iDon't want an iPhone

The plotline on the long-running CBS cop-arama "Blue Bloods" show recently concerned the efforts of the police to unlock a cell phone to uncover vital evidence and plans for an impending terrorist attack.

In its usual stacked-deck fashion, the show portrayed the internet service provider (they called it "Megacast" or some such) as the sort of evil people who would send their own grandmothers to internet perdition for many years for the slightest offense, and of course, it showed them as unwilling and uncaring to yield to Tom Selleck's exhortations, no matter now much he breathed and sighed through his nose.

(I mean, watch the show one time, if only to see Selleck inhale through his proboscis, then heave a mighty sigh of desperation, instead of acting.)

Reason # 284 of why I am an Android user is that I don't have to worry about locking my phone. For one thing, I keep my phone to myself, and for the next, even if powerful enemies overpowered me and commandeered my cell, they would find snapshots of cats, cooked grits, and New Yorker cartoons - hardly the stuff that global spies are after.

But it seems that with the iPhone, if the wrong tiny hands get your phone in their...tiny hands...they can lock your phone for 47 years, making your shiny Apple a very expensive paperweight.

Just ask a lady known only by her family name (Lu) over in China. She left her phone in the custody of her two-year-old son so he could watch educational videos.

By repeatedly entering the incorrect password, Sonny Jim accidentally activated the iPhone's security system.  This fiendish plan lengthens the time for which a phone is locked every time someone punches in the wrong code.  Young Wu extended that time, all right, to the tune of 25,000,000 minutes.


25 million minutes.  That's 47 years, or 2065 - the Year of the Rooster in China.

Well, cockadoodledoo!  Ms Wu went to the Apple Store in Shanghai, where she was given two options:

a) Wait until 2065
2) Reboot the phone, which would erase everythannnnng.

She went with option 2, because, "I couldn't really wait for 47 years and tell my grandchild it was your father's mistake," as she put it.

What would really be cool would be if the kid took a selfie of himself locking the phone just before locking the phone, but we'll never know.