To the person who stole my phone last night
joethepeacock.blogspot.com.au
joethepeacock.blogspot.com.au
a) He owns a top-of-the-line phone, yet complains about being poor.
b) He owns a phone that makes it trivially easy maintain backups in the cloud, and yet didn't think that his livelihood was worth backing up.
c) There's no real point to this post, yet it was published and submitted to HN.
d) He attempts to egocentrically link this post to his own humility.
Nobody deserves to have their property stolen, and it sounds like Peacock is in a particularly tight bind, but this is hardly enlightening journalism or something "that good hackers would find interesting".
Came here to make this exact point. Not to kick someone who's already down, but for god's sake people: If you do not do backups, your data is ephemeral.
There's only so many times one can hear sob stories about people losing all their un-backed-up data, especially from people who should know better, before one stops feeling all that sorry. Don't complain to me if you roll the dice and lose.
There are times to be critical and there are scientific studies that deserve to be nitpicked, but the story of a man learning to forgive despite being taken advantage of during a time of extreme hardship is not one of them.
There's more to life than bits and bytes; there's humanity, which is what we are really all building things for anyway.
And that is predicated upon the idea that somehow engaging with bits and bytes can be detached from the emotional, political, cultural, and historical.
Sure, the cops might not track down someone who stole a $600 phone( which is a little absurd), and maybe some people steal them for parts. But most people intend to sell them for use. We can make them useless in the US,Canada, and Western Europe trivially.
If I can remotely wipe my phone, it won't be hard to also brick it, remotely.
Leave the carriers alone, those incompetent jacks
I get the author is venting his frustrations at this. I know the feeling. It's a combination of infuriated and helpless, and that's just from having property that wasn't MINE stolen, let alone my own property. My sympathies there, btw. However I would like to know why the thief wasn't caught.