Apple's ex-cop and the case of the lost iPhone 5
Prototypegate II continues...
Update Update: This story has been updated to reflect that the SFPD has apparently changed its story about the iPhone 5 search.
The San Francisco Police Department has told a local paper that plainclothes police accompanied two Apple security officials to the home of a local man in search of a lost iPhone 5 prototype.
According to SF Weekly, San Francisco resident Sergio Calderón said he was visited by six people claiming to be police looking for an unnamed phone they tracked to his home via GPS, and the paper identified one of the six was an Apple "senior investigator".
San Francisco police originally told SF Weekly that they had no record of such a visit, but according to the paper, the police department has now reversed its stance, saying that the plainclothes police stayed outside the home while the Apple employees searched it.
When contacted for comment, a San Francisco Police representative said that our message would be given to Lt. Troy Dangerfield, who is cited in the SF Weekly story. He has yet to return our call.
Responding to earlier reports that Apple had tried to track down a lost iPhone prototype, Calderón told SF Weekly that in July, he was visited by six people – four men and two women – who wore badges and said they were San Francisco police officers. The six searched his home for the unnamed device and offered him $300 for it, but he told them he did not have it.
One of the six visitors, SF Weekly says, then gave Calderón his phone number and asked that he call if he had additional information about the lost phone. This week, Calderón gave the phone number to SF Weekly, and when the publication called the number, the phone was answered by a man named Anthony Colon, who confirmed he was an Apple employee.
A LinkedIn profile – which has since been removed from the web – listed Anthony Colon as a former San Jose, California, police sergeant and a "senior investigator" at Apple. A copy of the profile is available here.
The Register has spoken to Calderón's uncle, who said that there were three members of the household present during the search for the lost prototype and that none of them would be home until later Friday afternoon. The uncle said he was not present for most of the search.
Earlier this week, CNet reported that an iPhone prototype was lost in a San Francisco bar in July and that Apple security personnel worked to recover the device over the next few days. Citing a source familiar with the investigation, CNet said that San Francisco police officers and Apple employees tracked the phone to the home of a man in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood – where Calderón lives – but that they were not able to find it there.
This is apparently the second iPhone prototype Apple has lost over the past year and change. In 2010, an Apple employee named Gray Powell left an iPhone 4 prototype in a bar in Redwood City, California, and photos of the phone wound up on Gawker Media's Gizmodo blog. San Mateo County prosecutors searched the home of Gizmodo editor Brian Chen, but did not press charges against him or Gizmodo. Last month, however, prosecutors did file misdemeanor charges against two men who allegedly sold the prototype to Gizmodo. The two pleaded not guilty on Thursday.
According to SF Weekly, Sergio Calderón said that the six people who searched his house did not identify themselves as working for Apple or say that the device they were looking for was an iPhone 5 prototype. "They said, 'Hey, Sergio, we're from the San Francisco Police Department,'" he told SF Weekly. They did ask, he said, if he had recently been to Cava 22, the San Francisco bar where CNet says the iPhone 5 was lost.
According to SF Weekly, Calderón also said that his family members were "threatened" by the visitors. "One of the officers is like, 'Is everyone in this house an American citizen?' They said we were all going to get into trouble,'" he told the publication. He also said that he is a US citizen and that all the family members in his house are in the US legally.
After the SFPD apparently changed its story, Calderon told SF Weekly that four of the visitors did indeed stay outside his home. But he maintained the no one identified themselves as an Apple employee. ®
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
COMMENTS
And you are part of the problem
While you are willing to keep giving them your cash Apple will carry on with business as normal.
This includes stealing the work of others and passing it off as your own.
Filing multiple frivolous lawsuits just to delay a competitors product getting to market.
Blame other companies for their fuckups (blaming Microsoft when They shipped ipods containing a worm as just one example)
Ignoring European laws about the length of a warranty (3 years) and refusing to fix a faulty product as you didn't buy Applecare.
Ignoring EU law again by releasing battery powered devices which you cannot change the battery yourself. (why they haven't been battered in the courts I don't know, if it was any other company they would have been dragged over the coals by now)
Deliberatly restricting what a device can do, just to introduce a 'feature' in the next release so idiots like yourself rush out to buy it instead of asking why it wasn't there from day one.
Lying to their customers when a fault is found with a product and spending more on PR for damaged limitation rather than fixing the problem.
Attempt to sneak software onto peoples computers in order to make it look like market share had grown. (Itunes installing safari without asking)
Not allowing apps that directly compete with Apples own offerings because they 'duplicate functionality'. So what? If I want to have different apps that do the same or similar things that should be up to me. Apples stance is just blatently anti-competitive.
The attempt to impose American bible-belt 'morality' on everyone.
Terrorising journalists and threatening their career because they dared release information about a product before the marketing department (look up Jason O'Grady).
Terrify employees with a personal police force with regard to any leak to such an extent that they have even committed suicide. This started in China and it looks to have spread to the SFPD. No corporation should have a police force in its pocket. Be afraid, very afraid.
I could go on but point made. While Apple have such blind willing fans such as yourself they will never change. I don't buy Apple so you could say it doesn't affect me and you would be wrong. If a newspaper for example wants to sell through the App store they have to give Apple 30% fair enough apple can charge what they like. But they go one step further and ban that newspaper from selling a subscription cheaper elsewhere so they raise their prices. Even if I buy a subscription through the newspapers website I am paying a higher rate than I needed to as they are forbidden from selling it any cheaper by Apple. The more Apple get away with it, the more other companies look and think if they can get away with it, so can we. As a result expect technology to move backwards as individual companies use underhand tactics to lock you into their products and keep you there making it incredibly difficult to move to another supplier. As technology moves forward everything should be becoming more compatible with everything else, not less. We are heading back to the 80's were you had to pick a platform and stick with it as it was incompatible with everything else. IBM PC vs Amstrad, Amiga vs Atari ST etc. This is a huge step backwards and is a very bad thing.
Best Option of all is
Never, under any circumstances get an iPhone. They are fashion accessories, not primarily pieces of technology. Yes, they do smartphone things, but that is not what they are for. The great thing about Android is that it is sold as a (hopefully) reasonably priced smartphone the first purpose of which is to be a smartphone that can do stuff.
So my smartphone can't run iTunes? It can run Android marketplace and Amazons too if I want.
I can't run FaceTime? I can run Skype which has a bigger audience of phones and computers.
It hasn't got the iPhone slick interface? That is nothing special, just very well hyped.
I have never felt the need to hack my Android - I might when I get my new contract in a couple of months. I may fiddle with the old one to see what I have been missing but I have been able to do all that I wanted with it until now. I even managed to duplicate the Iphone connectivity experience by going into a lift while talking on the phone. Once the metal doors closed and we went down, it dropped the call - just like an Apple phone!
Even if SFPD were present and did not enter the home
The people from Apple who spoke to the perp claimed to be SFPD but were not SFPD.
Can I, as a regular Joe here in London, walk around claiming to be Met Police because there's some wooden top standing behind me? No.
So still looks like Apple are going around claiming to be SFPD, which is apparently a crime. I won't hold my breath waiting for the charges to be brought against the fruit company, however.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
