[pjc50]

Hmm. What happens to this with jailbroken phones? I can see it going two ways:

- killswitch is in the OS, and can be removed by jailbreak. Good for user, but means you just have to jailbreak a stolen phone to recover it / prevent it being killed.

- killswitch is in the baseband, and cannot be removed. Uhoh.

[mindslight]

- killswitch prevents phone from being "jailbroken", as the only way this "feature" can work (beyond current IMEI blacklisting) is with "trusted" computing and a non-user-modifiable trust root. Regardless of the placating mention of "opting out", the possibility to really opt out cannot exist, as it would render the whole system useless.

Despite noble intentions, anti-theft DRM is actually the worst kind there is. It is impossible* to differentiate between a thief in possession of your phone, and you in possession of a company's phone that they're considering you renting.

If this becomes reality, it's yet another bullet point for getting a separate MiFi + actual computing device next time I'm forced to upgrade. That's the only way of regaining the concept of a service demarcation point.

(* unless every device is given a different root key, and the owner actually manages the corresponding private key. given the usability issues, this will never happen in a commercial design).

[joosters]

3rd way: Kill-switch is OS-based. e.g. you tell Apple that your iPhone has been stolen. You give them the serial/IMEI, (or they can match up the device based upon your itunes account). If someone wipes the phone through an exploit or jailbreak, the device is still practically useless as whenever it needs to communicate with an apple service, apple sends back a 'you are stolen' message and the phone locks up again.

End result: either the phone stays blocked or you end up with a crippled, limited-usage device that can't use many of the services that you'd expect it to (app store, etc). Re-sale value would plummet.

It would work with Android too. Stolen phones (that are reported to Google) could refuse to use the play store or accept a gmail account.

[Canada]

You can load your own OS on Android, so this would be pretty easy to bypass. The baseband firmware isn't immutable either, just harder to modify.