Carnegie Mellon student robbed, uses iPhone to track down culprits
thetartan.org
thetartan.org
Weird that this came up again; this happened in August and there was a really crazy media frenzy at the time which mostly died down (although I do get a few random emails time to time).
And yeah, I do work for The Tartan.
I used to edit The Tartan.
Many times, the law isn't concerned with what you did but why you did it. I could shoot someone in the middle of the street in front of 200 people, however he might have just tried to sink me with a knife to get my wallet. It's the jury's job to decide whether I'm guilty on all the evidence, not on what a newspaper publishes.
This is why in Crown countries the government frequently has the ability to put a press-embargo on a case until after conviction.
(Note: I really despise the use of the word "actors" in the article, though. It's less wordy than "alleged theives" or whatever, but it could also have been omitted entirely. "The two actors" ---> "The two" etc.)
You can say "in my opinion, A is a murderer" -- but the only time you should be making a statement of fact on A's guilt is after it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
To do otherwise is to dishonestly masquerade your opinion as fact and to expose yourself to a nice fat libel lawsuit along the way.
Apperantly, as he told me, the police contacted apple which gave them the exact position of the mobile phone through the build in gps device, so the police could just pick it up.
If you use Mobile Me and register your iphone with it you can track your iphone as well as make it play a noise for 2 minutes and show an alert.
As someone who recently had to replace an iPhone at full price (unwilling to sign up for another two years on AT&T's horrible service in SF). I recommend looking into using this _before_ you lose/have stolen your iPhone.
It only worked when connected to an interweb, of course.