Stealing phones at Coachella is nothing new. My daughter had hers stolen a few years ago, and when I mentioned it to someone I ran into at the supermarket, she said her son’s phone had been stolen that year as well. And then a stranger who overheard us piped in that her son had also lost his phone to an “Apple picker,” as she referred to the thief. But this year, when a gentleman from New York swept through the festival picking phones from oblivious Coachella goers, a few people turned to Find My iPhone for help. The app led them to 36-year-old Reinaldo De Jesus Henao with a backpack stuffed with phones. According to NBC San Diego : The crime spree was discovered when several people noticed their phones were missing and activated the “Find My Phone” feature, police said. Those signals led the victims to Henao. Security guards detained him and when Indio police arrived they found more than 100 phones in Henao’s backpack, according to police. Some of the phones were returned to the victims that day or the next. Image by iphonedigital
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Man steals over 100 phones at Coachella, busted by Find My iPhone
A Vancouver researcher has patented a new material that uses light instead of electricity to store data. An anonymous reader writes: LI-RAM — that’s light induced magnetoresistive random-access memory — promises supercomputer speeds for your cellphones and laptops, according to Natia Frank, the materials scientist at the University of Victoria who developed the new material as part of an international effort to reduce the heat and power consumption of modern processors. She envisions a world of LI-RAM mobile devices which are faster, thinner, and able to hold much more data — all while consuming less power and producing less heat. And best of all, they’d last twice as long on a single charge (while producing almost no heat), according to a report on CTV News, which describes this as “a breakthrough material” that will not only make smartphones faster and more durable, but also more energy-efficient. The University of Victoria calculates that’s 10% of the world’s electricity is consumed by “information communications technology, ” so LI-RAM phones could conceivably cut that figure in half. They also report that the researcher is “working with international electronics manufacturers to optimize and commercialize the technology, and says it could be available on the market in the next 10 years.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.