This is similar to a company baking something with olestra and also manufacturing Pepto, and claiming to the people that they can’t do anything about changing the olestra product. Only difference is you’re not in a two-year contract with them to keep eating their stuff.

They want the theft to occur b/c they make money off the fear of theft. you’re in a contract anyway so you’re screwed.

LOL. High tech is no different then a typical corporation. Make money until they cross the line. Hi tech always sold themselves as progressive and compassionate highly educated people, but they are no different then corporate sociopaths. You are talking about a business model that hires mainly H-1B hi tech workers under the guise they possess unique badly tech skills not avialable in US only to consign the worker to 1/3 US salary, 7 years of indentured service, and the biggest kicker doing work 80+ percent of the time that a US IT college grad can do. IAW hi tech corporations lied on the H-1B application. I will bet you that if a gov audit was ever done, many H-1B application sponsors would go to jail for perjury on a form. Big money making, liar loans, ring a bell freepers. Businessmen if not monitored will lie and lie and lie. What is the first rule about salepersons, assume they are lying sacks of shit. If they are, remember who hired them and sent them to you (businessmen). Just remember, hi tech cry about slim profit margins,yet they work in beautiful billion dollar glass metal modern steel palaces and campuses, sell you the phone for $ 300 and pay the Chinese factory (not worker) $ .75. Pockets the $299.25 and divides the loot amongst themselves, but tells everyone in the US they cannot afford to hire US IT grads or build US factories to make the product. So milking a robbery victim for more money is so surprising!!???

Those corporations involved show extortion at it’s most corrupt.

Obviously we need the Feds involved.

They’ll show up with SWAT teams.

At what point does an apparently lost phone become a stolen phone — philosophically.

AND with snipers at the ready, they will force the criminal out of his hiding and then shoot the phone out of his hand...thus destroying the phone.

Solved that problem!

A hit piece to scare people into accepting the draconian “phone shutdown” system being proposed by the government ostensibly to curtail the theft of phones. However, more likely to assure the government that they can stop you from using your phone if they want.

“Businessmen if not monitored will lie and lie and lie. What is the first rule about salepersons, assume they are lying sacks of shit.”

Americans are realizing how business works, as the natural progression plays out: Now that we’ve lost our jobs, we’re not the target market for business anymore; the disposable income is in the hands of those who now have those jobs overseas, and they are the ones businesses are targeting with their marketing. There are billions of those customers (as opposed to our few hundred million), and the focus of business is no longer on “The West”. As we can see around us every day, it is a sad transition not fully understood by all players involved...

Was it really necessary for the person who wrote this to include the victim’s quote that contained the vulgarism “a..h...”? Where has the civility gone?

I have found phones on the side of the road before. I took them home even. Does that make me a thief? I even “juiced” up the phone and waited for a call to help locate the owner. Does that still make me a thief? I even returned the phone to the delighted owners. In this guys mind, I’m a thief. F him.

So are the cracked screens. Apple knows that a significant number of owners, whose screen cracks, will opt to buy a new phone rather than take their phones in for repair.

Actually this whole article is pushing government cell phone kill switches. My Moto Droid has a locate function, is password protected, and I can kill it myself remotely. I don’t want the government to be able to shut down my phone.

BS. I've called the police to report a stolen phone (used the main local line, not 911), they arranged to meet me a few blocks from the location when an officer in the area had the time (it was just 45 minutes later), we talked for a few minutes, they went to the house, and the phone was back in my hands within 3 minutes. I showed them my bill with that phone number, I showed them the IMEI number and it also matched, and they let me go on my way.

Post-script: I didn't press charges. It was my daughter's "friend" (she just became a HS freshman) who took it. Lesson for her, and hopefully he was scared witless by the arrival of the police less than an hour after he turned it on... but the yelling really began when his mom came home to find two officers with her son on her front porch. With some luck, maybe his future life of crime ended that night. Judging from her reactions, he likely wasn't sitting down normally for a week.

(I've also used the Find My iPhone app to recover a phone an an iPad on 2 other occasions, but didn't feel a need for police assistance on either of those encounters.)

BART has an official “Lost and Found” department.

510 464-7090
or http://www.bart.gov/lostandfound

Not sure why the BART cop took the phone home with him instead of giving it to Lost and Found.

Also an f bomb in the article. Needs excerpting to just a few paragraphs.

The kill switch legislation just failed by two votes in the legislature.

Yeah I don’t want govt to have a kill switch either.