Originally Posted by ajack (Post 1032072)

Stupid question, if this program was used, what stops the person from re-flashing the phone?

Originally Posted by SPARTAN563 (Post 1031795)

What is SIMLock?
SIMLock, or simlockd, is a small application written for the Nokia N900 that provides the ability for your phone to automatically lock itself if it detects that the SIM card has been changed. This is done using the phone's built in lock functionality and only requires that you have set a lock code on your phone.

What does SIMLock do?
When your phone is started up after installing SIMLock your current SIM Card's unique identifier, known as an IMSI, is stored. Each time the phone is started after that the current SIM Card's IMSI is compared to the original one. Should SIMLock find that your SIM Card's IMSI is different it will automatically lock the phone and put it into Offline Mode. Once the phone has been unlocked again SIMLock will add the current SIM Card's IMSI to the list of "allowed" IMSI numbers and it will not bother you again.

Why should I use SIMLock?
SIMLock provides an added level of security should your cellphone be stolen. While not being completely bulletproof the aim is to make it just that much more difficult for a thief to use your phone after he has stolen it. It is written to behave similarly to the functionality available in the Symbian UIQ phones of late and seems to function very well.

Where can I get it?
SIMLock is available for download here and information about the changes made to it can be found on this page.

I found a bug!
If you have managed to find a bug please feel free to send information about what happened to me at contact@sierrasoftworks.com or if you want to try your hand at fixing the problem yourself you can grab the source code from http://gitorious.org/simlockd.

Download
Changes
Source Code

Originally Posted by warhawk007 (Post 1032200)

I have a small request. Incase you are the developer of this app, if it is possible, could you please create an application which can invoke the phone's locking system if a protected application like Contacts or Conversation is opened? I have requested for such an application in this forum many times and have never seen an application as such being developed for maemo. I'm a person coming from Symbian and Windows Mobile 6 and have used Android and iOS a couple of times and all these platforms offer such an application.

My basic idea is that a list of protected applications is maintained and whenever a protected application is opened, the phone should ask for a lock code before opening the application. Hope you could understand my idea here.
Most "experts" in this community responded to my request by asking me to create and maintain a truecrypt volume or container..but this is not what I want. All I want is a lock code being asked before opening a protected application.
Thanks in advance!

Originally Posted by figaro (Post 1032424)

you mean make the phone automatically locked whenever those apps started?
i think that's quite doable.. if no one interested in doing this, i might consider do this myself. let's see when i get free time, i'll try to look at this

Originally Posted by SPARTAN563 (Post 1032533)

@ajack: The idea is more to discourage people from being able to use your phone without reflashing (and hence loosing all your personal data). Also, reflashing isn't the most easy thing to do for a thief not to mention they aren't all that likely to find many N900s to steal. All just designed to make their life a pain.

With regards to making an app to secure your applications. It could be possible but as figaro said, constantly checking the list of running apps will eat your battery. You could have it pause checking while the phone is locked and use some tricks to drop the number of cycles performed to see what checks have to be done (say, not checking before a certain TTY which you would have checked before). I could look into doing something like this but there will always be a workaround, a simple killall command would render it useless unless it was constantly respawned (not too hard to do) but say the app doesn't check any apps which are open before it was launched, then a
killall applockerd
exec contacts && disown
has a chance of getting through (race condition). Once again though, it is unlikely that your friends are going to realise all of this, and either way, you are likely to have added xterm to your list of secure apps anyway.