Loosing your moko

beren at kabelweb.at beren at kabelweb.at
Fri Apr 4 23:28:26 CEST 2008


About the "we can do nothing if the phone is turned off by the thief 
immediately" - maybe we can do at least something:

- implement the regular shutdown via a hidden menu entry, maybe with a
  password
- if the phone is instead turned off via the (hardware) power button of the
  Neo we just fake a power-off by displaying a shutdown animation and turn off
  the LCD and speaker.

In this case it's even an advantage if the thief tried to turn off the phone 
because then we can be really sure that the phone is in illegitimate hands 
(as it might be that a good soul finds your lost phone and tries to return it 
to you/the police).
After the fake-shutdown, the phone sets the THEFT_IN_PROGRESS flag and does 
all the fancy things you mentioned before:

- encrypting/uploading/erasing the data
- calling owner/police with GPS/GSM-cell location
etc...

Some more (exotic) things which came to my mind:
- record and upload ambience to maybe catch the voice of the thief
- setting volume to max and play a "The holder of this phone is currently
  stealing it, the rightful owner and the police have been called 15 minutes
  ago and know about your current location - drop it now and run like hell or
  face the consequences" :o)
- auto-accept a voice-call and make hanging-up impossible - that way you might
  get the chance to talk him out of stealing your phone

Of course - if he rips out the battery right after he finds it we really can't 
do much about it but if someone is paranoid enough he could probably make it 
very hard to open the case (-> superglue ;o)

And if the thief does not turn off the phone, we could still trigger the 
THEFT_IN_PROGRESS mode by a coded SMS message.

I'm pretty sure that the Neo could be made one of the hardest-to-steal phones 
ever :o)

-- beren




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