iMessage Bug Sends Texts to Stolen iPhones

It's a feature to be able to tell the thief pleasantries from time to time.

It sends text, picture, and video messages over Apple's servers instead of via the carrier's SMS service.

Very often it fails to send pictures.. and I end up having to wait a while or e-mail them

To a American or Canadian ear, "burgled" sounds like something made-up through a bit of whimsical word-play.

The key difference with your example is that "robber", the noun, is derived from "rob", the verb. (Yes, it's an historical thing.)

With "burglar", the noun came first -- it's not derived from "burgle"; rather, "burgle" is a back-formation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation) based upon it.

But back-formations are much more the exception than the norm when it comes to deriving verbs from English nouns. The more customary way to derive a verb is to add -ize (or -ise) to the end. Thus, "burglarize".

What's interesting is how, when American and British English really started to diverge, "burglar" was a part of the lexicon but a verb form of the word was not. The route each took in doing so is perfectly legitimate -- neither inherently more "right" than the other -- but a century later, the alternate word from the other side of the pond seems silly, for both sides.

Of course, one can question the necessity of any verb form, given lots of alternate words like rob, stole, broke into, etc. Off the top of my head, I'd say burglarize / burgle are more specific in their connotation, used normally in the passive voice, to refer to the specific act of person(s) entering a building (typically a domicile), in secret and without permission, and stealing items from within.

Ex:
"I was robbed" versus "I was burglarized". In the absence of any other context, the latter paints more detailed picture -- we can safely assume several more details about how and where the theft occurred from "burglarized" than we could from "robbed".

What the hell.

That can't be true.. I have done this with a few different phones. Replaced the sim card with another and sent a message, it was delivered with that number. Using iMessage. It could be, maybe that it gets remote wiped. Did they try a Restore...???

Restore what? They don't have the iphone, it's stolen remember? This is a fact and I was a victim of this back in October. Unless the person with the stolen iphone puts a new sim card on the phone and uses it or he restores it, there's nothing you can do unless you change your phone number. Simple as that.

If verified that this is a bug then it is something that needs to be fixed. But on the other hand it could be something that could come in handy. Think about it....your iphone is lost or stolen and someone wipes it or replaces the SIM so they can use it. But you are still able to send an iMessage to it. How cool would that actually be if that could actually lead to the phone being returned to you.

The new owner gets to see every iMessage I send/receive. That may result in an occaional returned phone, but the rest of the time it is a huge privacy risk. It could go on forever. Every single iMessage you send/receive will be visible to the thief.
I have been following this issue for a while, and there have been lots of threads about this happening. In some cases users were getting sexually explicit messages from random people.
Apple needs to resolve this problem.

I guess it makes sense to assume that any person could be identified by N number of UDIDs on the server side of iMessage. (My iPhone, my iPad, my iPod Touch, etc -- that's three right there!)

But for this to be a permanent linkage is clearly a design flaw/oversight. The remote wipe should have nuked the UDID from iMessage's server-side database (or where ever the hell it's stored).

May Steve Jobs rest in peace.

With or without Jobs, Apple has never done "services" right. iMessage is just another poor attempt. Why even even bother? Why would I switch to iMessage when Google Voice does texting to anyone, for free - on the iPhone? iChat, Facetime, iMessage...c'mon Apple. Just integrate the whole thing and make it compelling! Give us a reason to use it!

Stick to OSes, Apps, and hardware. Leave services to the companies that do them well (Google, Dropbox, etc.) and free.

This is NOT just stolen phones.

I recently upgraded to a HTC Titan from a iPhone 4 last week. I did the upgrade through the AT&T .01 WP7 sale. I activated the Titan and when I did that, EVERYONE who still has an iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch who has ever sent me a text message before the switch, they are still going to my iPhone because of iMessaging. The iPhone has no service and no sim card installed. It is only on wi-fi and all of the texts go to it still.

I can send someone a SMS from my Titan and their response goes to my iPhone. It is super annoying and no one knows how to fix it.

IMO this is complete ******** really and it needs to be fixed. Currently I am a slave to this iPhone now :/

Whats really sad is that 99.9% of the cellphone users that have an iPhone stolen doesn't know that the stollen phone is put back on the network, activated and is being used by someone else (ATT and Apple are making money off of your stollen phone) This happened to me, I filed a police report and spoke to Apple and ATT both and was told that the stollen iPhone
Was Not put on the Blacklist so it could not be used on the network anymore. The detective said that they could easily idetify if the the phone was back on the network from its imei#, but that they could not do so unless there was an investigation and that the iPhone could be used to solve a more serious crime. It seems that what ATT and Apple are allowing to happen is definatly a crime.
I even had an person at ATT tell me that when she first went to work for ATT that in one of her first staff meetings this stolen phone blacklist was brought up and they were told that this blacklist is no longer used. She has worked in other cell companys for years and the blacklist was always used to keep stollen phones from ever being used on the network again.What I think is Really insane is that when anyone activates an iPhone on iTunes or a person does this in the store, why doesn't ATT or Apples system see the
imei# as stollen and stop it from being used. I will tell you why more$$$$

Sad Stuff


This is from Wiki site

The IMEI number is used by the GSM network to identify valid devices and therefore can be used for stopping a stolen phone from accessing the network in that country. For example, if a mobile phone is stolen, the owner can call his or her network provider and instruct them to "blacklist" the phone using its IMEI number. This renders the phone useless on that network and sometimes other networks too, whether or not the phone's SIM is changed.

I've always wondered something about "Remote Wipe". Can thieves who obtain a remotely wiped iPhone re-sync it and have a fully working iPhone? Because surely it just becomes a factory restored iPhone?

Would love an answer.

I'd also like to know if you can keep requesting a remote wipe - ie. keep erasing the stolen phone over and over again to cause maximum inconvenience for the undeserving new 'owner'.