Technology

Why doesn’t anything this interesting happen to me!

As the author found out, these phones end up in Shenzhen. You can buy these burnt logic boards on the cheap and lots do just for testing. Check out Strange Parts on YT, he has soldered lots of boards and shows they sell them in bins. The grey market is the only place for them.

Also, for those that aren’t familiar with how Apple’s encryption works. The OS creates a key pair when you create your account, fully encrypting the contents. The contents become garbage if the key pair cannot be matched. This means even if you don’t remotely wipe the contents, the data they try to get from say recovery software or whatever, cannot be read. It’s of course good to wipe it remotely in case they guess your PIN, but if they can’t, then the data is gone forever. From a technical perspective, it’s actually pretty cool.

Someone's going to sell your phone on the black market

is my favorite

I don't 'do' smartphones at all, I think they're an expensive trap -- but if you have an iPhone and it gets stolen, can't you call up Apple and have them brick it, so it can't be used at all anymore? I'd think that would be what you'd ultimately have to do if you can't get it back.

I also fucking hate Apple, with the same seething rage that redhats hate Windows, and I too must admit this is shockingly effective security.

As someone who’s experienced the same thing, some of the messages I received were shockingly well written.

The fake “find my” site they tried to use to convince me to log into my iCloud account was wildly convincing, if not for the index.php at the end of the URL - something Apple would never configure for service endpoints.

The continued to try - but never threatening. However I never engaged and eventually they just stopped trying.

This made me realize, as an android user, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do if someone steals my phone.