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Proposed California Law Would Mandate Smartphone Kill Switch
alphadogg writes "Kill-switch technology that can render a lost or stolen smartphone useless would become mandatory in California under a new bill that will be proposed to the state legislature in January. The bill will be introduced by Senator Mark Leno, a Democrat representing San Francisco and neighboring towns, and George Gascón, the district attorney for San Francisco. Gascón has been spearheading a push by major law-enforcement agencies across the U.S. for more to be done to prevent smartphone theft. The proposed law could reach well beyond the borders of California. Because of the difficulty and added cost of producing handsets solely for sale in California, it could serve to make kill-switch technology a standard feature on phones sold across the U.S."
It's amazing how these retards affect everything that is sold the in the US.
On the surface one might thing âoeThatâ(TM)s a great idea, it would make stolen phone useless!â
But beyond the idea that eventually hackers would find a path around such measures, it also opens the door to abuse by âoeLaw Enforcementâ, who are notoriously unable to police themselves from both breaking the law and abusing the privileges they have been given.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The crackers will figure out how to trigger the remote kill switch without your authorization, bricking thousands if not millions of phones.
Or the goobernmint will...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
...but the foo cell phone contains a component, which violates one of our patents. Therefore we demand, that all foo cell phones are disabled immediately.
Funny how the propaganda machine skews things. I bet you never visited a camp and actually talked to the people... naa. You probably just listened to a bunch of phony reporters on TV talking shit, combined with cherry-picked sound bites. I spent two weeks sleeping on the sidewalk of Manhattan starting on September 17th, while working full time over in Jersey. I'll be the first to tell you, there was a share of people who are a little bit loony, but you'll find them at any protest. On the other hand, I've never met so many people who were in touch with what is going on in our country and in our world. Compared to the average American slob who does nothing but work, shop, and watch TV, these people actually saw the world for what it was, were disgusted, and were willing to make sacrifices to get out and find concensus among their fellow citizens and discuss the real problems our society faces and try to improve things. If you think that is counter-productive, I hope you like what you get for sitting on your ass and doing nothing until election day when you get to choose which lying bastard you want to get blamed for all the bad things that happen to you while the real crooks get away with murder behind the veil.
Dare I hope that this law will contain specific text prohibiting service providers from abusing this for contract issues or nonpayment? Naaaah, that would be asking too much of our corporate overlords and their paid^H^H^H^Helected cronies....
Plain stupid
In 3 years the phones will cost nothing so there will be no reason to steal a phone [*]
What will matters would be data on those phone.
Kill switch will be the perfect target for hackers/terrorists.
[*] Of course there still will be phone with a fruit logo on it that would still cost $$$$. But who cares ? If that matters we could force all vendors to adopt the same logo to confuse the thieves.
Glad to see that propaganda works so well. If the TV box told you it was true, it must be true. Never check any facts, including literature and political leaders of these groups. Just believe that picture box!
dumbass
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Why not just mandate the carriers participate in international IMEI black lists?
It doesn't stop the phone working, just means it can't connect to the network.
Still has the effect of lowering the value of a stolen phone.
The law, as I understand it, is to allow the authority, to issue a command to render a particular smartphone totally unusable.
However, the same law could be misused by the authority as well (think of what NSA is doing, for example) - instead of killing a smartphone that has been reported stolen, the authority could issue a kill command to smartphones that are being used by "dissidents", cutting off their communication lines.
Do not ever forget that inside the NSA datacenter they have all the information of who is using what phone, who calls whom and when and how often and where they call from, etc.
Right now, without the KILL SWITCH, all they could do is to LISTEN IN to the communications of people. With KILL SWITCH, they could kill off all the communication channels of the anti-NSA people, and render them totally unable to communicate with the world.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !