I've always assumed bricking legislation has nothing to do with theft and everything to do with shutting down communications during civil unrest to prevent even adhoc wireless networks by completely bricking the device. The proponents of a similar bill in my country are all intel agency shills that normally never dabble in any laws regarding street crime yet are heavily lobbying for this. The ability of the owner to opt-out or perform this remote brick themselves was also rejected with the police having sole power over the keys.
From what I understand, the mechanisms for this law are already in place and aren't much of a problem; any Apple customer already has this with the "Activation Lock" feature, and any carrier can already deny service based on a blacklisted ESN. The proposed law, at least in spirit, would require carriers and phone makers to honor your request to make your device unusable when you report it as stolen. It isn't so much that the government is going to be making technology and forcing everyone else to use it -- it'll let the private tech industry do whatever it needs to do to comply with the proposed "please brick my stolen phone" law.
I can understand how handset vendors other than Apple would have a problem with this. For example, where is the "activation lock" setting stored and who controls it? The handset vendor (Samsung, LG, etc)? Google (since it's an Android phone)? The carrier? Who deals with the customer when the device is stolen? That level of coordination would be a mess to deal with if you don't already control most of the stack and user experience like Apple does.
Because there's an epidemic of cell phone theft, many cellphone manufacturers don't provide a reliable mechanism for the victim of theft to deactivate their phone, and third party solutions are hit-and-miss. The primary purpose of the legislation is to require manufacturers to provide users with a way to remotely brick their phone. They're also required to get the user's permission for this as part of the phone setup, and make it easy for the user to disable the feature at any time. That's why there is support for this ability in a phone.
Functionality like this is pretty good to deter theft. If thieves can't easily re-enable bricked devices, black market price is much lower, thus there's less incentive to mug people carrying those devices.
allowing this would open the possibility of thefts forcing the victims to respond in a specific way thus opening a possibility of violence along with theft.
so no to that. the solution to work as deterrent should be final: stolen device = brick device, no other possibility.
in the case of solving theft of devices we have to choose the price we want to pay. all solutions are based on various ways to deter the theft. there is no solution to stop the action of theft once started. thus all solutions have a price that could range from false positives (like legit owners being locked out) to waste like theft happens because they dont know that they cannot unlock it without destroying the device.
This makes the unwary buyer a victim of the thief as well. All the more reason to brick stolen devices and make them unsellable by the thief so they can't victimize more people.
Why can't that phone be bricked the moment it's reported stolen. Unable to connect to any cell tower in at least North America.
Sure, the cops might not track down someone who stole a $600 phone( which is a little absurd), and maybe some people steal them for parts. But most people intend to sell them for use. We can make them useless in the US,Canada, and Western Europe trivially.
Interesting point. Are we wanting the phone (i.e. the manufacturer) to brick the device when it's been perceived as stolen? I had always thought of cellphones like bikes and assumed that there'd always be some inevitable amount of theft, but the two devices aren't actually that similar.
This is a horrible bill, those software locks have made stealing iPhones a unappealing incentive.
Considering so many exceptions carved out for other devices, it seems like a bill was made for thieves to steal attractive high end gadgets to sell them for parts in the after market.
It certainly doesnt make sense either from consumer standpoint or environmental standpoint considering the amount of exceptions it has added to the list.
Now it’ll be appealing to steal phones again… Great !
Such considerations must incorporate public safety/crime considerations as well. Smartphones are often the most expensive thing we have on our person and became a huge target for thieves. Locking/bricking went a long way towards reducing this, and then limiting the value of resale parts did again.
You can remotely brick it. The minute that the thief tries to do anything with the device, it's functionally useless. It needs to be online to be reactived, and if the device is marked stolen, it won't activate.
And they are complaining that they can’t use them because they can’t remove the activation lock without the owner’s consent. That’s kind of the entire point. The government was actually pushing for something like an activation lock making stolen phones harder to use.
I think post Activation Lock and similar features on smartphone platforms, thieves usually sell stolen devices to those who rip them apart to get to specific parts that they can resell. That will continue until the phone makers figure out how to disable the display, digitizer, battery and other parts that have value even in a "bricked" phone.
Trying to prevent theft that way is a fundamentally flawed approach. It's in the end all about controlling the phone you brought to prevent you from using it in any way they don't like or using it longer then they like (by repairing it).
Theft will happen anyway. You can even sell permanently-locked/bricked devices to people which doesn't look to closely at the sellers description. Sure you will need to sell them for cheap, but that's all.
That idea is like saying all cars must be always tracked, always link up with the drivers phone and be remote-controllable by there manufacturer to prevent theft.
Sure it would prevent theft, maybe, until people find ways to brake it. But it's still totally unreasonable with a lot of hidden cost to it.
E.g. in case of apple laptops the cost is losing a lot of small independent companies as well as any way to properly repair an Apple laptop. (Apple doe NOT provide proper repairs they at best replace whole components often the whole main board because it's one component when many damages tend to be similar because people use their devices similar and often are reasonable fixable with a bit of not-easy-but-not-very-hard-either soldering).
EDIT: And most important! The theft constraint can be archived to a reasonable degree WITHOUT locking out third party repair. A example (through not applicable to mac in this case) is how I setup my laptop with a custom EFI platform key/certificate and a BIOS password so to reuse it after theft people have to replace the BIOS chip soldered onto the motherboard (it has no publicly known master key or reset pin). Apple can archive similar things so that theft is more costy but third party repairs are still mostly unconstrained.
Exactly. This brew-ha-ha is nothing. This is an anti-theft feature. Hard to argue against features designed to reduce the potential for someone to target it for theft.
As someone who has had both a smartphone and a laptop stolen, I would have loved to know that aside from my frustration with the insurance company that the thief walked away with 2 worthless bricks.
And no, right to repair should not ban user-initiated device activation locks.
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