Monday 24 August 2009

Found iPhone

UPDATE: Specified the name of the person who called: Chuck
SUMMARY: my uncles found an iPhone and are willing to give it back.
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My uncles and cousins have just returned from a trip around the Mediterranean. Their last visit was Venice (yeah, the real one, the one in Italy). Their highlight of their visit there, was not the Ponto Rialto, or the Gondole, no no no the highlight of their stay there was that they foun an iPhone laying on a Vaporetto.

The Vaporetto is the Venice's public metro-boat network.

According to their story, it was just laying there, forgotten. So they looked around, did some quick questioning and didn't find the owner. They had a family reunion and discussed what to do with it. There were several options:
  • give it to the Vaporetto driver --> hmmm not reliable
  • keep it for themselves --> hmmm not ethical
  • try to find the owner --> difficult but not impossible! Sounds like an interesting challenge!
The first thing to do was to keep it ON as long as possible so the owner could call it. Surprisingly, nobody called in a long while and when finally someone called, they didn't let it ring long enough for my cousin to answer the phone. But he got the caller ID: Chuck Something.

Ok, new family decision! Shall they try to contact that person who called? That required passing the main terminal lock to check the contact list! The iPhone includes a timout lock that requests a 4 digit code. 10.000 combinations. But my uncles and cousins were on holidays and didn't think on probability, security measures, and this stuff so they tried a brute-force attack combined with some social engineering:
  • 0704
  • 1234
  • etc...
Obviously, they didn't find the unlocking combination. But they did find out that iPhone will block for some minutes after some failures. And then for an hour after some more failures. And then just block. (sarcasm) Now that was a good call (/sarcasm).

At that point the fimally's will to find the owner was beginning to break. A member was reconsidering his position to locate the owner and was beginning to feel the greed... "New phone. Nice!". But democrady has it and so they voted again and stuck to the original plan.

Since the terminal had blocked and the SIM didn't seem accesible anymore they decided to bring it back to Spain with them with the hope that "The cousin will know what to do.".

That's were I come into action. I'm the cousin of a family who was on holiday's in the Mediterranean and found an iPhone in a Vaporetto and is willing to locate the owner to send it back.

We know it's and AT&T user (probably US ;-) ), that has a contact in it's agenda with a certain name (we're not disclosing it for the moment) and we were also able to find the IMEI and the ICCID. So, if you lost an iPhone in Venice on the 22nd august (probably) during 18'30 and 19'00 send us an e-mail (found.iphone.in.venice AT gmail.com) and we'll post it back to you more than gladly.