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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Why can't we come up with a solution for this?

Remotely brick the device in EFI, so it's completely and utterly useless without taking it to an Apple store, maybe even to swap it for an entirely new machine once you verify ownership.

Obviously this will just cause the thief (or person who bought the stolen goods) to discard the machine - so why not offer an incentive?

When the machine boots, show a message from EFI - 'take this device to any Apple store for a $200 reward', or some such.

(Obviously there are some kinks to work out, but surely we can think of something)

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You guys are all so nice. My first thought was to gather as much personal information from these people as possible and then blackmail them into returning my notebook to me. This obviously only works when the stolen property is in a country like Iran; I doubt that you could get away with this in the US.

That said, I agree with earlier posters that this is probably a b.s. story made up for SEO purposes.

I'm using Undercover and it actually has a mode like this, it's called Plan B, and when activated it shows a simulated screen with an error as if something went wrong. What happens next is uncertain though, supposedly the owner should bring it to an Apple Store and they should detect it was stolen.

I think Apple's stance has always been that they don't want to get involved in device retrieval unfortunately.

why would they? they'd lose sales of products that would replace stolen ones

If they know the device is stolen and don't cooperate with legal authorities, aren't they as criminally liable as a private individual who buys a stolen device and doesn't care about it?

while (1) { Steal a macbook, pocket $200. }

Unfortunately for the user the 'pocket $200' API has undocumented behaviour that lands him in jail.

But if you throw someone in jail when they give it back, then there's still no incentive to return it. You could arrest someone who repeatedly returned laptops, but that just makes the loop condition 'for person in friends + family'.

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