Caveat emptor. Possession of stolen property is still a crime where I live, even if you didn't do the actual stealing.
That said, I agree that attempting to rack up a large bill will not prevent theft nor lead to the return of the phone. Any anti-theft mechanisms should focus on locating the phone. We could maybe have the option of disabling the phone. But the only way to disable this open-source phone would be with some hardware lock. I don't particularly like the idea that my phone could be locked. Even if it should only happen to a thief, if it has the capability, it could be abused. We're treading too closely to the blasphemous idea of "trusted computing". -Steven On 2/28/07, Attila Csipa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
A lot of ideas have been written on anti theft protection, but much of it from a geek/user's standpoint, and almost completely forgetting the possible ramifications of the suggested techniques. First of all, none of the techniques presented PROTECT your phone from being stolen (they fall more to the find-your-lost-phone category). Second, in most countries I know of you cannot act on your own without the help/presence of law enforcement persons. Although this may sound strange and ineffective at first, it makes a lot of sense from a police perspective. What would you do if you confronted a criminal who stole your phone ? What if he is dangerous ? What if you get hurt in the process ? What if the person who has the phone and whom you are shouting at/calling a thief is actually innocent and knows nothing of the origin of the phone ? Which brings us to the next concern - stolen phones usually do not get regularly used by the persons who actually stole them, and most certainly not used by their money - their SIMs are just as stolen. They might drain your account with expensive calls, but chances are high that the phone will soon get sold through ads and/or ebay. If the persons in charge do this 'professionally' they will surely flash the phone (the Neo1973 is here at a little advantage by not being a widespread/common phone). Thus there is no guarantee that you are spending the thiefs money - in fact, it is much more probable that you are tracking and wasting an unsuspecting victims money. How would you feel if you bought a slightly used Neo1973 only to find out that it is sending expensive foreign/roaming SMS-es because the previous owner 'forgot' to turn off a silent alarm/anti theft application ? As you can see the problem of phone theft is not that simple as relaying coordinates back to yourself - a much broader topic must be analysed to tackle this issue - and although the GPS might help a little, it is not really a silver bullet in this matter. _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
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