Legal eagles pit Apple v. Samsung in thievery test (The Register)

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Sick of the number of reported phone thefts in their jurisdictions, lawmakers have decided to hold a contest to discover how easy it is to crack stolen smartphones for resale.

New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman and San Francisco district attorney George Gasc?n have hired Northern California Regional Intelligence Center staff to try to crack the activation lock on an iPhone 5 and a Samsung Galaxy S 4 that was running $29.95 per year Lojack software.

"Finding technical solutions that will remove the economic value of stolen smartphones is critical to ending the national epidemic of violent street crimes commonly known as 'Apple Picking'," said the pair.

"While we are appreciative of the efforts made by Apple and Samsung to improve security of the devices they sell, we are not going to take them at their word," they said. "Today we will assess the solutions they are proposing and see if they stand up to the tactics commonly employed by thieves."

The testing will involve breaking into the handset and disabling any features that would allow the owner to track the phone. Once these have been broken, the device can usually be wiped, reset, and sold on.

Thieves are getting increasingly savvy about getting around these smartphone tracking features, and police report that taking electronic tracking into account is all part of the criminal business these days.

Certainly smartphone theft is increasingly common, with the FCC reporting that one in three robberies in major cities now involve the theft of such devices. We're carrying something with the price of a laptop computer in our pockets, and thieves follow the money.

Last month the two lawmakers launched the Secure our Smartphones Initiative (SOS ? predictably) to push mobile phone makers into installing a "kill switch" into their code that would allow the device to be rendered useless in the event of a loss or theft.

"Together, we are working to ensure that the industry imbeds persistent technology that is effective, ubiquitous and free to consumers in every smartphone introduced to the market by next year," they said.

Nevertheless, El Reg has to take issue with the math behind some of the lawmaker's claims. According to their statement "roughly 113 smartphones" are stolen or stolen every minute in the US. That's 162,720 per day, or 59.3 million per year.

Smartphone usage rates are high in the US, but not that high. Taking out those too young, poor, or uninterested in owning such a device, then that "roughly" sounds somewhat overstated. ?

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Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/19/apple_against_samsung_in_theft_test/

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