The Die Phone

Smartphones have become indispensable, but they’ve also become thief magnets, to the point that 40 percent of the robberies in major cities involve stolen smartphones.

And NY District Attorney Eric Schneiderman has had it.

“Our message is very simple to the folks in the industry. Work with us to solve this problem. Work with us to make it a pointless endeavor to assault someone and steal their smartphone. We can do that by making them useless for resale,” says Schniederman.

He, and some of his fellow DA’s are giving the industry until the end of the year to equip all smartphones will a kill program that would turn them into dead chunks of metal when they’re stolen.

Apple just announced an “activation lock” the requires a password to reactivate a stolen phone, but San Francisco DA George Gascon says not good enough – because that means the phone might still be salvageable.

“The industry has a moral and has a social obligation to fix this problem. This is an industry that has a tremendous capacity to innovate and they have an obligation to do this now,” says Gason.

Yes it would be so satisfying so see the phone thieves get a nasty surprise.

Maybe program the lithium battery to catch fire – which shouldn’t be too hard, come to think of it, I would only caution that under Murphy’s Law – which states that whatever can go wrong, will – the day will come when a foreign government will figure out the kill code and broadcast it to every cell phone, stolen or not, collapsing our economy.

But on the plus side, your car wouldn’t veer into oncoming traffic as often, and your buttocks would stop vibrating.