Stolen Cell Phone Shares Thieves' Photos?

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.

It's in the article

[Kadin2048]

Summary admittedly doesn't make a lot of sense, and the Flickr page is down, but the InfoWorld article isn't too bad.

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.

who cares?

[macadamia_harold]

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

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.

for certain phones, it's worth it.

[macadamia_harold]

That is $60/year. SO if you expect to have a phone stolen once every 3 years, it is equivalent to $180/per phone stolen.

Spending $60 on a "no questions asked" replacement policy for a $600 phone is kind of a no brainer. And I do mean "no questions asked". Theft, destruction, malfunction, airline shenanigans with your luggage, basically *whatever*. Believe me, it's worth it.

Re:Possible?

[in2mind]

Yes it is.

Instructions for posting to Flickr from Cameraphone: http://www.flickr.com/get_the_most.gne#cameraphone [flickr.com]

From Nokia to Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/nokia/upload/n93/ [flickr.com]

Choose "Options" -> "Upload"

From that page,it seems users have to manually upload the pictures to Flickr.I dont find a option to AUTOMATICALLY post every new picture.

Re:Possible?

[Ewan]

There's a piece of software called shozu which does the automatic uploading. it runs on your phone as a j2me application in the background and everytime you take a photo, it resizes it to your specifications and uploads it to your flickr account.

Ewan

The Rise of the Conspiratorial Class

[CHESTER COPPERPOT]

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.

Yeah, I don't know if anyone else has noticed but there seems to be a rise in the general "OMG it's a conspiracy" reaction for every news worthy event these days. I find it bothersome that if a real world anomaly pops up the automatic reaction is for it to be either a government or business conspiracy. What happened to enjoying stories like this one for what they are worth? It's a pretty cool story IMO. Those vanguard conspiracy types are the first to admit to being "critical thinkers" and "heroes of truth" yet they are the first to destroy a critical element of humanity - the story.

Re:Possible?

[snillfisk]

It's just not possible, it also opens up quite a few new possibilities. As part of my master thesis we fitted a mobile phone with a camera in the front of a car, linked the phone to a bluetooth gps and recorded both the view and the path of the road in the landscape. It also uploaded the images and position directly to a web site, so viewers could track both the vehicle and the view online.

The norwegian road authorities apparently does something similiar when doing road maintenance, and have stored 18m+ pictures of the road network in Norway from the view of the driver. They do probably use a bit more hi-resolution images than a camera phone, but the concept is the same.

Idiot Tax

[Frankie70]

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.