
Iowa City officer develops software to find stolen Wi-Fi-enabled devices - cgtyoder
http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/public-safety/iowa-city-officer-develops-software-to-find-stolen-wi-fi-enabled-devices-20150907
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e28eta
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.

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nicholasjarnold
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?

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x0ry
Yes. Criminals are dumb, and while you wouldn't catch them all, you could
certainly use it to catch some.

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itsdrewmiller
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.

