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US carriers agree to build stolen phone database, blacklist hot handsets
What's the best way to deter a thief? Ruin the spoils, of course. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint have agreed to a broad outline that will culminate in the creation of a central database for stolen cellphones. The goal? To block lifted units from functioning on US shores. Over the next six months, each firm will build out its own stolen device database for integration into a larger, central database, said a Wall Street Journal source, with regional carriers joining the effort over the following two years."We are working toward an industry wide solution to address the complexity of blocking stolen devices from being activated on ours or another network with a new SIM card," said a T-Mobile spokesperson, "This is not a simple problem to solve." The quartet of wireless providers hope to imitate the success UK carriers have seen with similar efforts. With any luck, the program will put an end to massive phone-heists and the awkward public relations stunts that imitate them.
'Activision doesn't blacklist journalists,' working on resolution with Gameblog
Earlier this week, France's Gameblog posted a screenshot of Amazon France's premature listing for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, a story that we and other gaming sites picked up immediately. We later found further support for the claim in a Treyarch employee's resume.A new Call of Duty title -- or a second Black Ops -- wasn't particularly surprising, but apparently Activision wanted to keep the news quiet, and it called the site to take down the story, Gameblog wrote in a follow-up post. Gameblog said the reporter refused and that Activision took a strangely extreme route, "blacklisting" the site, uninviting it from events, declining to send it any more review titles and removing all advertisement.Activision has now publicly responded to Gameblog's claim: "Activision doesn't blacklist journalists. We believe this was a misunderstanding and are working towards a resolution." That sounds like a more reasonable response than the all-out journalistic warfare Gameblog reported; then again, this is all about a Call of Duty title, so maybe "warfare" was the angle they were comfortable with at first.
