possibly, but until it start's shouting, the thief probably isn't holding the phone in a way that would let the front camera take a candid snap. When it starts shouting, I'd be willing to bet that he'd be shocked enough to do nothing except grab it & try to turn it off for ~10 seconds, then waste another 10 seconds trying to muffle it.

By that time, the shouting would (temporarily) stop when I appear on speakerphone. I'm guessing that once he sees that I know where he is, what he looks like, and I can make the phone call people, that he'll at worst put it down where it is, and at best return it to the cafe.

*IF* it survived being "put down" (dropped) (I'd know this if my ssh session was still running but the GPS position become static), I'd then unlock the phone (so that the banner asking people to call me to claim a reward) was visible again - meantime, I could hot foot it to the GPS location to try and recover it myself.

... but you're scenario's probably just as likely, so remember to duck if you hear a stephen hawking voice shouting "I've been stolen" as a heavy black brick flies towards you :-)

CPW and carrier insurance is a rip off. Vodafone had me insured by DEFAULT and I was paying £9 p/m. Which isnt that bad. I cancelled that anyway as my bank account comes with phone insurance (lost/stolen). I pay about £6 a month for it but I get other perks that make it worth it (free travel insurance etc).

I have already set up public key authorization, but since I'm very paranoid, I did it with passphrases. (Both into my middle server and into my N900).

Is there a way to run this business of the infinite loop to reconnect to the middle server if the 3G connection is lost with the public keys AND passphrases?

Thanks for the link to the wiki, I will look into it and into your set up for the loop.

I guess you'd need to use something like expect within the script (to wait for the passphrase prompt and then provide a passphrase in response on your behalf). However I don't think that expect is part of the n900 built-in shell & I am no linux guru (last serious *nix involvement prior to N900 was early 90's with SCO Unix), so not sure whether there are any other alternatives outwith writing some python (or whatever) code yourself to do it programatically?

Personally I don't think that the blank passphrase is much of a risk - sure, my server's public key is on my n900 ... but if that gets stolen I'll know PDQ if I can get it back or not. If not, I reckon I can disable my ssh server quicker than johnny thief can hack into my phone, sus my scripting and climb down my tunnel :-) Once I get a new device I just change the listening port and generate new keys.

in my country, the same exact moment when the phone is stolen, they take off the battery, so no gsm triangulation can be done.

sorry to disappoint,

any thief with half a brain will pull out the battery and throw the sim card away first chance they get after stealing the phone.

yes, I realise that if it gets swiped by a pro they'll do so, that's why I said "just for fun" in the original post :-) However, I'm sure there are also some amateur thieves out there too, so I can dream ...

I use my reverse SSH tunnel all the time anyway, to connect quickly to N900 (with my WLAN power saving settings, I find that I can never ssh into it normally without first "waking the network up" by pinging my PC from the N900, which kind of defeats the point of ssh'ing in).

So, the "connect anywhere" functionality is there anyway on my phone, along with all the phone-control stuff, eSpeak etc. and I just thought it might be amusing thinking about remote actions I could take if I got ripped off.

Off now to superglue my battery into the casing, and apply a nice wee layer of ricin to its exposed surface. Do you feel lucky, punks?

I tried the ssh reverse tunnel in the background (with options -f -N to allow for the pass phrase). I think this is really cool if I want to use my work computer to do stuff on the phone.

But, now seriously how do you do all the phone-control stuff you mentioned, like taking a picture, calling a number, etc? What are the real commands to do this stuff, and can you send an sms from the command line?

Thanks (I didn't see a thanks button in your initial post.)

phone-control is installable from extras-devel (it's really just a wrapper for the lower level dbus commands) .. see http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=60251 for info :-)

For cli interface to send sms's see http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=36148 (haven't tried it myself but looks like a bit of python code in a script may do the trick)

ps. no thanks allowed in off-topic!

im no theif. but surely the first thing hes gonna do is power off the device? as most phones have a custom ringtone thesedays.

the first thing people do is call there phone if its been pinched!
if its off you aint gonna get nout from ssh. and when they do power it up your gonna have to be at your terminal when they do right?

i love you ideas but i think it would only apply if the tea leaf was a complete idiot? and doesnt ssh need an internet connection?
you need the ip to connect to the device?
your sim wil the first thing to go.
i maybe wrong?