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Iowa City officer develops software to find stolen Wi-Fi-enabled devices

• nicholasjarnold 11y ago
  While I do give kudos to this guy for stepping outside of his comfort zone and making a product, I have to say that for a device meant to help solve 'high level crimes' it's a complete fail. It's trivially easy to disable the WiFi radio on both Android and iOS devices. Additionally, with a little more work, it's possible to also cause the kernel to report a different MAC address than the one assigned to the radio during manufacture. Am I missing something here?
  • x0ry 11y ago
    Yes. Criminals are dumb, and while you wouldn't catch them all, you could certainly use it to catch some.
• itsdrewmiller 11y ago
  Sad: "[The officer] said he applied that concept to his product, which was designed by a developer he worked with." I thought they had a programming cop. That would be sweet.
• e28eta 11y ago
  I wonder if the survey sent to the other law enforcement agencies mentions remote surveillance of suspects. It's a pretty small leap from "finding stolen phones" to "finding any phone". On the other hand, I really like the idea of a LoJack for cell phones, and they've got a nice entrepreneurial story written about the guy, so good for him. Do stingrays already spoof wifi networks? Should be pretty easy to come up with a wifi network that the target phone will join, and then you get to snoop Internet traffic along with cellular.