But New York’s senior senator Chuck Schumer thinks your carrier should do more than just suspend service when a phone’s been swiped.

Schumer wants carriers to disable the phone so it can never be used again.

Sound like a deterrent to theft?

He thinks it would be. The technology exists to do exactly what Schumer wants. And it’s used in other countries.

But most U.S. carriers don’t bother. They’re interested in your service, not your phone. And they likely wouldn’t mind selling you a new unit — at the high price of a new phone for an account that’s not eligible for an upgrade.

Schumer thinks that’s bogus. And with the theft statistics on cellphones showing a near-epidemic of phone theft, it’s probably a useful idea to take some steps to curb the problem.

In fact, 41% of all theft reports in New York City involve a cellphone. The savings in police time alone would be worth taking some kind of action to discourage the crime.

Most companies only disconnect a stolen phone’s SIM card, which protects a customer’s information but does nothing to prevent the stolen phone from being retooled and resold.

“Deactivate the phone so it is no longer valuable on the black market – like a car without a motor,” Schumer said as he held up an iPhone.

“Bricking” a cellphone would make the unit a whole lot less attractive to the folks who trade in stolen phones.

The post Senator wants stolen cellphones ‘bricked’ appeared first on Finance Tech News.

Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, said Thursday he’ll put a hold on the legislation unless changes are made.

The move essentially kills the bill until the next session, when Wyden could also put a hold on it to force changes.

As it is now, the bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to go after expedited court orders that would make U.S. domain-name registrars shut down domestic websites suspected of hosting copyright infringing materials.

The legislation would also allow the DOJ, through court orders, to order U.S. ISPs to redirect customer traffic away from infringing foreign websites.

Wyden believes the law would give businesses and government too much power to shut down sites that have content they don’t like. Advocates of the legislation believe something has to be done to put some curbs on intellectual property theft.

Who’s right? Depends on who you talk to.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce supports the legislation; Computer and Communications Industry Association, a tech trade group, opposes it in its current form, as do many free speech advocates.

The post Senator stands alone against website shutdown bill appeared first on Finance Tech News.

The campaign of former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) learned this lesson the hard way recently after proclaiming that all the data on their contributors was locked down and secure.

It wasn’t. To prove the point, whistle-blower site Wikileaks.org published personal info on more than 51,000 donors and supporters of Sen. Coleman it says were leaked because his campaign Web site was not properly secured.

The info included the names, street addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and, in the case of 4,721 individuals, the last four digits of their credit card numbers.

In a statement on its site, Wikileaks said it was publishing the information to substantiate rumors that sensitive information belonging to thousands of Coleman’s supporters had been floating around the Internet since Jan. 28 “as a result of sloppy handling by the campaign.”

Wikileaks owners also wrote: “Senator Coleman collected detailed information on every supporter and website visitor and retained unencrypted credit card information from donors, including their security codes. Although made aware of the leak in January, Senator Coleman kept the breach secret, failing to inform contributors, in violation of Minnesota Statute 325E.61.”

According to media reports, technology consultant and blogger, Adria Richards, stumbled on the problem when looking into reports in January about Coleman’s campaign’s site crashing because of heavy traffic. In her attempts to figure out the problem, Richards said she entered the IP address for Coleman’s Web site into her browser, and the Web site’s directories were immediately exposed in plain text.

She says she found the database while “tooling around” the listing of exposed Web directories on Coleman’s site.

Richards insists the problem was the result of the Web server not being “told to restrict directories from the Web.” She says she didn’t download any of the files, though she said she posted screen shots of the directory listings on two other blogs.

The post The campaign that protested too much appeared first on Finance Tech News.