Daily Archive for June 21st, 2006

If you want to be a thief, don’t be a dumb thief

A 16-year old diva from Corona, Queens “finds” a Sidekick cellphone in a taxi, decides to keep it and snaps a whole bunch of pictures of herself and her family.

Little does she know Sidekicks send a copy of all pictures taken with it to a T-Mobile web account where the owner can view them later. That’s exactly what the rightful owner of the Sidekick did.

The owner found out the AIM screen name of the thief, and IMed her asking her to return the phone. She told the owner, in a particularly nice way to shove it. That’s the first thing she did wrong. The second thing she did wrong was to ask her brother serving in the military to threaten the owner. Apparently that’s quite a big no-no for military personnel. The third thing she did wrong was to ask the owner to pay her to get the phone back.

The amateur thief has now been arrested for possession of stolen property. Way to go! Next time be more stupid and maybe you’ll evolve from misdemeanors to felonies and go to jail for a long time.

A friend of the owner of the Sidekick set up a website to document all of this:

http://www.evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick/

-TPP

AT&T to customers: Fuck your privacy

AT&T gets sued for violating their own privacy policy and disclosing confidential information about their customers and their usage records to 3rd parties.

What does AT&T do to rectify the situation? Apologize and vow to protect customers’ privacy better in the future? Naah, that wouldn’t be Big Corp (tm) enough.

Instead AT&T rewrites its privacy policy to state, in no uncertain terms, that AT&T customers have no privacy whatsoever and AT&T can do whatever the hell they please with your data. Excellent!

Customers to AT&T: No. Fuck you.

-TPP