Activation lock for phones was demonstrably effective at reducing theft of the products it was applied to, so _if_ theft of tractors is an issue this seems like a good thing, _if_ JD is also willing to commit to/legally required to maintain the activation service.
My phone (a samsung s21 ultra) was snatched from my hand while I was using it to check google maps in Barcelona. I tried to remote wipe it 5 minutes later at my hotel but it had already been disconnected. So the thief was very quick at removing the sim card.
I checked online since and it seems that even with the advent activation lock, there's still a lot of phone thefts in some countries. They just sell the spare parts and can make 100 to 200 euros between the screen and battery.
I'd imagine with John Deere tractors, there's quite a few parts that could be resold so an activation lock wouldn't necessarily reduce the value by that much.
I'm not sure is the best analogy. Perhaps it wouldn't reduce the value, but I don't see how you move a tractor that wont start (unless you want the owner standing beside you while you hack).
Unfortunately commonplace in Barcelona. A thief that is caught will only get a small fine for thefts under 400€ even if it's the 1000th time. So the chance of a fine is just taken as the cost of doing 'business' by these professional pickpocketing gangs.
If there's violence involved it's another story but if a victim initiates it, they themselves can get into trouble. So these thieves are trained to be ultra passive.
That's probably the best time to steal it: the device is unlocked, giving access to the data and settings etc. Also the owner is distracted looking at the screen, and it's held in a position conducive to snatching. In short I'd expect this to be the main mode of phone theft directly from the owner.
It's a fairly common tactic in the UK. I've seen plenty of CCTV clips where kids cycle past people on their phones and snatch them. The thief is 10m away before the person's even reacted.
Because all the parts are paired. Hugh Jeffreys has an interesting series where he buys two new phones and swaps the parts. Basically nothing can be swapped without breaking core functionality. Swapping a screen, for example, loses true-tone and auto brightness.
This can be fixed by replanting a tiny chip from the old screen to the new screen, requiring extremely precise micro-soldering skills that the average repair shop doesn’t possess.
Yep, absolutely true -- I worked on the project ("FDR / New Deal").
It was originally supposed to prevent a repeat of the Hon Hai Zhengzhou incident where a team of line workers mixed/matched parts from units that failed QC and sold the Frankensteined units on the grey market. (Massively oversimplified, but that's the general gist)
The resulting near-total inability to swap screens/buttons without knowing someone with FDR update access was seen as acceptable collateral damage.
If that project came my way, it would have been a hard no, go find someone else. You literally implemented the most public unfriendly feature I've seen in a long time. That's one of those cases where sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
While I understand we are all entitled to differently prioritizing ethical red lines, it saddens me whenever I see the public suffering for the sake of increased corporate profits.
...and it is only the company that gained anything. The extra parts on the market would likely have driven prices down, making the handsets less high dollar desirable theft targets. Instead; user servicibility plummeted, planned obsolescence ensured the path of least resistance was "buy another", and the accountants likely beamed at the improvement to the bottom line while the execs patted themselves on the back for a job well done securing money that otherwise "would have been left on the table".
It took the theft of phones from honest folks to make those 'extra parts' available in the past. I personally don't want these 'extra parts' on the market even if it ends up increases repair prices for everyone.
They will sell the hardware to unwitting victims as new via eBay, Craigslist, … and disappear before the victim figures it out. It is a new iPhone in the original shrinkwrap - who’d become suspicious?
If you mean "suspicious that it might have been stolen", the buyers are suspicious too, but they don't care, they're fine with it if it means they get it for cheaper.
I'm not sure we have proof it's that effective. Recently 400+ phones were stolen from a store in a well prepared way, so I assume there's plenty of ways to work around or get value from the stolen phones despite whatever Apple is doing:
I wouldn’t be surprised if activation lock causes _more_ theft. If stolen devices are worth less due to activation lock, thieves need to steal more phones to make up the lost profits.
Also, the data on a phone is almost always far more valuable than the phone itself. If a thief steals my phone, it’s much better for me if they erase it. But they can’t do that, so my stolen phone with all my data just sits there one exploit away from being exposed.
Activation lock only serves to benefit the manufacturer as they get to sell more phones. It doesn’t benefit the consumer at all.
> thieves need to steal more phones to make up the lost profits.
Unless these thieves were rolling in money previously, I would imagine they maximize theft as much as they possibly can — why would they leave money on the table? I don’t think they’re stealing to meet some monthly quota like hired hands on a farm; they should just be acting on a risk/reward function.
And as such, I think the more likely scenario as phones decrease in value per theft, other objects are made relatively more valuable (per risk/reward), and theft would transition elsewhere.
depending on your OS / windowing system, you actually have easy ways to quickly get greek letters out of your (non-greek) keyboard without having to copy-paste them:
my favorite way is to assign a key or key combination of your choice to act as so-called dead_greek modifier, and then just press that modifier before a latin letter key to get the corresponding greek letter. For example, under linux/xorg, if you wanted AltGr+g to be your dead_greek, you can use xmodmap to set it so:
alternative 1: assign a key as a direct modifier (not a dead key) and add key combination defs for that to generate the characters you want … alternative 2: switchable keyboard layouts
can't test it currently as the machine I have here doesn't run wayland but xorg, but iirc: the general idea of using a dead_greek modifier should also work on wayland, but assigning a key for it unfortunately cannot be done with the simple non-xkb legacy X11 keyboard layout tools like xmodmap that still work on xorg.
That being said, wayland did take over part of xkb (the less old keyboard system) from xorg, and so from what I can gather from a quick search, the easiest way to assign a key as dead_greek in wayland would probably be with a file in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/xkb/symbols/ like they do here for other key symbols: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/292868/how-to-custo...
I don't know any way to tell wayland to (re)load an xkb config on the fly (without logging out and back in) though. In particular, I doubt that setxkbmap would work for that like on xorg.
Dude, no. The sheet number of times I've seen candidates point blank lie to my face in a zoom is to high. Spend some time at the manager's side of the table in the interview process and you'll see this immediately. This is a major problem.
It's a major problem, but it's not new. I worked for a consulting firm (not one anyone here has heard of) and it was an issue with in-person candidates just the same as it is with virtual candidates now. It might be more prevalent now because it's marginally easier to pull it off, but that's about it.
It got to the point where we actually had a manager suggest taking a photo of candidates when they interviewed to confirm that the person coming in when they got hired was the same person.
This assumes I've never done any hiring... which I have done, massive amounts of.
You do get frauds. So what? It's always been the case. It hasn't appeared out of the blue this year, so why is there now an outcry about it? It hasn't increased one bit, all things considered. People have been running bait and switch scams since before the internet existed. Read up on penpal bride scams - you send a photo of a younger, more attractive sister or daughter and entrap a prospect. Or about "flattering portrait" matrimony scams - the same thing, but using paintings, since that was done in the middle ages, before photography.
So again, why is the narrative building being done?
Asking why "the narrative building" is happening presupposes it's some sort of coordinated thing, which I don't think it is. I agree that it's been going on since before widespread virtual work (I saw it first-hand almost immediately upon sitting on that side of the interview table). I don't agree that there's any sort of coordinated "narrative building" happening. You just have a bunch of junior managers or folks who have never hired before being shocked that people will try to make a lot of money by less than scrupulous means.
I don't believe in such closely occurring coincidences, which follow the exact same playbook. But even if (big if): why aren't these getting knocked off the FP for being re-runs?
Can I interest you in some protection... Err, 3 year service plan?