Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

  • http://twitter.com/jlerwin James Erwin

    “He steps on your phone, you run his over with an excavator. That’s the Moscow way!”

  • http://twitter.com/kpkpkp Kevin Pierce
  • OldBrownSquirrel

    See also: clearing broken bottles from Tverskaya in the wee hours of New Years’ Day with a snowplow.

  • Wreckrob8

    So? Increases the market for Russian knockoffs, I suppose.

  • http://twitter.com/OhMeadhbh Meadhbh Octopodidae

    in soviet russia, chinese knockoff iPhones destroy you!

  • Sigmund_Jung

    Or just take one person and 10% of the diesel and burn all the phones at once.

    • http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki

      Yeah, toxic fumes and cancer are awesome!

      • Sigmund_Jung

        As opposed to the flower scent from the machine exhaust, yep.

        • http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki

          Yeah?
          You seem to have no idea what kind of dangerous chemicals are in electronics.

          • Sigmund_Jung

            You know you can burn things on places like steel mills with no added danger, right?

  • derek prowse

    just popping in to see if the fakes are as good as the originals..

  • tylerkaraszewski

    And we complain about the world becoming polluted and running out of resources as we build perfectly functional (presumably) phones, ship them thousands of miles, then drive over them in a fuel-guzzling construction machine and then bury them.

    • Melissa S

      That’s exactly what I was thinking. There’s a lot of metals in mobile phones that should be recycled, counterfeit or not. Although I don’t know how easy it would be to recycle a crushed one.

    • chaopoiesis

      The problem of “we”… it’s all there, in one word.

    • flickerKuu

       Watch the video above these comments and reconsider a little.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63u6b-eHYzU

  • http://twitter.com/ubermudskipper Chris Michael

    Why would Russia even care if China’s making knock-off Apple products?

    • http://www.facebook.com/bazimmerman Brad Zimmerman

      They can tell WIPO that they’re protecting trademarks and copyrights and that kind of stuff.

  • Tor Lillqvist

    Of course, the very point with tracked vehicles is that the weight is distributed over a large area, i.e. the pressure under the tracks is low. So it is not an extremely good way to crush something, just jumping on the phones with work boots might have produced larger destructive force…

  • https://plus.google.com/104067355242126774300/posts?hl=en Dennis Smith

    Much rather have a fake. No DRM, No locked down OS, interesting hardware to play with…….

    • flickerKuu
      • https://plus.google.com/104067355242126774300/posts?hl=en Dennis Smith

        A little common sense would suggest buyer beware. I buy counterfeits all the time, deliberately, always aware of the risk from someone trying to scam you or one that is just trying to sell a cheap copy. There is a check list of things I run through before I part with my money, Is it safe (can I open and test the PSU/battery), does it have hidden extra’s (IE rootkit), will it last at least 1 year from my abuse? Is the memory as big as it claims(Not hacked to show more). I have not yet had a real lemon, so I would argue I have done well. I buy something that is fake, knowing it’s fake, and knowing what to expect, and what it’s limitations are, or in the case of Apple, how much more capable the fake is.

        • flickerKuu

           Ummm… Ok…. Please show me an example of a counterfeit that is more capable than an Apple phone. Lol.

          • https://plus.google.com/104067355242126774300/posts?hl=en Dennis Smith

            The iphone is so locked down and tied to one ideal, that great hardware is wrecked by a control freaks demanding inflexibility. Any Chinese knock off is a dream by comparison. It’s a shame that so many people are swayed by peer pressure and greed that they miss the good things in the alternatives.

          • flickerKuu

            … Says no one who has ever used one. I’m the first to jailbreak  – alleviating anything you may imagine is “locked down”-   But I haven’t needed to. I like simple, uncluttered, pretty UI that does what I want to do. I’ve never found I was “locked down” from anything. Instead, I find myself being able to do amazing things with it, from business to pleasure, and it never crashes, or misses an update. It doesn’t look like a silly giant brick in my hand, etc.. etc… Not willing to start a war over stupid phones. Just saying, you’re nuts with this whole “I buy counterfeit phones because they are better than Iphone”   BS you are pulling.

  • John Verne

    I’m not an expert, but at least one of those guys was wearing a knock-off watch.

  • Carlos Ayala

    That’s a bulldozer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldozer not an excavator: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excavator
    =) I made a similar mistake a while ago.

    • Paul Renault

       Dang!  You beat me to the punch. 

      /I was going to use Tonka toys to illustrate.

      • Chentzilla

        Please do.

        • Paul Renault

          Done:

          • Chentzilla

            Cute, thanks!

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/3JDMDQTHK6VTATVWVJDI2NKYLQ nick thomas

    I tried out an iclone 4 in thailand a couple years ago. Couldnt get it to do much, as in it wouldnt connect to a wifi signal or make any calls. But it did receive tv signals. and it weighed next to nothing.

    • flickerKuu

       Tv signals?

      • http://profile.yahoo.com/3JDMDQTHK6VTATVWVJDI2NKYLQ nick thomas

        Yep. It had a little extendable antenna that swung out from the side. Most phones in Asia have built in tv tuners, primarily so people can keep up with all the soccer games.

        • flickerKuu

           Want.

  • flickerKuu

    “Instead of giving six men hammers, they hired five men … and one man to drive an
    excavator over the phones”

    Yeah, but they saved SOOOOO much money when they used pencils in space instead of developing a space-pen.

  • Chentzilla
  • CLamb

    I wonder how durable they would’ve been if used as paving stones?

  • http://indigestible.nightwares.com/ Warren

    127 fake iPhones? Sounds like classic off-by-one error to me.