Police warn of bad Apples that fell off the back of a truck after highway robbery Northamptonshire Police in the UK have warned locals to be on the lookout for suspiciously well-priced Apple products after a literal highway robbery saw 48 pallets loaded with Cupertino kit stolen. "The incident took place on the southbound slip road at Junction 18 of the M1, between 7.45pm and 8pm on Tuesday, November 10, …
I think most people know by now not to buy iPhones from some guy selling them out of his trunk, because they won't work when you try to activate them. Activation lock solved that problem years ago, so now the crooks mostly don't even try but break them up for parts instead.
That's why Apple has been making it harder to swap parts between phones. They've said they want to eliminate theft of iPhones by making stolen phones "worthless" to thieves (though they're probably thinking more about phones stolen from their owners, not off trucks)
Of course this has the side of effect of making it so small time repair shops can't swap parts between phones. Hopefully they can find a middle ground that makes stolen phones worthless as parts while still providing a way for repair shops to swap parts out of legitimately obtained iPhones.
I guess it depends. iPhones: yes probably. Macs? Less certain. Monitors, peripheral? Probably not.
Besides none if that matters to the robbers if they can offload it, it'll be the people who buy it who'll find out the hard way. And it won't necessarily be sold off piecemeal in pubs, etc - they're closed at the moment. I'm not sure buying second hand items off eBay is going to be a good idea at the moment.
Apple recently paid a huge bug bounty to some enterprising youngs hackers for, amongst other things, poor authentication security on the Dassault software that Apple use for managing warehouses and logistics. Naturally they informed Apple and only disclosed their work after Apple's security team gave them the nod.
So yeah, could be inside job. Could be patient thieves staking out area and discerning patterns. Could be a security hole in logistics.
ERP compromise perhaps
I think the feeling is, it’s not so much about if and when a company gets hacked, but if and when they actually get around to discovering they’ve been hacked.
Not a lot of cash available for those operations according to the decision makers of a lot of conpanies.
To add onto this dilemma, anybody going to school in the UK may discover their IT lessons to be a “bit shit”
IT, a janitorial role in the eyes of the many “adults” upstairs
Apple knows the serial numbers of all the phones they've built, and the serial numbers / barcodes or whatever for each pallet they ship. They have to rely on the buyer to manage their own inventory and know pallets X, Y and Z were on that particular truck. If they just throw pallets in the truck willy nilly without scanning them then Apple won't have any way to disable those phones.
But considering how much each pallet would be worth, what are the odds that a company wouldn't take a few seconds to scan in each of the 28 pallets as they were loaded onto the truck? It isn't like the technology to track inventory isn't readily available. So probably safe to say that Apple knows exactly which phones have gone missing, and they will be bricked the minute they are first connected to a network and can access Apple's servers.
Only if you are dumb enough to buy a brand new iPhone out of some guy's trunk, or dumb enough to buy from some small shop whose owner is shady enough to buy some iPhones that he will absolutely know are stolen.
Not sure what Apple would do in the latter case. If they are smart they'd say "we'll exchange your phone for a new one in exchange for your proof of purchase from the shady shop" that they can use to help the police go after the shop owner and put pressure on him to give up the guy who sold him the phones, and hope it leads back to the thieves.
Not sure if logging into iCloud would, but accessing Apple's activation servers (which is a required step in the setup of a new iPhone even if like me you don't use iCloud) will, that's how activation lock functions.
I don't use Macs so I can't say for sure but I would assume they have something similar - not necessarily "activation" since they don't use the cell network but there's probably some "check if I'm legit" process when you are setting up a Mac up from scratch.
It probably gets that information every time a phone/Mac checks for updates from Apple's servers. Otherwise how could a stolen item ever be located, if there isn't some way they are making their ID known to Apple? If the server says "hey you're listed as stolen" it can provide whatever information it has about its location. Easy with a phone thanks to GPS, a bit harder with a Mac since you'd have to use IP geolocation and hope it is at least somewhat accurate.
"I don't use Macs so I can't say for sure but I would assume they have something similar - not necessarily "activation" since they don't use the cell network but there's probably some "check if I'm legit" process when you are setting up a Mac up from scratch."
I'm not sure that's actually the case for Macs - the instance of MAC OS (Catalina, IIRC) that I run under KVM on my Linux/Win10 laptop doesn't seem to have any issues and it certainly logs on to Apple's servers and picks up updates from there. It could be, of course, that the install process inserted a MAC address in KVM that was already recognised by Apple as a legit one of theirs.
parts cant be cloud locked
Sure they can. If Apple builds iPhone serial number I0001 with display serial number D0001 and mainboard serial number M0001 then when iPhone I0001 checks in, Apple knows it is using display D0001 and mainboard M0001.
If they restrict it so you can't put display D0002 into iPhone I0001 without having that part swap properly recorded on Apple's servers, then that prevents iPhone I0002 from being stolen and split up for parts and display D0002 being used to replace broken display D0001 in iPhone I0001. That prevents shady repair shops from buying stolen phones to use for repairs thus reducing the value of stolen iPhones on the black market, but as a side effect it also prevents legit repair shops from buying legit phones and using them as a source of parts.
It's difficult to know nowadays who is stealing from whom, the way these multi-nationals operate with Apple's 30% take of iOS Apps, the massive mark-ups on memory/ssd storage options, the deliberate obsolescence of Macs like the extremely capable 2013 iMac 27'' (and in 4 years, all Intel based macs), and the soldered NAND chips forming the SSD, so the product has a deliberate limited design life right out the box, with Apple have pretty much a monopoly on repairs.
Can't say I have any feeling of a sense of loss for Apple, because the cost of this will be put squarely at the feet of the logistics company and the poor bastard that was driving the vehicle. I very much doubt anyone at Apple will take any responsibility.
And if you look at this in the cold light of day, 'the positives' if all goes well, the main benefactor should be the consumer in terms of obtaining genuine Apple spares via non-official sources. Yes, screens and logic boards will be in the most part, worthless, but a supply of genuine Apple NAND chips to replace the built-in obsolescence of the ones soldered to the board, means maybe, a defunct Apple product might one day get a new lease of life from this heist and the cost of replacing the glass back of an iPhone with a genuine part, might actually be possible by a third party.
Conversely, the inability of thieves to make easy use of stolen iPhones is one of the reasons that people aren't inconvenienced by thieves snatching their phones as often these days. You could have the Landrover Defender model where easily interchangable parts have left legitimate vehicle owners with panels missing because some sod has nicked them in the night.
Whatever. You rather undermine the moral arguments for Right to Repair by equating existing practise with actual theft and assault.
And another thing, the logistics company's insurance premiums are part of their known operations expenditure passed on to their client, and ultimately the consumer. That's the whole point of insurance, to turn an infrequent big expense in to an expected small expense.
What? Stolen goods is somehow a net-positive to the consumer, and so receiving/handling stolen goods shouldn't be a crime, as long as those goods are Apple parts?
Nobody likes planned obsolesence and vendor lock-in, but tacitly encouraging shipment hijacking is really not the way to solve those issues.
I must admit, when I heard the news report on BBC Radio 4, I was mystified why national news was reporting the heist of fruit. Then it struck me when it was reported to be such a high value, I tried to think of what kind of processed apples (apple products) could get to such values, and came to the conclusion that it could only be vintage Calvados.
Doh!
You've given me all the excuse I need to post this Ronnie Corbett sketch. A classic. How he & Harry Enfield managed to keep their faces (mostly) straight I'll never know.
Many years ago, where I worked had a brand new mobile, still sealed in the box, "relocated" from the managers desk while out of hours.
There was no cameras and the RFID card readers on the doors just showed the usual staff for that time of night.
As it was some time in December, someone thought they had got their significant other / favourite child and early (and free) Xmas present.
The IT manager organised for the phone IMEI to be blocked at 14:00 on Xmas day...just as the user would be doing some setup.
Back when UseNet (well, many a comp.* group) was awaiting news that the first Pentiums (Pentia?) had shipped. Came the message (roughly):
Depends how you define "Shipped". The first load of packaged parts was hijacked on its way from the assembly plant to the airport.
(Yes, I could be mistaken about the exact hotly-anticipated new x86 processor. Corrections welcomed)
I suspect when $10 million of iPhones or $10 million of Intel CPUs are shipped on a truck, that truck probably has a lot less armor and security than $10 million in cash or gold would have. So it makes sense that you read about these sort of thefts more often than someone making off with $10 million from an armored car.
A friend of mine who died some years ago used to related an experience he had....
After he left the US Air Force, one of the jobs he had for a while was as a bank guard. One day he was called into a room where two sets of bankers were transferring bearer bonds from one group to the other. Bearer bonds, for those unfamiliar, are bank bonds made out to "Bearer". They are, for all intents and purposes, cash. My friend said that what went through his mind was, "There is $8.5 million on that table and I am the only person in the room with a gun."
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