A new approach to Re: Itch3: Anti-lost/theft protection

[kkr]

Le mercredi 28 février 2007 à 20:54 +0100, Attila Csipa a écrit :
> 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. 

In this case, when you buy on ebay, you do have to receive the prove
that the phone is not stolen, in other case (even if I'm not a lower),
the buyer is too in fault...

> 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. 

If the phone is flash by the thief, then the software will not work ;-)


> 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 ? 

Is the same for car alarm... When you sold something, you do have to do
the necessary action (in other case, you're too responsive for the
damage)

> 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.

But globally, I agree with you, we do have to think carefully about this
case... So, let's start a working group on this idea :-)


Regards,