Comment by palijer
14 days ago
Phone thieves aren't checking which phone brand I have before they knick my phone. Your scenerio is not improved by making Oneplus phones impossible to use once they're stolen.
14 days ago
Phone thieves aren't checking which phone brand I have before they knick my phone. Your scenerio is not improved by making Oneplus phones impossible to use once they're stolen.
It reduces the expected value of stealing a phone, which reduces the demand for stolen phones.
> It reduces the expected value of stealing a phone, which reduces the demand for stolen phones.
It's not at all obvious that this is what happens. To begin with, do you regard the average phone thief as someone who even knows what expected value is?
They want drugs so they steal phones until they get enough money to buy drugs. If half the phones can't be resold then they need to steal twice as many phones to get enough money to buy drugs; does that make phone thefts go down or up?
On top of that, the premise is ridiculous. You don't need to lock the boot loader or prevent people from installing third party software to prevent stolen phones from being used. Just establish a registry for the IMEI of stolen phones so that carriers can consult the registry and refuse to provide service to stolen phones.
It's entirely unrelated to whether or not you can install a custom ROM and is merely being used as an excuse because "prevent theft somehow" sounds vaguely like a legitimate reason when the actual reason of "prevent competition" does not.
> It's not at all obvious that this is what happens.
This is what we've empirically seen as Apple went from having devices which could trivially be reflashed and resold without much impediment to now most iPhones being locked and their hardware parts cryptographically tied together.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/apples-activation-lock-lea...
The rates of phone theft have gone radically down since phone makers have made it harder to reflash and part out the parts of the phones.
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> It's not at all obvious that this is what happens. To begin with, do you regard the average phone thief as someone who even knows what expected value is?
They know if their fence went from offering them $20/phone to offering $5/phone, it's not worth their time to steal phones any more.
> Just establish a registry for the IMEI of stolen phones so that carriers can consult the registry and refuse to provide service to stolen phones.
This seems like something that the average HNer is going to get equally riled up about as a surveillance and user freedom issue.
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Thieves don't always get the news right away, but when you work hard to steal a bunch of phones and can't sell them for anything, you don't get your fix and you find something else to steal and sell.
Regulations have made it pretty hard to sell catalytic converters, but there's still thefts cause some theives are really out of the loop, but I think it's been reduced by a lot. Still a few people who want to fill up their stolen trailer with cats before they go to the scrap yard, though.
A strong lock system that prevents stolen phones from being used is better than a global IMEI denylist because phones that can't be connected to a cell network but are otherwise usable still have value, some networks won't participate in a global list, and some phones can have their IMEI changed if you can run arbitrary software on them (which is maybe a bigger issue, but still steal phone -> wipe -> change IMEI -> resell is stopped if you can't wipe the stolen phone)
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I find it hard to believe that Oneplus is spending engineering and business recourses, upsetting a portion of their own userbase, and creating more e-waste because they want to reduce the global demand for stolen phones. They only have like 3% of the total market, they can't realistically move that needle.
I don't understand what business incentives they would have to make "reduce global demand for stolen phones" a goal they want to invest in.
This is a security feature from Qualcomm. So there is little of their own time spent on this.
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