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Stolen Cell Phone Shares Thieves' Photos?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Sep 02, 2006 12:14 AM
from the maybe dept.
from the maybe dept.
eastbayted writes "A man from Berkeley, Calif. had his cell phone swiped. Soon after, the ShoZu starting uploading pictures to his Flickr account taken by the thieves — for the world to see. There's one of an unidentified woman eating something chocolatey, and a couple of either a chihuahua or a large rat. Seems this guy had installed some software on his phone to automatically perform those photo uploads, and whoever took his phone didn't realize it That's his story, anyway ... some people doubt it. He's a Yahoo employee. Yahoo owns Flickr. This is all pretty good PR for the photo site, no? He claims: 'People assume I'm doing it for self-promotion, marketing, a hoax or something like that. I'm talking to you because I want it to be known that it's not a hoax. I'm just too ordinary. I'm just too unclever for that.'" Update: 09/02 05:48 GMT by Z : Made the quote more obvious.
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Stolen Cell Phone Shares Thieves' Photos?
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did anyone else read the summary amd think... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Saturday September 02 2006, @12:18AM)
It's in the article (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://kadin.sdf-us.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 16, @01:46PM)
Apparently the guy (allegly -- assuming you don't believe it's all some sort of elaborate PR hoax) had some software on his phone that caused photos taken to be automatically posted to his Flickr account. This is pretty reasonable, actually: Flickr lets you post photos via email, so it would just involve programming the phone to automatically send photos to an the address for this. His phone was stolen, and a while later, photos of random people started showing up on his Flickr page, taken by the thief, we assume.
The real interesting part of the story is not all this, though, it's how it turned into an Internet phenomenon and in particular how a lot of people really tore into him for being a PR flack. Personally I think that the story is probably legit, particularly in hindsight, but a lot of people didn't.
Apparently after he took so much crap about it being a stunt, he disabled the software and has written off the phone.
A crappy ending to what could have been a pretty neat story, if you ask me.
Massage? (Score:1)
Re:Massage? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Massage? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://put-your-mone...r-mouth-is.com/blog/ | Last Journal: Monday January 29 2007, @02:44PM)
I hope they post pics! Especially if it's one of those really FUN massages!!
Re:Massage? (Score:4, Funny)
Too bad flikr is down... (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://www.thefloatingrock.com/)
Flickr is Down? (Score:1)
(http://put-your-mone...r-mouth-is.com/blog/ | Last Journal: Monday January 29 2007, @02:44PM)
And yes, this is a strange story.
who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.google.com/)
Well, for $5 a month, Sprint offers a full replacement plan. If someone steals your phone, they void the ESN of the stolen receiver, and they send you a new one. problem solved.
Idiot Tax (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, for $5 a month, Sprint offers a full replacement plan.
That's the idiot tax.
In a 10 years period, you would have paid 600$. You
would have to lose phones pretty frequently to break
even.
Possible? (Score:2)
-matthew
Re:Possible? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure why you ask about automatically taking pictures with a "cron" function - because that is not part of the story. Apparently the photos were manually snapped by the alleged thief, or someone in possession of the phone. The phone just automatically uploads new images taken by the user. As for the automatic photographing - why not? You can get software to do just about anything with your phone - time-based things like alarms are available. So I don't see why you couldn't do the autmatic picture-taking.
I Can a user upload an arbitrary program to their phone and have it run? I thought your provider pretty much controlled what your phone can do and what programs are on it.
Depends on what phone you have, and who your provider is. My Nokia runs the Symbian OS, and I can write software, or buy/download thousands of different applications for it. Not sure why this seems so far-fetched to you.
Re:Possible? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://longwords.org/ | Last Journal: Monday September 04 2006, @04:49PM)
Ewan
Worst Excuses Ever (Score:1)
and
"having a massage"
I can't imaging what's next
Sounds like the T-Mobile/Sidekick scenario (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.widescreen.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday February 15 2006, @07:44PM)
A similar thing happened a few months ago when a T-Mobile Sidekick was stolen. Apparently, T-Mobile stores a copy of all of your data and photos on their servers so that if you switch phones you have access to all of your data and photos. The "thief" apparently wasn't aware of this and was soon identified because of the photos that she took of herself and her neighborhood. It's a long story, but an interesting read.
Sprint PCS last year (Score:1, Redundant)
(http://powerlord.livejournal.com/)
not just lying but overlydramatic too? (Score:3, Insightful)
Crime (Score:1)
(http://www.geocities.com/tablizer | Last Journal: Saturday March 15 2003, @01:22PM)
O RLY? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://tarmas.com/)
O RLY? Take a look at this pic [flickr.com], supposedly taken with the stolen camera phone, then at this one [avtoindex.com], the first result for "Chavelle" on Google Images. Looks familiar? And I'm not taking his lame excuses.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://in2mind.blogspot.com/)
Probably thats why he put this disclamier on Flickr for the car pic:
Now you see her ... (Score:1)
Suspicious (Score:2, Insightful)
I wouldn't trust a guy who speaks newspeak and has a camera-phone, uploading pictures automatically. IMO he's thought-police..
Deja Vu (Score:1)
HINT: If you steal a phone, do not take pictures of yourself and make them public. This is almost the same as leaving your wallet at a bank after you rob it.
Hoax (Score:2, Troll)
(http://www.curlypi.com/)
But what strikes me is that there are photos that are obviously his both before and after the "thief's" photos. So either it's a hoax, or Flickr for some reason inserts your latest photos halfway down the list. Or he got his phone back. Any other options?
Update ! (Score:2, Funny)
ShoZu? (Score:2)
(http://mistshadow2k4.deviantart.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday May 31 2006, @02:37PM)
Re:ShoZu? (Score:4, Informative)
Too Bad He Didn't Upgrade (Score:2)
(http://www.cyberarmy.net/~ikioi)
Hmm, note to self: Next cellphone, make sure it has working GPS & API so I could code my own anti-theft system. Remember to buy "Louisville Slugger" for the "final step" of anti-theft system add-on pack.
why is this on /. (Score:1)
mutter mutter ed hitting accept button instead of reject mutter mutter
Lame marketing ploy by Yahoo (Score:2)
Yahoo's financials have not been that great lately. They recently overhauled their message boards, and the result is so bad that their message board traffic plummeted.
Yahoo has a problem - not enough traffic to their content sites. This lame ploy is some marketing person's failed attempt to drive up traffic.
Know the guy (Score:2)
(http://eatshitanddie.com/)
I doubt, very much, this is some kind of marketing ploy or otherwise, it would be well below Ben's character to participate in such a thing. Besides, I believe he's just a creative director and why would Yahoo tap their CD to do such a thing, doesn't make any sense.
So put the tin foil hats back on, I can 99.9% for certain say this is legit.
Doesn't Make Sence (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.matthoppes.org/)
Face Recognition software (Score:1)