM in the $600 phone.

    Fuckin think before you post, people. Now, I need to go back to modding the stupid down to keep it minimally at bay...