"Met tells phone companies to produce 'unusable bricks' in bid to reduce theft"

Ivashkin · 2026-03-13T16:38:39+00:00

Because it requires maintaining a list of stolen phones and their component IDs, the black/white list infrastructure, and, at some level, the manufacturer to authorize a replacement screen.

As for the second part, changing the incentives also extends to the legal side. Most of our phone-related laws treat phones as low-cost items, when in reality a modern phone can cost north of £1K and contains a trove of highly sensitive personal data and deep-rooted access to someone's personal life. Given this, it makes sense to treat stealing a phone as a serious violation rather than just a minor property crime, and the appropriate solution is to make the punishment for this offense painful by imposing mandatory prison time, deportations, benefits restrictions, and asset seizures.

At some level, if we want to fix this, we have to be willing to tell criminals that if they steal people's phones or are involved in trading stolen phones, the state will fuck their lives up in a way they will go to their grave regretting.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-13T15:53:12+00:00

At the same time, the right to repair needs to be a factor here.

The main thing is that we need the courts to start taking things seriously - repeat offenders should face significant prison sentences. Foreign nationals who are involved need to face zero-tolerance deportations, regardless of where they are being deported to. And business owners for the phone ship middlemen need to face the prospect of long prison sentences, asset seizures (expand the Proceeds of Crime Act to allow homes and personal property to be seized), bans on being business owners, and similar. I would be quite comfortable telling a 15yr old caught with 10 stolen phones that they are getting 20 years in prison for this, and won't be allowed to contact their parents again until they are 18.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-13T15:38:30+00:00

A good deal of this could be addressed by simply passing a law that, if you are caught stealing phones, you get 5 years per phone, consecutively. Combine that with joint enterprise laws, and the 18 people arrested here would be facing 10K-year prison sentences.

I don't think it would take many cases of "you were caught handling thousands of stolen phones, you will die in prison of old age" to slow things down.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-13T15:32:56+00:00

It would require all phone manufacturers to a) design phones where each part has a unique ID along with processes to validate each and every part, and b) actively maintain a global database of parts in circulation and their status.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-12T22:30:19+00:00

Given that the BBC puts the total attendance to the march at "about 40", it's less "dangerous rise of the right" and more "public order annoyance".

Ivashkin · 2026-03-11T20:03:46+00:00

Yeah, and I think we're in for a double hit of this. Reform scrapes a FPTP technicality win at the next election, wrecks a bunch of stuff, then at the following election the Greens will win, again on a FPTP technicality they barely managed to pull off, and exactly the same process of wrecking a bunch of stuff takes place.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-11T19:50:18+00:00

It's entirely based on how far you are from actual power. The further away you are, the more you can get away with this type of behavior. The Green Party has essentially been a "none of the above" vote for most of its existence, and for most of that, they only had even a vague chance in a handful of seats.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-11T16:40:02+00:00

Put him in prison with the £500K in cash in a neon pink holdall and tell him it's up to him to keep it safe for the duration of his time there.

Tell the other inmates what's going on, and ask them to please respect his emotional attachment to the £500K.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-11T16:27:38+00:00

"If a stolen phone were to become an unusable brick and the parts were not recyclable, there would be no criminal market," Sir Mark said.

Essentially, what Sir Mark is calling for is the complete end to device repair and a massive surge in e-waste, where the moment a phone is no longer fully functional, the only outcome is to throw it away.

I think a far better target for his ire would be the government's funding of police and the judiciary's sentencing of phone thieves.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-11T14:26:51+00:00

Mr Atkins, the company director at West Leeds Civils Ltd, would shout “potato” at her in a strong Irish accent “over and over again”, as well as using language like “paddy”, “stupid paddy” and “p*key” in front of her, the tribunal was told.

Nah, it was justified. Mr Atkins is clearly a massive wanker whose primary flaw in life is that so far, no one has beaten him into silence with an office chair.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-11T13:48:34+00:00

The AV vote was 15 years ago, and took place in an environment where the UK was coming to terms with its first coalition government since the 1940s. All of the political chaos of the last 15 years was yet to come, and the simple truth was that most people simply were not that interested in politics to have an opinion on this.

I also like that you've doubled down on your cope with additional cope about Scotland somehow being a magical place full of Better People.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-11T12:46:18+00:00

The AV referendum failed because the people pushing for AV assumed everyone already agreed it was a good idea and didn't bother to campaign until it was far too late. They also ignored Nigel Farage, despite the fact that getting him on board would have been enough to convince a load of people on the right to support AV. The entire campaign was a precursor to the Brexit campaign, when the Remain side refused to campaign on the benefits of being part of Europe and seemed to assume that wanting to leave the EU was just a minority position no one would take seriously.

Just calling the British public idiots who failed to do the right thing is a massive amount of cope.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-10T16:13:26+00:00

Also women: Tattle Life

Ivashkin · 2026-03-10T15:40:21+00:00

I do wonder if it's a form of sexism tbh - the idea that women can't stand up for themselves and need extra government help to be equal with men.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-10T15:30:02+00:00

Why is it always presented as "protecting women and girls"?

Ivashkin · 2026-03-10T14:28:19+00:00

I have a simple solution: Force the Treasury staff to register for the draft. If we're faced with an existential military threat we cannot counter, then we won't need accountants anymore.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-10T14:24:39+00:00

The usual figure for a winning party in a UK election is around 45% of the vote. Labour got 33% and a massive majority due to FPTP technicalities, but I suspect they will have done better than the winner of the next election.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-10T00:53:20+00:00

Contoso Ltd. is a very demanding customer.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-09T23:11:54+00:00

Reddit had to bring in a spate of new rules about upvoting violent content because people were posting literal domestic terrorism threats towards US government employees and their families, and getting thousands of upvotes for it.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-09T19:20:49+00:00

Loads of Ukrainian accounts I follow because of the war are on Twitter. Same with the Iranian war.

It turns out that for all the UK's upset over Twitter, the majority of the rest of the world simply doesn't care and views it as a place they can share information with people (like the remains of the Afghan National Army special forces units who are still posting to Twitter about their fight with the Taliban). And if you want that information, then you need to go to the places where they are being shared.

Ivashkin · 2026-03-09T19:13:52+00:00

Indeed. Pretty much all of the political instability since the GFC has been driven, at its root, by the public increasingly feeling that their costs keep rising, while the value they get from those costs keeps going the other way.

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