A California bill requiring all smartphones sold in the state to have antitheft technology installed was today signed into law by California governor Jerry Brown. Introduced in February, the SB-962 Smartphones bill, which mandates a “kill switch” for cellular devices, was initially approved by the California State Assembly in early August and passed a final vote in the California Senate shortly after.
I’m in favor of this.
Mmmm… couldn’t this be used to disable en mass the phones of a group of citizens — say those assembled during the Furguson protests — effectively cutting them off from outside entities?? If all the carrier needs to do is send a “lockout” signal to all devices connected to a set of specific access points? Something to think about?
Well, according the language of the bill the lockout has to be done by an authorized user. Would a carrier count as an authorized user?
Besides which, if a carrier wanted to block cell phones in an area, they don’t need this “kill switch”.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/aug/18/bart-free-speech
Bad precedent, the retards in Sacramento telling Apple what it must do. Just watch Jim, you’ll see.
It’s more like “Sacramento telling Apple to do what they’re already doing.”
Also, the term “retard” is horribly offensive and derogatory, and does nothing but weakens any power your words might have had otherwise.
You just made George Carlin cry.
I don’t understand why government has to step into this. Why do people need such handholding? Yet another law to limit everyone’s actions, when the free market would solve this on its own, would’t it? (Apple was already doing this, wasn’t it? Sigh…)
Actually, the free market wasn’t doing this, just Apple. It was in the free market’s best interest to not do this. Not having a kill switch meant the original vendor got an opportunity to sell you another phone and the third party resellers didn’t have to care if the phone was stolen or not.
Looks like the free market had already solved this problem, not just Apple. http://www.slashgear.com/california-kill-switch-law-takes-effect-in-2015-already-in-use-25342700/
There is no such thing as a free market. Every market has biases, every market has barriers to entry.
… and they couldn’t do that right now?
Carriers/telco providers can refuse individual IMEIs right now, as far as I know – or can turn off entire cells.
Neither of which makes them not a free market, unless the barriers are imposed from outside.
“It costs money to complete in this market” doesn’t make it un-free, nor do biases in customer preferences.
Customer preferences define the market, not limit it.
(Now, in practice, there are no actually free markets, because outside barriers or requirements are, in practice, imposed on every possible market.
But inherent barriers to entry [capital requirements] and customer or competitor biases are not the reason why.)
The remote lock feature, yes. But I don’t think Google has a similar activation lock as on iOS yet. This prevents someone from resetting the device to factory condition until you enter the iCloud password and it verifies with Apple.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/06/20/police-say-ios-7-activation-lock-is-significantly-reducing-thefts-of-apple-products
from SB-962
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB962
(e) Any request by a government agency to interrupt communications service utilizing a technological solution required by this section is subject to Section 7908 of the Public Utilities Code.
excerpt from Section 7908
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=puc&group=07001-08000&file=7901-7912
(c) (1) Communications service shall not be interrupted without
first obtaining a court order except pursuant to this subdivision.
(2) If a governmental entity reasonably determines that an extreme
emergency situation exists that involves immediate danger of death
or great bodily injury and there is insufficient time, with due
diligence, to first obtain a court order, then the governmental
entity may interrupt communications service without first obtaining a
court order as required by this section, provided that the
interruption meets the grounds for issuance of a court order pursuant
to subdivision (b)
It’s somewhat entertaining to read the entire Public Utility Code text because it has all sorts of (unenforced, I’m sure) stipulations about telecomm providers having to do periodic sweeps of their system to ensure that no listening devices are installed, etc.
But, putting the “Kill Bill” together with the PUC wording, it looks like it would be easy to disable (permanently?) the cell phones of people congregated in a specific area. Without having to lookup device IDs or whatever for each person.
I like Apple’s current implementation under iOS 7 because it’s under my control (or at least it feels that way): On/Off, opt-in or out.
Having something mandated by the Govt. and less under my control makes me suspect ulterior motives.
It’s kind of surprising that it was Leno who sponsored the bill, because I generally think of him as a pretty intelligent and progressive individual.
It might be interesting to follow the money trail there?
Good for Apple. I’m a Windows Phone guy myself, and Microsoft is apparently adding this. I don’t know exactly how this would work across all of the various hardware implementations of Android, though.
I’m sorry but to me this as a way to stop cellphone theft is about as useful as handing a school a bunch of iPads with vetting of apps or bothering to teach the teachers how to use the dang things. A waste of time and money.
if they really want to stop cellphone thefts they need to stop them. in most areas there is little to no police presence and when there is they don’t do crap. I’m up on Hollywood by the Kodiak all the time and if there are cops there they are standing up against the wall doing nothing about crowd control, or anything else. If they were actually patrolling there would be fewer opportunities. Same with transit cops only being at the gate to make sure you paid. And then there is when a theft is reported, its not worth it to do anything more than hand someone a police report in case they have insurance. There’s rarely to no follow up when someone says they have something like Find My iPhone. if police did go and check it out and arrest those with the phones, as well as search for those that might be buying stolen phones, then it might be less desirable.
But right now it’s grab and run and worry about the lock down issue later. Which means useable or not, a phone was still taken
Actually Apple did this on their own. And the “retards” just pulled a Samsung by making it a law for everyone