Law enforcement officials and consumer advocates in the US have come together behind an initiative designed to curb the rising incidence of phone theft in the country, according to CNET.
Called ‘Secure Our Smartphones’ (S0S), the coalition seeks to convince smartphone manufacturers and wireless carriers to implement a kill switch that would render stolen phones useless.
The objective is to weaken the market for stolen phones, which are easily wiped and resold on the streets.
“It would brick the phone, as the kids today say,” says New York Attorney General Eric Scheinderman. “Thieves have to know that there’s no point in stealing a phone.”Schneiderman, along with San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon, organized a press conference in New York City to announce the initiative.

A moral obligation

The two officials say the proposed kill switch can be integrated into smartphones as early as next year, since the technology to create the feature already exists. The next step would be to agree upon a standard, and then to provide consumers with a free kill switch option. Schneiderman said the public should not be forced to pay more for phones with a kill switch feature.

The smartphone industry — which thrives on phone theft because it forces consumers to purchase new devices — has resisted the idea.

Gascon told reporters that he spoke to Apple about the possibility of a kill switch a year ago, but was promptly informed that the company had no plans to install such a feature on their phones. He received a similar response from US wireless carriers. “The industry has a moral obligation to fix this problem,” Gascon said.

The SOS coalition — which includes politicians and various law enforcement agencies from more than a dozen states — is now raising the issue anew as smartphone thefts continue to rise even as average crime rates throughout the US have declined.

An epidemic of street crime

Half of all crimes committed in San Francisco last year involved a phone. In New York, 20 percent of all robberies involved a smartphone, which is 40 percent more than a year ago. In all, almost one in three robberies in the US involves the theft of a mobile phone, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

“The epidemic of violent street crime involving the theft and resale of mobile devices is a very real and growing threat in communities all across America,” Schneiderman said in an earlier statement. “According to reports, roughly 113 smartphones are stolen or lost each minute in the United States, with too many of those thefts turning violent.”

Smartphone summit

The announcement came on the same day that Schneiderman and Gascon were to co-host a smartphone summit with executives from Apple Inc, Samsung Electronics, Google Inc, and Microsoft Corp. “We’re prepared to deepen our inquiry if that is appropriate,” Schneiderman said.

After the summit, Schneiderman and Gascon released a statement saying that they asked the companies to develop an effective solution to this national crime wave and install in all new products within one year. Meanwhile, Apple has announced that such a phone service would be part of its iOS7 software to be released in the fall.

Gascon and Schneiderman said in a statement that they were appreciative of the gesture, but would reserve judgment until they could understand its actual functionality. “Apple has been very vague as to what the system will do,” Gascon said in an earlier exchange with the press. “We’ve been led to believe that it is not a kill switch.”

Some 96 percent of the US population uses mobile phones. According to one source, around $7 million worth of smartphones are lost in the US on a daily basis.

About the author: Henry Conrad is a 29-year-old game developer from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Aside from gaming and being a tech junkie, he also dabbles in creative writing, which allows him to create great storylines and backgrounds for his characters. Follow him on Twitter and Google +.

The post Smart-phone Kill Switch: Will it Prevent Theft? appeared first on Colocation America.

Outsourcing is an approach done by American, European and other big corporations where they get contractors from other countries to do the same type of work at a lesser price than their home-based workers.

Normally, qualified contractors come from countries in Asia like India, China, Philippines and Singapore.

Outsourcing is an effective tool for companies because they can get a lot of work done at a lesser price. One developer used this approach and outsourced his own job to a company in China and never got caught until recently.

Outsourcing To China

This program developer was hired as a work-at-home employee and was provided a virtual personal network (VPN) that uses a two-factor authentication process so that he can access the company’s network in the comforts of his own home. In addition to this, the work-at-home program developer needs to enter a special number given by the RSA SecureID key fob as their sign on tool so they can start doing their work.

This is necessary for payroll purposes. It determines what time the employee signed on to work and what time he signed off to end his day. What this sneaky program developer did was send his fob information to the Chinese based company and discussed additional details about the work via RingCentral business VoIP. When the work day starts, the Chinese contractors enter the fob information and what the company sees back home is he’s signed in and doing his job. He pays the Chinese developers a fraction of his salary.

More Time, More Money

While everybody in his company thinks he is working, this program developer spent most of his time watching videos online, checking web auction listings and updating his social network page. When his work is completed, he submits it to his company under his name. When the plan works, it’s now time to get additional work from another source. He contracted two more companies as a program developer.

Leveraging Time

He contracted several web developing projects and outsourced them all to China. Thanks to the high quality skill of the Chinese program developers that he hired, he aced his performance review and was considered to be one of the best programmers in the company. He got all the rewards and praises while the outsourced contractors got a small portion of his monthly income.

Something Fishy

One thing that his company noticed is that logins that are registering under this developer’s name were coming from China. The IT people checking this out didn’t have the slightest idea that their colleague was outsourcing his own work-at-home projects. Initially, they thought it was just a malware that’s initiating the VPN to connect through a proxy server, which reroutes the Internet traffic to China and back to the US Company. They came up with complicated explanations but never considered the simplest idea at all that someone was logging in under the developer’s name in China.

A Foiled Plan

The issue got elevated to a higher department, which made a thorough investigation of the issue. That’s the only time they found out that their ace developer wasn’t doing any job, and was just outsourcing his work to someone else. This employee made several hundred thousand dollars in a year and only paid $50,000 to his outsourced company.

Cheaters Never Win

He succeeded in fooling his company and in return he was able to generate employment in a third world country. The small amount he paid out put food on his contractor’s tables. Nevertheless, he was cheating and needed to be punished for it. He lost his employment as a developer and at the same time, tarnished his credibility.

About the author:

Henry Conrad is a 29-year-old game developer from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Aside from gaming and being a tech junky, he also dabbles in creative writing, which allows him to create great story-lines and backgrounds for his characters. . Follow him on Twitter or join him in Google +.

The post Sneaky web developers and IT outsourcing don’t go together appeared first on Colocation America.