December 25, 2013
Alva Review-Courier/Newsgram
Page 8
Lynn Says
Find a cell phone? Do the owner a favor! Take it to the police station By Lynn L. Martin Marione was making a routine visit to see the accident reports at the Alva Police Station. During that visit, she mentioned that I couldn’t find my iPhone5. Kathy Schwerdtfeger said, “Oh, we have a collection of found cell phones! When people find them they sometimes bring them here.” They looked through the collection and there wasn’t anything as modern as an iPhone5. She told the story of one phone where the owner had taken precaution to install a piece of security software. When the police powered up the phone, it displayed a message, “This is a stolen phone. Please call this number.” In that case, the phone was lost and not stolen. They were able to re-unite the phone with its owner because of the message.” As most of you know, I am not a big fan of Apple, but they do have some products that are must-have. In particular, I’m thinking of the iPad which when loaded with the Foreflight program is outstanding aviation navigation software. My main cell phone is an Android
Galaxy S4. I added the iPhone because I was going to teach a course about the photo-aps for cell phones. Both Apple and Android are big players in that specialty. Anyway, had I enabled the Apple iCloud, then that service would have displayed a map showing where my missing phone was hiding. I fired up iCloud anyway and it did show me that my iPad was resting at home. I already have cloud-like services with DropBox, Google Drive, Zenfolio and Adobe Drive. I hated to be bothered with one more so I skipped the Apple offer for the iPhone5. At the present time, the huge irritation in the computing and smart cell phone world is everybody wants you to have a user-name and password in order to do utilize their services. I wouldn’t be surprised if I don’t have a hundred accounts and they are all supposed to have different user names and passwords for security reasons. You and I both know that is almost impossible. I have a half-dozen user names I can remember and a few different passwords. Even with that UNrecommended simplicity, I’m all the time having to pull out a cellphone to look up a way to access some service I need. At least on the missing cell phone, I installed a password to get into it, and I
usually enter a shorthand version of the user name or password so a little personal knowledge of my coding method is needed. By the way, it is extremely important to install encryption software on your phone. Nearly every one of us with a smart phone have our entire life history carried on that phone with such goodies as bank account numbers, credit card number, ATM pins, social security numbers, birth dates, etc. Hackers can easily retrieve that information from your phone if you merely protect it with a password. They can plug a capture device into the phone’s microUSB port and enjoy a bonanza. If you encrypt the information, they’ll give up on yours and find a non-encrypted victim. In conclusion, if you happen to find a black iPhone5 and don’t know where to take it, the police station is a good choice. I still believe I will stumble across mine at one of the three locations and two cars in which I hang out. I did attempt to call the phone on the very day I misplaced it while I was at each of the locations. No luck. And it was a Saturday and I had not visited a single store or restaurant that day. So it should be in one of my personal locations. My wife thinks I probably dropped it on the street getting in or out of a vehicle, and it may well be run-over.