> "People stopped by the police in parts of London are having their > phones scanned and instantly checked against a national database to > determine whether they are stolen.
> The on-the-spot checks, reminiscent of Police National Computer (PNC) > checks for stopped vehicles, are being trialled by officers in Ealing > and Bromley. > A handheld wireless device called Apollo scans the IMEI barcode, > usually found underneath a phone's battery*, and [...] IOW, it's based on the IMEI of the phone's case, not the IMEI the phone actually uses. (I believe I have at least one phone whose IMEI does not match that of its case - I had three phones of the same model with assorted, and differing, damage, and swapped parts to get a working phone out of the assortment, and I think the guts of the resulting phone did not come from the same phone the IMEI-bearing part of the case did. Perhaps fortunately, I am highly unlikely to be in the UK in the foreseeable future.) I suppose that's good enough for most cases, but, really, if this silliness has police powers behind it, wouldn't it be easier to just require the cell carriers to collect the _real_ IMEIs? /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [email protected] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
