Technologies

A Mystery Phone, Found in the Desert, Slowly Reveals Its Secrets

The Samsung phone had been lost for a decade. Then Katie Elkin found it.

Everyone who loves mysteries secretly hopes that one day life will drop an intriguing puzzle into their lap for them to solve. Maybe not an Agatha Christie-type crime, but something that will send them on a real-world chase to connect the dots and land at a satisfying conclusion.

That’s exactly what happened to Katie Elkin, a retired teacher with a penchant for mysteries. “I’m 84 and I have lived a full, wonderful life,” she tells me over a video call from her home in Prescott, Arizona.

Until now, Elkin’s mysteries have largely been genealogy-based. She recounts an extraordinary story about making friends with a woman from California and discovering that their grandfathers had trained together in the Army and then shipped out to France in World War I on the same day. “That’s my whole life,” she says. “It’s coincidences.”

On this Friday in February, we’re talking about another coincidence in Elkin’s life — one of finding a phone, lost for a decade in the desert, and Elkin’s attempt to reunite it with its owner.

Our phones are immensely personal items, serving both as memory banks that store our most precious data and as portals that connect us with every important person in our lives. These days, if we lose them, tracking technology means there’s every chance we could be quickly reunited with them, but that hasn’t always been the case.

Those disappearances can be high-stress moments for anyone — just ask Apple about the unreleased iPhones it lost back in 2010 and 2011, which, coincidentally, were around the same time it introduced the Find My iPhone feature. But even today, recovering a lost phone means relying to an extent on the goodwill and honesty of the person who found it. Many people will choose to do the right thing in this scenario, and some — like Elkin — will go above and beyond to help out a stranger.

On a sunny day just before Thanksgiving, Elkin and her husband drove about 10 minutes west of the city to spend some time outdoors. Prescott is surrounded by national parks and ponderosa pine forest, but on this day, Elkin was headed to the desert — not for a hike, she says, but an “amble.”

Rather than taking the well-marked trail popular with hikers and ATVs, Elkin instead split off onto a lesser-known path “obliterated by the grasses and the weeds.”

It was Elkin’s dad who taught her that if she wanted to spot something, she should look for it — sage advice that’s served her well over the years. “He was always finding change,” she says. “And I can do that too. I always find animals. If we’re driving, I can see them in the woods … I’m always looking for something.”

Looking for a vague something can turn up the oddest of things, and on that particular day, the something Elkin found was a dusty, beaten 2012 Samsung Gusto 2 lying on its side, clamshell open in the scrub.

Elkin picked up the phone, thinking she would give it to a neighbor boy who liked to take electronics apart. But when she got it home, she was struck by another idea — what if she could get the phone to turn on?

Like many of us with a drawer full of mystery cables, Elkin has kept all the cords and wires that have come with the electronics she’s purchased over the years. She dug through her stash and found a charger that fit the Gusto (she still has no idea what it was used for previously).

When CNET reviewed the Gusto 2 — a simple flip phone that came out the same year as the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S3 — we said: “the construction seems strong enough to withstand multiple drops and endless opening and closing.” Our instincts about its potential resilience were, it turns out, correct.

“I couldn’t believe it when it came up charging,” Elkin says. It took a little while, but when the phone turned on, she was ecstatic. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I wonder who this phone belongs to?’ And so that was when the mystery began.”

The quest for answers

Elkin went into the text messages and started to piece together the Gusto owner’s life, clue by clue. The owner worked in a cafe, she seemed to have family connections in Chicago, she was a renter and a keen hiker. Her name was Maddie.

The other thing Elkin noticed was that the last message was marked Saturday, May 16. It was the only evidence she had to indicate when exactly the phone might have been lost. She went to the internet and looked up which years May 16 had fallen on a Saturday. Two possible answers cropped up — 2020 and 2015.

Elkin’s internet research didn’t stop there. She took one of the commonly texted numbers in the phone and did a reverse lookup. “And bingo! I found a woman’s name that had that phone number,” she says. But when she called the number, it was disconnected.

“I said to myself, who would know where she is?” says Elkin. “Her dad would know.” She found a number listed under “daddio,” performed another reverse lookup and found the name of a man living in Chicago. “I was so excited because I was getting close,” she says.

On Dec. 30, Elkin’s birthday, she called the number, but no one picked up. She had to leave a message. “I was really disappointed, because I wanted to talk to somebody,” she says.

Ten minutes later, her phone rang, but when she picked up, it wasn’t a man on the other end of the line. “It was Maddie, the owner of the phone,” she says. “She had come to Chicago to visit her dad for the holidays.”

Elkin and Maddie talked for around 10 minutes. “She was amazed,” says Elkin. “We were both amazed.” Maddie didn’t want her phone back, but it turns out she had lost it in 2015 after hiking in the exact spot that Elkin had found it.

The little phone that could

For a decade, the little Gusto had been lying out in the desert. Unlike some parts of Arizona, Prescott has four seasons, with all the minus temperatures, scorching heat, snowfall and summer storms that come with them. The Gusto weathered every storm, and battered and bruised as it was, it still came back to life.

We have little expectation these days that our phones will last us a long time, and we rarely get all the life out of our devices that they’re capable of offering us. Rather than seeking to get them repaired, once they fail us in one respect, we tend to seek out replacements. Most Americans hang onto their phones for an average of 2.5 years, according to a Reviews.org survey.

It turns out, though, that some phones are built to last, and the Gusto was one of them. After Elkin had spoken with Maddie, she reached out to Samsung to let them know her story. “I said to myself, ‘Does Samsung require some kudos for having a product that lasted that long?'”

Any tech company would. My own first phone, a 2002 Sagem MW 3020, gave up the ghost simply by being exposed to the concept of water while wrapped up inside a backpack on a rainy day. In spite of the best efforts of phone-makers to increase display resiliency, many people are still walking around out there with cracked screens.

For as long as we’ve had mobile phones, they’ve been vulnerable pieces of kit. But whatever secret sauce Samsung put inside the 2012 Gusto 2 shows that it was more robust than most — even though it was lying open with its main screen exposed when Elkin found it.

At the time we reviewed the Gusto 2, we gave it a score of 7 out of 10, with points knocked off for its subpar screen resolution and a smaller-than-usual headphone jack. It’s too late for us to go back and revise that score in light of what we know about how robust the phone is 14 years later, but it’s entirely possible that the “problems” we highlighted actually played into the Gusto’s long-term survival.

Elkin still doesn’t know what she’s going to do with Maddie’s Gusto, although a friend has suggested that Samsung clad it in gold and put it on a pole at headquarters. Samsung is clearly proud of the phone’s durability, having put me in touch with Elkin, but is also undecided about how to celebrate the life the Gusto 2 has lived. In spite of Elkin’s love for mysteries and my suggestion that the FBI recruit her, she isn’t about to start a detective agency to reunite other people with their lost possessions. “It’s just a hobby,” she laughs.

That’s a shame. As someone who’s lost more than one phone over the years, I would dearly love to be reunited with my missing technology, and I’m sure there’s a market for Elkin’s skills. Not every phone is as resilient as the Gusto. Most devices that have taken such a battering would likely refuse to even turn on.

Perhaps there’s a longevity challenge for all phone-makers. I can’t promise CNET would be able to replicate this scenario in our reviews testing process, but in an age of disposable tech, it would be lovely to give extra points for truly hard-earned durability.

Technologies

China indicates rare earths will keep flowing to EU, regardless of U.S. trade deal expiration

European trade commissioner Maroš Sefčovič met with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing last week.

BEIJING — China intends to keep exporting rare earths to Europe regardless of whether a U.S. trade deal with Beijing gets extended past January.

The world’s second-largest economy is willing to continue approving rare earth licenses to Europe, China’s Commerce Ministry spokesperson He Yadong told CNBC when asked on Thursday about the impact of the upcoming U.S. deadline.

Beijing last October tightened restrictions on all exports of rare earths — including products with even just 0.1% of China-sourced rare earths. The move followed a new U.S. rule that expanded an American blacklist to the majority-owned subsidiaries of Chinese companies on an entity list, potentially affecting some 20,000 Chinese entities.

However, both the U.S. and China agreed to suspend those measures for one year at a meeting in late October 2025 between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump. Ahead of the leaders’ latest summit last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the truce was extended by two months to January.

Trade tensions between the EU and Beijing cooled last week after European trade commissioner Maroš Sefčovič met with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing. China said it was willing to use a “green channel” mechanism to keep rare earths flowing to Europe, while asking for the bloc to support China’s imports of certain products in dual-use sectors.

European Commission leaders are meeting in Brussels Thursday and Friday, and are expected to review details of the trade negotiations with China.

Technologies

Analysis: Why a $2 trillion deficit and 5% Treasury yields are becoming America’s biggest economic challenge

Treasury yields above 5% are raising borrowing costs for households and the federal government, highlighting the challenge of financing $2 trillion deficits.

Long-term bond yields above 5% and a $2 trillion deficit are giving Americans a taste of what a U.S. debt crisis would be like. A true emergency would hurt much more, and isn’t baked in. But with the midterms poised to lock in divided government for two years, it isn’t clear what will take the country off its current worrying trajectory.

Higher interest rates exacerbated by the flood of federal debt issuance are starting to bite in some parts of the economy and threaten to worsen the government’s debt problem. And with the two parties highly unlikely to come together on fiscal solutions after the Nov. 3 midterms, any fixes are years off in the future.

The housing market is showing signs of slowing as the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage hovers around 7.5%. Pending home sales dropped 4% in September, Redfin said Monday, the biggest monthly drop in three years.

Mortgage rates track the 10-year Treasury yield

Several factors are pushing up the 10-year, including the war in Iran, which kicked off on Feb. 28 and precipitated the rise in long-term yields. Oil and diesel prices are up sharply, and that has bond traders asking for more yield to account for the possibility that central banks such as the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates.

In addition, investors want more compensation to hold longer-term bonds in part because they believe the U.S. government will continue to flood the market with them. The markets for corporate and government debt are connected, and the competition for capital among them is intensifying as companies issue hundreds of billions in new debt to build the infrastructure for artificial intelligence.

Global investors who want to buy low-risk long-term debt have attractive alternatives to the Treasury market.

If the U.S. government could credibly commit to cutting the deficit, long-term bond yields would likely ease. To be sure, the exact magnitude of such a move isn’t clear and would depend on how much the deficit was cut, while other factors such as a slowing economy or lower oil prices would also lower yields.

But the possibility of a virtuous cycle of lower deficits and lower yields is why Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that the U.S. ought to target a deficit lower than 4% of its gross domestic product by the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

There is almost no way the U.S. will hit that target. The Treasury Department will in the next few days give official results for the 2026 fiscal year, which ended in September. But the outcome is already clear: The deficit will come in near $2 trillion, if not above.

That is likely to put the deficit in the range of 6.0-6.2% of gross domestic product for the year, based on the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of a $1.993 trillion deficit and a projection of third quarter GDP.

Higher rates make debt reduction tougher. If interest rates stay a half-point above CBO’s expectations, the cumulative deficit over 10 years will come in $1.9 trillion higher, the agency estimates. If rates overshoot by 1.5 points, that adds $6 trillion in deficits.

CBO expects the 10-year Treasury to average 4.3% over that period, compared to 5.3% today. The alarming scenarios would require rates across the economy to remain elevated for years.

“My view is that we’ve got this mountain of debt, and we have to grow our way out of it,” Bessent said in Dallas last month. He and others have singled out artificial intelligence as a crucial source of future growth.

AI could help but can’t fix the problem entirely. It would take a decade of 7.2% growth to balance the budget with growth alone, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a research group that advocates for balanced budgets.

GDP growth was recently revised up for the second quarter from 1.5% to 2.2% at an annualized rate. The acceleration that quickly would get us to 7.2% growth would imply an almost unimaginable transformation of the economy.

Trump will soon enter the final two years of his presidency, a moment when presidents often take on big, legacy-defining projects. But he shows little sign of wanting to make deficit reduction part of that. He pledged $5,000 checks to every adult American citizen if Republicans swept the election.

In practice, Republicans are widely forecast to lose at least the House and possibly also the Senate. Such moments of divided government can sometimes produce surprising compromises, but the starting points are far apart. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Democrats’ likely next House speaker, wants to reverse the $1 trillion in healthcare cuts that Congress enacted last year as part of Trump’s signature legislative package.

And that’s leaving aside the deep animosity between the parties.

The overall U.S. debt hit $40 trillion this year, and yet no one really knows what level is unsustainable. A full-on debt crisis likely remains much farther out in the future. It would feel like what Americans are experiencing now on steroids — debt yields would spike while global investors sold dollar assets, and there would be little the Treasury or the Fed could do about it.

For now, though higher yields are also attracting investors to U.S. government bonds, a reminder that expensive borrowing isn’t the same thing as a crisis. But the bottom line is that economics alone can’t solve the problem. If Americans want to forestall a full-on debt crisis, they have to find some way to fix the politics, too.

Technologies

Key Details on Starshield, SpaceX’s Defense-Oriented Starlink Network

Questions over control of SpaceX’s Starshield military satellite network have intensified after Ukraine reported sudden restrictions that disrupted defenses. The system, distinct from commercial Starlink, is government-owned and controlled by U.S. authorities.

Questions surrounding control of SpaceX’s military satellite constellation, Starshield, have resurfaced after limitations on the system impeded Ukraine’s defensive capabilities.

Kyiv has leveled accusations against SpaceX

Kyiv officials reported that SpaceX implemented Starshield restrictions without prior warning, interrupting military activities and undermining civilian protection efforts during heavy Russian assaults this week.

Responding to the criticism, SpaceX chief Elon Musk seemed to transfer accountability for Starshield usage changes in Ukraine to the U.S. government and President Donald Trump. Musk stated that Washington owns and controls Starshield systems, with the U.S. military and ultimately the president setting any usage boundaries. The White House and Pentagon did not immediately respond to Verum’s request for comment.

Here’s an overview of Starshield and its distinctions from Starlink.

What is Starshield and how does it function?

Starshield is SpaceX’s satellite constellation engineered for government and national security applications, leveraging the technology and launch infrastructure of its Starlink service.

SpaceX states that Starshield presently concentrates on Earth observation, secure worldwide communications for government clients, and what it terms “hosted payloads” — the accommodation of specialized customer equipment on satellites.

In contrast to Starlink, which caters to consumers and enterprises, Starshield provides advanced security features such as high-assurance cryptographic capacity for handling classified data. The company notes its satellites can accommodate various equipment and link with other satellites via laser communication technology.

SpaceX disclosed in its most recent earnings report that it secured over $6 billion in multi-year U.S. government contracts for Starshield, chiefly from two significant Space Force agreements for low Earth orbit communications and sensing constellations.

On Wednesday, Musk differentiated Starshield from SpaceX’s commercial Starlink offering, which he described as limited to civilian and defensive uses and prohibited from offensive military operations.

How does Starshield contrast with Starlink?

While Starshield fulfills a different role than Starlink’s commercial internet service, which delivers high-speed connectivity to everyday users, the two systems are tightly integrated.

Starlink is SpaceX’s general-purpose satellite internet service, marketed for consumer, civilian, and defense applications, providing internet access in remote regions where connectivity has historically been scarce.

Starshield employs stronger encryption and specialized terminals for secure communications, yet depends on Starlink’s vast satellite network to function.

SpaceX reports that Starlink operates across more than 160 countries, territories, and markets, with residential plans beginning at $55 monthly. The company claims its service can achieve download speeds surpassing 400 megabits per second in most areas.