I have to laugh at how Apple was able to remotely disable that one specific phone at their will. If that's not alarming to anyone who owns an apple product, they simply deserve to lose control of whatever they buy.
1) It's a prototype. Building protections into your prototypes is common-sense, and doesn't mean that there is an evil overlord out to attack you.
2) Both Blackberry and iPhones have had this capability for years. It's part of MobileMe, and built into every BES. It's a must for enterprise use, practically anywhere. This is a publicized feature, and a very useful one.
...how Apple was able to remotely disable that one specific phone at their will.
This does not prove that Apple has the ability to remote-wipe any user's phone.
First, if Apple remote-wiped the iPhone, this would be explained by the fact that the company administrator of mobile devices can disable employee and contractor phones, and Apple does give out iPhones to its employees. It's logical that the owner of this prototype phone is an iPhone employee.
Secondly, it's likely that the rightful owner decided to remote-wipe the phone themselves to protect their own personal data (as he or she would do to any other lost or stolen phone) while continuing the search.
Not only is there no evidence that Apple can remote-wipe any user's phone, but it's very possible they specifically passed on having this ability in order to minimize liability.
Isn't that the entire point of mobile phones having an IMEI number? Hardly new to the iPhone. In fact, it looks as if all they've actually done is the remote-wipe feature of mobile me ... and no one outside apple can get it working again, as you need the right "image" to restore on to it. Which obviously isn't available yet.
edit: I presume IMEI isn't something that's unique to the UK?
> I presume IMEI isn't something that's unique to the UK?
Definitely not, though depending on the underlying system the acronym will change a bit, the function is the same, to identify a phone independent of the identity card in it.
This is why people that prank call 911 with their identity card removed from the phone are caught.
Not always... there are lots of mobile phones where you can change the imei with simple tricks - temporarily or permanently. I know it was trivial to reprogram this on many siemens sets ~6 years ago.
It's not unique to the UK. But most US mobile customers never have had to deal with swapping SIMs between devices and, thusly, never needed to know what their IMEI is.
There are remote wipe applications available for every smartphone platform I've ever seen. I believe it's built into the BlackBerrys when connected to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Just because Apple had a remote wipe program installed on this prototype, doesn't mean it's installed by default on any production retail phone.
