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Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

"EcoLogic told the Super Express newspaper that somebody found the tracker in Sudan, removed the sim card and put it in their own phone, where they then racked up 20 hours' worth of phone calls"

So they actually got a huge bill because they didn't set a SIM lock (if that's possible), and didn't block voice calls and so on.

Presumably, they had a good contract for sending tiny packets of data, but not for roaming calls in Sudan.

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A simlock works the other way around. It is to ensure that a subsidized phone does not end up being used for another carrier. It does not lock a SIM from being used in another device.

You probably mean a pin code on the sim, but then you'd have to have a keyboard to enter the pin with and the device most likely did not come with such luxuries (nor a screen).

They should have added a PIN then. There was a time when the practice of adding PINs to SIMs (and phones) was common in my part of the world (in the era of candy-bar phones) to prevent this exact scenario: so that losing your phone won't result in someone else racking a large bill using your phone and/or SIM.

Perhaps their hardware and/or software doesn't support PIN unlocking the SIM, or they didn't consider the possibility. I'm sure they've learnt their lesson.

How would you enter the PIN?

The gps receiver's software could enter the pin. No buttons necessary.

I have a mobile hotspot, all of this is done through the WebUI over WiFi.

One possibility is that the GPS tracker does not have a UI to unlock a SIM card, so the SIM card was set without a pin.

Sim locking is a device-side control that ensures only a specific carrier’s sim is used in the device.

They should have used a limited IoT-oriented sim with data limits.

I kinda feel these folks were extraordinarily naive, but I’m coming from the perspective of a telco SME.

I think they were talking about the SIM PIN code not the device locking.

I think I mean the PIN lock, the one you have to input after rebooting the phone or inserting the SIM. This has existed since the beginning of GSM, as far as I remember.

But probably the GPS receiver can't work with that.

PIN lock is right

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