Making Stolen Mobile Phones Useless

It's surprising to me that it took folks in the UK this long to figure out that they needed a system to make sure stolen mobile phones were easily disabled. Mobile phone theft was becoming a huge deal in Europe with stories coming out every day about violence caused by thieves taking off with the phones. Now, however, authorities have created a system which will switch off the handsets, no matter what sim card they use, making the phones useless. They're hoping that this will discourage thieves from targeting the phones any more. It could be effective, but I think it's not nearly as much fun as the Dutch plan from last year to bombard stolen mobile phones with SMS messages saying "this phone is stolen!".