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Government Officials Praise 'Activation Lock' Feature of iOS 7 Following Public Release
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This could make online sales more difficult--since to check for activation lock you need to examine the iPhone in person.
Well, no matter what someone will find a way around it. But it will be a lot harder. If it is hard enough, demand will go down and thieves will pray on other targets.
I just hope that Android does something similar. But because of how open it is, I doubt it will ever be as secure.
It's funny how it wasn't thought of before. Now that it's there, it's such an obvious feature to help against a host of problems.
Also, I guess you have the same problem with someone sending you a rock in a box marked "eyephone."
In other words, sending you an unusable stolen phone has the same negative consequences as sending you a broken phone or not sending you one at all, i'm assuming
I do like this...makes me feel like I can leave my iPad/iPhone in the lunch room and come back after one hour and found my device right there on the table
Where did you say you worked and which lunch room?
If you rent your house to a tenant and he left without willing to return the key, what will you do? It's either lawsuit or change the locks. I say change the locks (or buy a new iphone) is lot cheaper than the lawsuit.
You can lock the phone remotely. I do not use a pass code, but the few times I have lost my phone I located via Find My Phone and locked it remotely.
It's true. Apple actively resisted putting this feature in until they were treated with either legislation of being sued.
You see, Apple actually makes money on every iPhone theft because the victim buys another phone. Apple had no incentive to stop this.
That's a really good question (just reimage the phone), maybe they have this tied in to activation and covered that way. Hopefully there isn't an easy way around it like this...
Bravo, this will have a chilling effect on opportunistic thievery. Up until this a iPhone laying on the ground would fetch and easy $200, now there is a high chance that the resale value is $0.
This is a great first step. Buyers will get burned at first, but I think people will quickly learn how to check moving forward.
This is a great first step. Buyers will get burned at first, but I think people will quickly learn how to check moving forward.
Not sure they will "require it", but now users are encouraged to enable it as part of the phone's initial setup.
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It's been asked and tested before. A DFU restore will not bypass activation lock. I believe the device asks for the activation status when the device goes through apples initial activation. The only potential work around that I can see would be someone redirecting the phone to their own spoofed server and telling the device that it is ok to activate. I hope apple used SSL or some sort of encryption to prevent this from being easily accomplished.
It's obviously the users responsibility as well to protect their devices, the entire theft problem can't just be left up to the companies providing them.
The studies are no doubt true but essentially that becomes the users problem not the manufacturers issue, the manufacturers provide the necessary technology to reduce theft now the consumer needs to use their brain!
You cannot wipe the phone from iTunes without knowing the very Apple ID / password linked to the phone, that's what exactly the point is. If you try to restore from iTunes, it demands that you first turn Find my iPhone off on the phone. And you can only do that if you enter your Apple ID and password, I tried it yesterday.
So the key thing is here that an average thief cannot take your phone out of your control, he simply won't be able to either unlink the phone from your Apple ID or restore it. Until some "hacker" finds out how to wipe the phone without iTunes, this is simply unbreakable.
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Politicians LOVE to find a parade, run out in front of it as it nears its end, and claim that they started and led it. Disgusting.
I'm assuming each iPhone has a hardware-level id that you can't change by jailbreaking.
So, if I had a phone with id 321, and you stole it, then no matter what you did to it (wipe it, reformat it, jailbreak it), when you tried to re-activate it so it could do all the Apple-y things you want an iPhone to do (like make phone calls, or sync to your iTunes library), Apple would look at its own database and see that phone 321 is registered to doelcm82, and it would tell you that in order to activate it you need to enter the password for Apple ID doelcm82.
My iPhone is of very little use to you as a phone.
To be able to jailbreak, you need some special conditions in the first place, such as having backed up your previous data, etc There are many things that can't be hacked on iPhones, even with a jailbreak.
My friend got a used iPhone 4 that was locked to a carrier, and she thought it's possible to "unlock" it one way or the other. After weeks of googling to try to help her, I came to the conclusion that it is simply not possible to unlock her device, at all, no matter what we did. I was quite impressed, since I've never come across a system that can't be cracked. This doesn't apply to every iPhone or iOS version, but it shows that it is possible for Apple to make a system secure enough, if they really want to.
I imagine that if activation lock is enabled, the device simply refuses any connection over the lightning port unless it's a specific encrypted one that feeds it with the Apple ID data. Then of course there may be a flaw in there somewhere, that's quite possible, but it's also possible that there isn't. At that point you can't jailbreak.
"You know what stops a bad guy with an iPhone? A good guy with an iPhone. Whoops...sorry...wrong debate."
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