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Mac Thief Caught Thanks To Applescript & Timbuktu
el.cerrito.slasher sent in an amusing bit found on MacSlash. This story
is a tale of a stolen iMac that just happened to be running Timbuktu (a remote
control program like VNC I believe). Well the stolen box kept getting
used, and the owner was able to track it down through
a variety of amusing Timbuktu Fu. Funny story.
Rule Nr. 1 in criminology: 95% of criminals are idiots. If they weren't, they would risk a year long jail term e.g. by robbing a liquor store for 100$.
You would be smart enough to swap hard drives to evade detection, but you'd also be smart enough to not steal a computer...
AppleScript is UNBELEIVABLY easy to write. If you have any kind of logic in your soul and speak English, you can automate your plastic pal to death. We actually run our business on .as, it's just great to have a script that runs when you drop a video capure file on a folder, runs Cleaner to compress it, BBEdit to knock up some HTML, DeBabelizer to cobble together some GIF thumbnails, Fetch to upload it and IE to spring open to look at the site. All while preparing coffee or beating the crap out of some guards in Oni.
That was classic intercourse!
Uh, no, it just makes sense. Possessive apostrophes are awesome for programming languages.
c++/java:
foo->bar()
AppleScript:
foo's bar()
bar() of foo
It's a hell of a lot easier to type.
PHP:
$myArray[3]
WebSiphon:
myArray'3
It's not wrong, it makes sense. Just try typing those lines of code there. I wish more programming languages used it.
And ya, it's very easy to write. That is, once you understand that it is a programming language which has its own way of forming meaningful statements, so that something that makes sense in English doesn't necessarily mean it will make sense to AppleScript :)
AS is best for making objects from different programs work together. It's a solution to the interoperability problem. Each program can describe itself with verbs and nouns, and AppleScript's syntax is very good at mashing those things from different programs together.
It's not so great for coding intense algorithms, as it tends to be verbose.
set foo to 5
foo = 5
When you do have to make programs talk to each other, AS makes wonderful glue. AS is intended to exploit logic in other code, so rather than running awk/sed to munge my text, or use the language's text manipulation expressions (as you would in Perl), I'll get BBEdit to open the text file, and use all it's insanely powerful multi-file regex features. Apps in OS X are supposed to support opening files and doing operations on them without presenting a user interface specifically for this purpose.
No need for CORBA to solve those problems :P
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
The Timbuktu extension that's installed on it posts a unique identifier to Netopia's IP Locator server (findme.netopia.com) whenever it connects to the internet.
What about the privacy aspects of this? Sure, in this instance it worked out to be a good thing, but do you really want someone else to know where you are using their license? How is this different than Windows XP phone home? What -other- information is being transmitted to Netopia?
With most 'criminal' actions, the belief is that you won't get caught.
An apt insight. If you were to take a look at the mind of a developing criminal, you will often find someone who, after one or two several nervous crimes, discovers that getting caught is actually indeed quite rare. After this discovery, they become increasingly brazen, disregarding basic precaution. This is how most criminals actually get caught.
C//