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500 EURO reward for finding car by finding laptop
Komawi writes "Greetings,
On the night of march 11th my car was stolen (Mercedes Benz, I'm realy fond of that car!), but also my laptop with in it a wireless networkcard with the following MAC address:
00:30:BD:9C:BD:B2
Also a mobile phone was stolen, with IMEI number 351083531088913.
If anyone has a way to locate these goods and by this I get back my car, a reward of 500 euros will be given!
The goods were taken from Alkmaar, The Netherlands somewhere between 2004-03-11 23:00 and 2004-03-12 07:30.
May the force be with you!"
Sorry to hear about the theft. I can only imagine how awful it feels.
...I got your car too
nevermind. It's April Fools Day!
Good luck to the guy, I'm from the US so I doubt I have a chance at finding his stuff.
But here are the more interesting questions: How often do people submit stories like that now? And since this one was posted, how often will stories like this be posted in the future?
This makes the Slashdot front page? In what possible way is this news for nerds? "Man offers reward"
So what?
A latent existence
First fool!
(I actually believed it)
Unless I am reading the date format wrong, and the submitter's car was stolen in the future (November), this was three weeks ago. Over here in the States I hear numbers like around 2/3 of stolen cars are eventually recovered, but I'm not privy to stats in The Netherlands. You would think that the longer you wait, the less chance you have of getting your car back, no?
:(
On top of that, it would hardly take long to sell a laptop off. What a bummer.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Did you try slashdot.ru? I think sooner or later your laptop and your Mercedes-Benz will be seen somewhere around the Red Square.
Found it.
Oh, right, you wanted that stuff back. Sorry, I made way more than 500 euros just by parting it out.
I am a filthy pirate.
May the force be with you!
Isn't that what got you into this situation in the first place?
In Soviet Russia, laptop finds you.
i have no joke gland you insensitive clod!
Benze is a nice care, surly anyone that can afford it can replace a mere laptop and cell easily! If you followed the golden rule of backing up you data you'd be all set. Also, doesn't your insurance cover anything that was in your car if it is stolen?
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
For sale:
Second hand Mercedes, second hand laptop and second hand mobile phone.
Total price: 501
Hate me!
APRIL FOOLS!!! Isn't Taco the big prankster?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
You know, today is the day you get the funny picture with a phpinfo(); call.
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
so he might be telling the truth....
At first, I wondered what the hell this post was doing on /.
Then I realized it: a true geek treasure hunt.
However, I'm not sure 500 Euros is worth the effort. It's already been a few weeks. It's unlikely the car is still in one piece. Maybe someone can get lucky and locate the laptop (or at least the ethernet card). I'd be shocked if the car and laptop were both found together.
------- "One of the joys of travel is visiting new towns and meeting new people." -- G. KHAN
In Europe (and probably other places, I don't know) we switch the date and month in our numberic dates. Ie in the UK today's 01/04/2004 whereas in the US it's 04/01/2004.
Strangely enough my car was stolen too, yeah that's the ticket. So, I'm offering $500US to anyone who retrieves my Mercedes Benz with a wireless capable laptop and a cell phone in it... just send me the car, the laptop, and the phone and I will send you your $500. Thank you for your support during this trying time.
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
The thought that it's April Fool's Day immediately leads one to question the validity of any story on Slashdot or any other news outlet. Although I doubt this is an April Fool's Day joke, how do we know that it's real? How do we know that this person isn't actually looking for someone else by searching for their MAC address? OR something more sinister?
The other thing about April Fool's Day is that noone ever believes me when I say it's my birthday. Which is kind of depressing.
We Build Beautiful Websites
That's nothing. I once read an ad in the Via Via that went something like: "Laptop for sale. 500 euros. I don't know anything about it, I'm a cab driver and somebody left it in my car. 06-12345678 etc..."
In Soviet Russia 500 Euros reward you.
--Kevin
ISO 8601 learn it. live it. love it.
not as much as I like cats! *faps*
ok, it might be a bit paranoid but there's programs for symbian phones that detect if the sim card changes and can send sms with the current gsm cell id(and number of the new sim) to pre-set gsm phone.
as to the mac address, isn't that changeable? though, you could still strike lucky.
however I'm pretty sure your car is on it's way to eastern europe, sorry.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
No, civilized countries write dates either as DDMMYYYY or YYYYMMDD, you don't just juggle the digits around.
Nobody would write time like HH:SS:MM ? Of course not, it would be just as ridiculous as writing a date like YYYYDDMM it doesn't make any sense.
Or you could write dates like most airlines do 01APR04 or in this case 11MAR04..
I so sorry about your loss.
I cannot help with your laptop theft, but oh Holy Day! I have been the pleasure of telling you that there is most definitely good news for you today sir!
I am Abdul Shakalakabangbang, from New Timur. Our Prime Minister, may his soul flatulate freely in heaven, was tragically killed in a mushroom stuffing contest. Since I his trusted most aide, he leave me lots of money. Due to political unrest, and a bad case of hemorroids, I am needing to remove this money from the country. This is where you can help me, my new friend.
If you feel most strongly you can help this poor man, please contact me and let us know.
thanks,
Dr Shakalakadangdang
Sent from your iPad.
I think this is a bit of a twist on the April Foolery. Notice the department for this article: "real-submissions-unedited dept." I'm sure people submit inane "stories" like this all the time, and they're usually promptly deleted. I think somebody actually did submit this story in all sincerity, and the joke is that /. actually published it...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
No, he said:
... this was stolen over three weeks ago
Unless I am reading the date wrong
OT: (not that there was much of a T going on in the first place): While I find YYYY-MM-DD a bit strange (I prefer DD-MM-YYYY myself, being English), I have to accept that it is the most logical and easiest to use from the point of view of sorting by date etc.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
April Fools aside, the date format is most likely YYYY-MM-DD making the car's time of theft between March 11, 2004 11pm and March 12, 2004 7:30am.
A radioactive cat has 18 half-lives.
Well it will be tricky to find a laptop with just the Mac address unless they connect to my computer. But when I get a little extra time I am going to write a script on my laptop that checks the IP address of my laptop and if it is different then it will email me the new address and Ill probably hide it in the crontab where most crooks cant find it.
So if my laptop gets stolen I can just SSH to my laptop and check out the new data and see if I can find the new physical address. Or at least go thew the ISP and get it back.
Plus the script will be handy when my DHCP address is changed.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You'd think the license plate number would be a better clue than the MAC address and IMEI code of the electronics, but what the hell, this is slashdot!
Martin
I'm a 25 year old professional male, secure and single.
I like long walks on the beach, romantic dinners, and dumb april fools jokes. Call me.
Unless I am reading the date format wrong, and the submitter's car was stolen in the future
Let me introduce you to both European (and most of the non-USA world) date formatting, and more importantly, ISO 8601 standard format for representing dates and times. F.Y.I.
as oppossed to those talented trolls?
You offer $500, and he offers EURO 500 !
Please offer at least more than he does.
Note the department: real-submissions-unedited
Becha someone really thought we would be ready/willing/able/inclined enough to help, and michael saved it, since truth is stranger than fiction.
It *ain't* your BD! You take us for (april)fools? ;-p
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
so just maybe.....
OK, you locate the goods.....but to claim your reward there are some "unforseen expenses"........
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
silence for a while...
someone in the audience: "i offer $600!"
* Imagines an international orginization of crime-fighting nerds recovering stolen Linux boxen and cars with clever 802.11g hacks . . . . . . *
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
Seeing as it's April 1st and all I was expecting to read a story about the evil bit again. oh well.
Is this your Mercedes
I metamoderate, therefore I am
YYYYMMDD is a format suitable for filing. DDMMYYYY is some Euro thing that makes no sense. You don't speak dates like this: "Meet me 17 April 2004." It's not natural. You might say "Meet me on April 17th 2004." That would correspond to MMDDYYYY. Naturally speaking.
I do.
Know the old adage, 'better to keep your mouth shut and have people think you are a fool than open it and prove them right'? I think I'll play it safe and choose to lose 'em today.
Let's look up the MAC and the IMEI numbers: MAC: 00:30:BD -- Belkin Components IMEI # Handset was approved in Finland? This makes it more likely it is an April Fool's joke.
I realize this is an April Fools Joke (Hopefully) but is there any software (OSS, Preferably) that phones home (via email or some such mechanism) if it determines if it has been given a different IP address from some DHCP server? It could mail it's current IP address and maybe the real owner could give this info to the authorities (who have the real power) to go get it and track down the perps.
Of course, this may fire off someone's AV software, too; which would alert the unsavey theif (or fooled buyer) to the activity.
It could also be configured to accept a few known IP addresses to ignore so it's not firing off emails when you switch between home, work or the local coffee shop.
Anyone?
Now that I've planted the idea if it doesn't exist...
Or did they rip out the easter egg in the Fedora Core 1 version of PHP :-(
IMEI number analysis results
Manufacturer Siemens
Model type S55 S30880-S5720
Reference S30880-S5720
Production date N/A
Phone version N/A
Phone GSM phase GSM Phase 2 or higher
IMEI number break-down
Type Approval / Allocation Code (TAC) 351083
Final Assembly Code (FAC) 53
Serial Number (SNR) 108891
Check Digit (CD) 3
Full IMEI presentation 351083-53-108891-3
Huh?
Why is someone posting my MAC address?
How about a small service that comes on after power up to run a traceroute back to a website and then report that route... granted, a *smart* thief would pull off any docs (without net connection), and then wipe the harddrive (or just wipe the drive) before using it.
meh
You lying bastard!
All the card had was a moldy pizza, butts of cigarette, and what suspiciously looks like a... oh! you're sick man!
Don't even get me started on that laptop..it had a version of Windoze funnily similar to the one we use in America, but i thought hey, MS products may be a bit better in other languages! No such luck - reboot every hour
To think I came all the way back in time to post an update on this!
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Oh, and BTW, bravo on the porn collection. I'm going to make a backup before I sell your laptop on eBay.
--t
Speak for yourself, ignorant american.
There's a lot of *whoosh* going on in this thread. It was a very, very lame joke (car stolen in the future, ha-ha). I know how to read different date formats.
;)
sigh @ text, expression never gets across how you intend it to.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
DDMMYYYY is some Euro thing that makes no sense. You don't speak dates like this: "Meet me 17 April 2004." It's not natural.
Well, actually you'll find that alot of people in the UK will say "Meet me on the 17th of April, 2004". There is a world outside the US, you know.
You're bidding the wrong way: $500 is only 404 Euro.
I'll bid 550 Euro for the car, the laptop and the phone.
I thought this was Slashdot. Oh well--
... and you live nearby I'll be happy to give you a ride down to the local coffee shop.
If anyone can help me find my car keys (mis-placed them, probably not stolen as the car *is* in the driveway)
Now, where did I put those keys?
Can I keep the hash and marijuana stuffed in your laptop case or do you want that back too?
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
I lost a G5 and a WRX and a really hot babe. Return them to me and I'll give you $500 US...
You realise that not everyone in europe speaks english? 17 April 2004 makes sense in many languages, including french.
Just check with mine : it was also approved in .FI only, even though I am in Switzerland and this belongs to my company, so I guess, this could really be.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
The ghost of Stephen King.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
YYYY-MM-DD. He's in Europe, so he's using sensible date formats ;)
no taxation without representation!
It was in the conservatory, stolen by Professor Plum, using the lead pipe. Where do I collect my (insert fancy Euro symbol here)500 Reward?
You don't speak dates like this: "Meet me 17 April 2004." It's not natural.
Not in English it isn't, but in most European languages it is:
French, Dutch, Spanish, German,
In soviet russia, Laptop reward you!
Being a bit of a cellular freak (ask anyone who knows me) I did some checking on that IMEI...
Firstly, if this isn't an April Fool's joke, that IMEI is from a very new phone. Odd's are, its a 3GSM/WCDMA phone or a Nokia Series 60 judging by the config of the IMEI.
And as such, all I have to say for anyone who attempts to find this phone, good luck. It's a new phone, which means pretty much as soon as it's reported stolen, its unlocatable, thanks to your friendly local cell provider.
If you're an American, don't bother replying to this post, Americans have no idea about cellular tech.
--
The last digit of pi is four.
... he gave all the important information except his contact info. Curious.
To devil with sorting ease. Clarity is what is important. A four digit year, and a text month (01-APR-2004) is completely unambiguous.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Gee man are you been provincial?
First the format YYYMMDD is used, and if I am not mistaken Sweden uses that. Also that format is very useful when you want to sort things. Try sorting in another date format, and you will quickly see problems being created.
About the DDMMYYYY format, it is used in many many countries. For example Canada uses this format. It makes more sense.
MMDDYY is not that logical when you think about it. Sure convention dictates that is how people say things, but logically it makes no sense whatsoever. Even with respect to sorting this is a bad format.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
He is Dutch and he drives a CAR? There are no cars in the Netherlands. Now, if he had said his bicycle was stolen I wouldn't have jumped on this quite so quickly... :-)
Alot of why people do YYYY MM DD is when you are naming a file and want to have the files when arranged by name such as:
Timesheet20040322.txt
the next timesheet would fall in the same are but lower due to the date.
Unlike the United States, most countries list the month number before the day number, making it March 11 and 12.
Of course, "sometime between" november 3 and december 3 is kind of silly, and if you switch the 3 and 11/12 around it makes much more sense (especially because he included the time).
I did this, once after my house was burglared, and I got the thieves on the other end. They'd stolen my PC, phone, car, and other stuff. They basically laughed and told me to fuck off and die. I called the phone company and asked them to locate the GSM. They told me to fuck off and die. So when the cops came I gave them the information and said "you can probably find the buggers by driving to the cell location and dialing the number," and they told me to fuck off and die (but nicely, after making me sign a long statement).
Basically the merc is already in Eastern Europe, the PC has been sold in a bar somewhere, and the phone has been rechipped.
Your only hope is to bump up the insurance claim. Surely you also left EUR10,000 in cash under the seat? And your gold Rolex?!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
French doesn't count, since only frenchmen and canadians speak french. But 17 April 2004 makes sense in swedish, and that counts. Just see how many of the Gnome releases had release names in swedish! (Grym liten hattgubbe, etc)
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
But thanks for giving me the advance warning to remove all traces of previous ownership.
apt-cache search mercedes-benz
Not necessarily. The IMEI on my mobile (nokia 6610) also comes back as being from Finland. I bought it in the UK.
Do you want them alive? No disintegration? /Boba Fett
You don't speak dates like this: "Meet me 17 April 2004."
I do. I'm British.
You lose. Tough luck old chap.
Well, actually you'll find that alot of people in the UK will say "Meet me on the 17th of April, 2004". There is a world outside the US, you know.
.... oh wait, you weren't joking.
Hahahahaha! April Fool's!! Good one!
Google should really make a new service for a small fee that allows you to track a MAC address for cases like these. Everybody uses google, this would be a great tool.
Drivewarring - like wardriving, but backwards.
Put a good wireless access point in your car with the same SSID/WEP key that you were using before it was stolen, then drive around and see if you can get your stolen laptop to connect to it.
Better still - get everyone else to do it too.
I'm there must be a tool called stumblenetter that could do this...
Wait a minute, this April fools joke contains some SCO code I just know it!...
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Aren't wireless cards with 00:30 usually Apple AirPort cards? fwiw.
--
$tar -xvf
Pardon, but why does this make the slashdot front page? A car was stolen. um.. ok... Was it stolen via a tractor beam? Time machine? Shrink ray gun? Stuffed inside a tardus?
Seriously.. Slashdot has been sliding downhill lately (read that: over the past few years) but do you guys really to have to start scraping the bottom of the barrel? A guy's car was stolen. It happens all the time! How is that geek news??
Looks like someone needs to brush up on their official French speaking countries. ;-)
Americans say that too. The guy just isn't very smart.
You gotta hand it to the slashdot crowd, they certainly don't let something minor like understanding the meaning of a post get in the way of their rabid anti-Americanism. The guy parses the date correctly, mentions the absurd possibility that it might be "the American way" (and in the future), and gets jumped on by half a dozen people saying, "no you idiot, in the rest of the world we write dates properly. To the sibling posters: your rants are more interesting if they actually make sense in context.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
That phone would be a Siemens S55 then.
I'm scanning... hope I find it!
ethereal: ether src host 0030BD9CBDB2
Here are some tips and tricks for Theft and Loss Protection for Linux Laptops and Notebooks. Some of these tricks are useful for other operating systems, too.
I live in Heiloo, the Netherlands. It's right beside Alkmaar! I will look around, 500 euro is not nothing. How many other people ar from this region?
:-P
And I bought a laptop this morning, with a free phone.
The IMEI number is 351083531088913, proofs it is not stolen. The MAC of the laptop I haven't checked yet.
And to prove I'm not only joking:
Heey, suc6 met vinden van je laptop he, anders is mediamarkt open vanaf 15 april (Ik verkoop je graag een nieuwe laptop)
Or should that be LoHack?
You don't speak dates like this: "Meet me 17 April 2004."
"Rencontre moi le 17 avril 2004".
Well, you do in french. Anyone care to chip in a few other european languages?
No. In _America_ they switch the date and month in their numberic dates. We go the sensible route and put the elements in order.
You forgot the number of the car, the one that is written on the "chassis" (don't know if there's an english word other than that)
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Like we say "come and spend your holiday in Russia, your car is already here!".
Most Mercedes stolen in western Europe get a second chance in eastern Europe.
realkiwi
Spreek me 17 april 2004. That's Dutch for you.
I won't try other languages, english evrybody speaks and I hate German and French.
Danish: "Ses vi den 17. april 2004?".
Treff mich am 17. April 2004
(German)
If you read his post, he says that YYYYMMDD and DDMMYYYY are both sensible, then you call him provincial and agree with him.
Oh well.
This story brings the question : Is there a way to scan (the internet) for MACs addresses like scanning ip's. I mean is there a software that does it ?
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
I dont want to sound like a jackass, but I really dont understand if this is supposed to be an Aprils fool joke or not.
A guy tells us he lost his laptop, cellphone and car and asks if the slashdot community has seen any of them. But he desn't leave any contact information. And he doesnt tell us the model of the laptop, the phone OR of the car. What does he expect, that everyone on slashdot update their firewall rules to log the IP and MAC adress of every computer that connects to us, and try to locate his computer for him? And it's filed under "Your rights online". What does this have to do with DeCSS?
But if this is a joke, I really dont get it. It's just not funny.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
that April Fools doesn't apply after midday?
see that , after "No"? he said that the two formats you mentioned are in fact the ones being used in the world.
your point about MMDDYY being weird is right, though.
This cheapskate! 500 Euros for finding his Mercedes AND his laptop? I'd expect at least 4 times that.
Maybe I'm just too much of a cynic, but that seems like an awfully low reward. I'd be more inclined to just keep the laptop.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
and here in the UK we don't 'speak' dates at all; we say them.
Personally I don't consider your comments on language to have the slightest degree of validity.
Logic is a virtue that you dont posses. Ignorance is bliss. Have a happy life.
Een april, een april, kikke in je bil. This is what they say in the Netherlands when you have been April Fooled. Now swallow.
That gives me an idea:
1)Fill Mercedeses with all sorts of toxic and radioactive garbage (stuff that's expensive to get rid off)
2)Have them stolen by Russian criminals and shiped to Moskou.
3)Get paid by the heavy industry for disposing of their dangerouse waste.
4) sell trips to Russia to see the mysteriouse mutants in Mercedeses.
5)sell miracle cures to the mutants in Russia.
6)Blame MS, SCO and Canada for the Russian mutant problem. Demand money to fix the situation.
7)Send more miracle cures to Russia.
8)Buy bigger warehouse to store money.
YYYYMMDD is a format suitable for filing. MMDDYYYY is some American thing that makes no sense. You don't speak dates like this: "Meet me April 17 2004." It's not natural. You might say "Meet me on the 17th of April 2004." That would correspond to DDMMYYYY. Naturally speaking.
--
Daniel
I thought things like this only happened in the United States. The humanity!
You don't speak dates like this: "Meet me 17 April 2004." It's not natural. You might say "Meet me on April 17th 2004."
parent: ... (those are just the ones I know.. surely there are more)
Not in English it isn't, but in most European languages it is: French, Dutch, Spanish, German,
English is a European language, and we're far more likely to say "Meet me on the 17th of April" over here.
WIFI is not that widespread in Pakistan you know....
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
get the phone company to track it to the nearest tower and rive around that area for a few hours looking for something familar.
Chances are that your phone will be sold here in Latvia soon. Maybe even in my store. At least 50% of "new" mobile phones sold here were stoled in Europe. If I'll notice that I'll let you know.
I use almost exactly that for work:
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Just for fun
The MAC is owned by Belkin. Seems to be related to wireless routers.
The phone is a Siemens Model S55 S30880-S5720 approvial for sale Finland.
Got the VIN on the car? ;-)
In God we trust, all others require data.
Last I checked on those numbers, the laptop and phone have been found and stolen four separate times in the last few hours by various h4ck3r5 0f 7h3 w0r|d hoping to score a piece of that 500-euro reward.
I think the fourth steal was actually the second h4ck3r stealing it back from whomever took it from him. I'd put it in an iron lockbox and wait on the reward to go up!
Oh, wait, he wants the car! Hmm... A license plate and/or VIN would be good.
Spanish in the house: "Nos vemos el 17 de abril de 2004".
Even though this is an April fools... I wonder what proportion of the Mercedez Benz drivers don't have Lo-Jack or some other type of remote recovery device?
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Unlike the United States, most countries list the month number before the day number, making it March 11 and 12.
Ummm... no.
In your haste to bash America, you fucked up and made no sense. Please go back to your ignorant backwater and repent.
Quite standard? You can't get more standard then ISO-standard! :)
Over here in the States I hear numbers like around 2/3 of stolen cars are eventually recovered
Wow, I've never heard that stat. Here in NYC if they don't find your car within a day or two it's in pieces and never recovered. It's an entire industry here.
Developers: We can use your help.
OMFG! You mean that a civilized country in Europe actually has crime!!!!
I don't believe it! (story must be some April Fools thing).
Especially since all you Europeans are constantly bashing America for being such a crime-riddled, gun-toting cesspool of un-civilization. Welcome to the world of reality.
In Polish (polski) "Spotkajmy sie 17go kwietnia 2004"
As an aside question, how difficult is it to change the MAC address of ethernet hardware? And does it matter anyway? Ie. can it not just be spoofed?
:) I hope :().
If the original question was legit, it may not matter since unless it was grabbed by joy riders the car will probably be sliced and diced and its parts scattered to the 4 winds. The laptop and cellphone will either be tossed or used for next week's headlines. (avoiding key phrases
"Just remember, it takes a village idiot." -- The Motley Fool.
Wrong net number though...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Some info:
1. Japanese (or ISO) dates: YYYY-MM-DD. Good for sorting; logically arranged from MSB to LSB.
2. European (ISO-reversing-endianness hehe): DD-MM-YYYY. also good, because in many (Latin-derived?) languages you say the dates this way. Spanish, French, Portuguese: "onze de marco de dois mil e quatro" (pt) ~~ "eleven of march of two thousand and four". not so good for automated sorting...
3. American (USofAn hehehehe): MM-DD-YYYY. the only advantage is that it maps to the English way of saying dates. March eleventh, 2004 (do you say twenty-o-four??)
4. Inexistent: YYYY-DD-MM. this would really, really be braindead.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Encontramo-nos a 17 de Abril de 2004
Nos veemos a 17 Abril, 2004
Rencontre moi le 17 Avril, 2004
You gotta love North-American closed mindedness...
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
You'd think the license plate number would be a better clue [...]
:)
I would think the specific Model of Mercedes might be even more helpful.
Don't know how European car theives are but here in the US a nice car like that would have been chopped up into little pieces by now at some chop shop.
If your car is stolen in NYC you can just visit all the nice garages around Shea Stadium and find an exact replacement. "Wow, it even has the same license plate!"
Porque senao as pessoas podem comecar a nao se preocupar se quem somente entende ingles vai compreender o que elas estao tentando comunicar.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Having fooled at least five people today by claiming to be engaged, my aim for next year is to get engaged on the 31st of March.
No, I would say "please don't ever try and meet me"
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Hey, narrow the scope a little, Canada uses this format, we are north american. Change your post to
You gotta love AMERICAN closed mindedness...
I just called 08701 123 123 and had them block the phone, even if they use a new SIM.
http://www.immobilise.com/home.html
Spotkajmy si 17 (siedemnastego) kwietnia 2004. (Polski)
Robert
PS 17 aprilya 2004 in Russian too, IIRC.
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
It is my theory that the Euro itself was an April Fool's joke from 1999 gone horribly, horribly wrong.
dinner: it's what's for beer
You give $500. :
Let's see how this can sell
- Mercedes Benz : $10000
- Laptop : $1000
- Cellphone : $150
Total = $11150
I'm still not sure I'm gonna tell you if I find your stuff...
____
nico
Nico-Live
If it weren't for that typo, you might have believed him!
One can draw one's own conclusions.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
(In a recent example, a case about French musicians going after Apple for iPod royalties: someone started going on about the DMCA. I pointed out the poster was being US-centric and that the DMCA didn't apply in this case. That poster was not modded Offtopic, but I was modded Flamebait. Atrocious.)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
your MAC (00:30:BD:9C:BD:B2) wasn't listed in our database wifimaps.com, WiGLE doesn't seem to be operational, or I'd do a search there too.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Vi mots den 17e april 2004
(Swedish)
it's in my head
He's not reading it wrong.
He wrote:
unless i'm reading it wrong, and it happened in the future, then it happened 3 weeks ago.
In Geekish that is:
if(not_reading_it_wrong)
happened_3_weeks_ago
else
happened_in_the_future
shows up as a Belkin device using this search.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
WE dont switch em around - its the damn US that gets it wrong.
The most annoying thing about September 11th is that even British newsreaders are using the hateful expression 'nine-eleven' which to every self respecting EU inhabitant used to mean either a sportscar from Porche or '11 minutes past 9' or, at a push, 'the ninth of November' although this would have to have been with a year attached to be appropriate 'nine-eleven-two thousand'.
Why you would reverse a perfectly logical ordering to put the month before the date I have no idea!
YYYY-MM-DD is an ISO standard. ISO 8601:2000
They need to update that list: Belgium is missing. *sigh* (And "update" is quite an understatement because French has been an official language of Belgium since it's creation)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
This post reached +3 funny, even got marked insightful and has now gotten back to the sewer.
It indeed got what it desserved but why has its positive modding been erased (and how -by whom-, btw) ?
"04172004" (or 04/17/2004), MMDDYYYY, would really be read as "April seventeen 2004", NOT April seventeenth 2004". But we add the 'th' because that's sort of correct syntactically, and it sounds right. Similarly, "17042004" would be "Seventeen April 2004" but we would say it "the seventeenth of April, 2004" because it's correct syntactically and it sounds right
----
he's a freak of nature, but we love him so.
Read; Write; Execute
Just out of idle trivial benevolence -- the airline date syntax is directly derived from the US military's administrative notational format for dates, which itself is a derivation of the ubiquitous but slightly obtuse military "date-time-group" by which military message traffic is catalogued, i.e. 010800 APR 04. This translates in civilian to 8 a.m. on the morning of All Fooles Day, in the Year of "Our" Lord, 2004.
In effect, the dominant date/hour paradigm is jumbled/juggled on a extremely regular basis even by the powers that "be"...
"Tavatahan seittemastoista(17) huhtikuuta(April) kakstuhattanelija(2004)." Etela-Pohojammaa, Suomi Finland. "Tavataan seitsemastoista(17) huhtikuuta(April) kaksituhattanelja(2004)" Written language, Suomi Finland.
No, civilized countries write dates either as DDMMYYYY or YYYYMMDD, you don't just juggle the digits around.
Ooga booga! Grrrrr ...
Oops, that must be my uncivilized side showing. I meant, "grow up, smartass" :)
Or you could write dates like most airlines do 01APR04 or in this case 11MAR04..
Probably a wise idea in this heterogenous world ...
Try getting used to DTG (Day Time Group) tagging in military messages. DDTTTTZ(Month)YY
I can see it now. Watch it be a practical joke on someone. All of a sudden, hundreds of /.ers start homing in on his location and a massive chase through the streets. It would be grand. /. is coming! The /. is coming!
The
No, I would say "please don't ever try and meet me".
I would say "please don't ever try TO meet me."
I never understood why people say "try and do something".
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
hehe interesting point, I hadn't really considered that.
You missed another one though, it should be 'try to meet I'
perhaps one should say 'please refrain from attempting to introduce yourself to my person'
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I guess that means you've never heard of Microsoft. :-)
Odd e-mail address no? SlashDotReply@komawi.demon.nl Nice try slashdot
No, in the United States of America they switch the first two items. In the rest of the American continent, we do mostly the right thing.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Belkin makes cheapo WLAN cards, my dad has one. We used to have a Belkin AP, but it broke. Was a POS to begin with, crashed every week or so even after a firmware upgrade (used to crash daily).
What's so odd about a handset being approved in Finland? Perhaps the user is Finnish?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
In the US, 911 is the phone number you dial in an emergency.
There's always been a suspicion that Sept. 11 was chosen because of the fact that the US writes it that way. Symbolism and all that stuff...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
USAians have sloppy grammar, hence "April 17th" --> hence MM/DD/YYYY format.
And then they fscking argue 10 comments long about it and 6 of those fscking comments get moderated up.
WTF is wrong with you mods? This guy would like help for his car and you arm chair detectives can only sit and argue about the date format?
Jeez, instead go kill yourselves with 100 cups of coffee or something...
The posting might be a april fools joke but if not, lets say you lost your laptop and car and didn't have a viable solution to recover it, wouldn't you like the mods to pay attention to comments that might be useful to the poster?
If yyyy-mm-dd is correct why can't you simply drop the yyyy and have mm-dd? Hence, 9-11.
And we don't understand why you call an elevator a 'lift'.
/at least we know idiocy is univerisal
MAYBE ITS BECAUSE EVERY COUNTRY HAS ITS OWN LEXICONS!!!!
If you've got ethereal installed, look at file /usr/share/ethereal/manuf and search for the first three bytes of the MAC address:
...and...
00:30:BD BelkinComp # BELKIN COMPONENTS
This file is a merging of two sources:
The IEEE public OUI listing:
http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml
http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt
Michael Patton's "Ethernet Codes Master Page":
http://www.cavebear.com/CaveBear/Ethernet/
ftp://ftp.cavebear.com/pub/Ethernet.txt
Hey, my old company is even in that file!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
but I need your Paypal account information first ;P
MBZ has been putting tamper-proof VIN stickers on every major body panel and door for at least the last 12 years. Our 1991 mbz has I think 14 vin stickers visible just with the hood/trunk/doors open. Alot more of those numbers are on major parts under the car too. I don't think the windows are VIN'ed.
Stretneme sa 17 aprila 2004 (Slovak)
Setkame se 17 dubna 2004 (Czech)
How can you remember the MAC address without the laptop right in front of you? I can hardly remember my own cell phone number without looking!
...
Now where did i put my bong
Help! I've fallen in a karma hole and I can't get up!
Good old DOD date. Memories of my enlistment flooding back now just seeing it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I couldn't find it on IANA's list of MAC-adresses. It should be on that list :P
Jesus, Tony, lighten up. Relax. Enjoy a nice cup of java, and let it go.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
How does he expect to find his car if it's been more than a few days since it was stolen? I think this is an April fools submission. I agree, that the criminals would have found the laptop and phone by now, and the car would probably be in pieces or another country.
Euro was a tip to not think in U.S. standards.
(Personally I like, YYYYMMDD, because when the dates are alphabetized, they are in chronological order.)
-Dave
on 2004-04-01 14:40 (#8736298): :)
:-)
Quite standard? You can't get more standard then ISO-standard!
I'll go along with that. In fact some of us prefer to format our SlashDates this way
"Incontriamoci il 17 aprile 2004" (Italian)
Please help me find my PC!!! I will give you US$1000. I am very fond of my PC, it was stolen sometime between here and now. I don't know its MAC address, but its IP is 127.0.0.1
Thanks,
April F. Ool
Well, yes, you can also get de facto standard. :-) That one is unfortunately often above ISO standards, etc. :-(
what just happened i know its april 1st but whats going on with slashdot
Younger Cop: And was there anything of value in the car?
The Dude: Oh, uh, yeah, uh... a tape deck, some Creedence tapes, and there was a, uh... uh, my briefcase.
Younger Cop: [expectant pause] In the briefcase?
The Dude: Uh, uh, papers, um, just papers, uh, you know, uh, my papers, business papers.
Younger Cop: And what do you do, sir?
The Dude: I'm unemployed.
Help! I've fallen in a karma hole and I can't get up!
its my birthday too!
Actually, I love (no wait, hate) closed-mindedness everywhere, because that's where it exists- every human-populated area of the world.
Going slightly OT here (but it's 01 Apr, so I think I may be safe from karma thrashing
My reply: (Mugu basically means "dipshit"; the scammers call their marks "mugu", the people who screw with the scammers call the scammers.)
That is correct. Exactly which 2/3 of your car you get back varies, but it's usually the parts that weren't easily removable.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
is there any statistics of nationalities behind projects like gnome?
would be quite intesting to see how much of it is swedish, and then comparing it to how much of its american => tell 'em to
This stuff is so lame, regardless if it is an april fools jokes or not... Why are we posting "help my find my stolen stuff" on /. ... IS THERE NO NEWS TODAY?
snowulf.com
But don't think he had a laptop... and eithe way I didn't record the MAC address. Bummer.
Or you could write dates like most airlines do 01APR04 or in this case 11MAR04..
Oracle's default date format, na?
You could probably only offer a 50 euro reward...
"You are technically correct - the best kind of correct."
Combine WiFi hotspots + DHCP log and match them (just like spam) against a blacklist of stolen material.
with the following MAC address: 00:30:BD:9C:BD:B2 Also a mobile phone was stolen, with IMEI number 351083531088913
Next story will be "I tried ringing the stolen phone, did anyone hear a phone ringing?"
What I'm really worried about is the poor thief. After all, he's just unleashed an unemployed geek army, ready to do battle.
"Cornelius! Look! I saw that MAC address! Hit the gas! Rev up that little Honda Civic! Think of all the anime posters we can buy when we get the reward!"
"Eugene! I was playing with my scanner and I found that IMEI, so I triangulated its location! We can buy t-shirts on Thinkgeek with the reward money! Go Away Or I Will Replace You With A Very Small Shell Script!" [snorting laughter]
And pretty soon, there are 2,500 unemployed virgins with masking tape holding together their glasses converging on the thief's doorstep.
Dude, wherever you are, turn yourself in before it's too late.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
It's situations like this guy's that make me wish I had a mini-PCI GPS card inside my laptop, imagine the possibilities. Once an hour, it could report its exact coordinates to a hidden log on your web server.
Of course, just checking in periodically has its benefits, even without extra hardware. If the laptop sees some "stolen" flag on the server has been set, it turns on keylogging and sends you all the thief's keystrokes. The laptop could also turn on its microphone (yes, they have built in ones) and send a realtime audio stream of everything being said around it.
there was a story in the last year or so on MacSlash and other mac sites about a guy who's sister's iMac was stolenf rom her apartment. being the nerdier of the siblings he had installed (i think) Timbucktoo (sp?) on her machine. it's like Apple's remote desktop, before ARD existed. he just waited till the thief signed on again and till it looked like they left the machine idle and went in to change the isp dialup numbers to his house. he then logged their numbers on his callerID box and used whitepages.com to do a reverse lookup. i think the police were confused about his thing when he went to them but he went to the address and demanded back the machine explaining he knew the stolen merchandise was in the house. the person there claimed "they bought it from some guy" not knowing it was stolen... but as you know stolen merch is stolen merch. i don't think the person using the stolen iMac was charged, but the guy rescued the iMac for his sister.
the story may have been posted tot he apple news section here..... the guy behind it was posting info as it was going on to at least one site. no it wasnt on April fools day either...... makes you wonder if it's not a bad idea to put some remote desktop client app on your machine in case the thief is too stupid to format the machine.
i wasn't making an Apple "i" joke
(Norwegian)
"Sorry, I'm busy that day."
(English)
*The 'o' isn't really an 'o', but an 'o' with a / through it. Silly Slashdot, not supporting essential characters.
.sig? No.
No, I don't. In English English "to meet" takes a preposition, so: "meet me on the 17 April 2004."
Why not find them, show up with a fake badge, and steal it from the thieves. It'd be poetic justice to leave them duct taped and score a new laptop to boot...
I could sell it on E bay for 700 and get 20k for the car in a chop shop. Given the fact it was stolen, it would almost guarantee that the thieves would believe I was a real undercover police officer, especially if I showed up with 3 of my thuggish friends.
no honor among thieves and all that...
Note: I am not serious about this. I live in the US anyway. I am not a criminal and would never actually do something like this. I am just pointing out the vulnerability created when posting stuff like this. You should report it to the authorities, not slashdot.
Get a new mercedes+phone+laptop and include any kind of discrete tracking units you can get your hands on.
:)
put it up for grabs in the same location from where your gear was stolen and let the games begin
humm proactive citizen police work, perhaps we could get government funding, or at least receive sponsorships from the insurance industry.
actually I got my laptop stolen as well once.. tough about the hardware, although I'm most likely financially poorer than the thief and really needed it, the loss of data was the real set back, especially when my backup was on dat tapes in the same bag.
The phone companies are actually able to track IMEI numbers, but they are usually not willing to do it. They can fairly easy track down to which cell a certain phone is located in, even if the SIM card is changed. What is necessary to be able to track your phone is to first let the police take interest.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I just LOVE the mercedes. Right after the chop shop game me what its worth.
Now that laptop is a pile-o-crap. I've stole better from college students.
DOH!!! Wrong MAC address. Ignore me.
And why would the first person pronoun be "I" and not "me"?
I do apologise. You also know what football is, which makes you infinitely superior to them IMO.
My Olympus C-750UZ digital camera and 384MB of xD cards were stolen from a friend's car outside some Manchester Uni building September last year. On said cards were pictures from one of the best weekends of my life (needless to say, I was feeling a ill at the time, hence little thought was put on the camera at the time). It was stolen with a load of other stuff too (clothes, 128M thumbdrive, batteries, charger, lens adaptor and filters..)
Camera has serial number A0050332140929A, but frankly I'd be happy just to get the pictures, or the head of the guy who took it and most likely threw most of it in a bin somewhere.
> No, civilized countries write dates either as DDMMYYYY or YYYYMMDD, you don't just juggle the digits around.
I noticed that you forgot to include the common USA format, which is MMDDYYYY. I can only assume that your deliberate omission of USA as a "civilized country" was an attempt at humor.
It is also, I believe, the standard date format in nearly every single country in the world (inlcuding all the countries in the EU and the US).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Have you ever considered the fact that it should be -09-11 in the Iso8601 date format (YYYY-MM-DD which is the official standard one in the US, UK and EU)?
Or do you still live in the dark ages and not use the standard international date format?
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
600,-
So what if the IMEI is of his friend's phone? [nl]Moehahahahaha[/nl]
RARP: Who has 00:30:BD:9C:BD:B2? Tell 212.238.153.169
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
That just sounds like some car purgatory man!
Where do they go after that?
Some kind of car hell?
I heard that some get their parts ripped to bits for transplants... pretty sick stuff man!
Neither, it's either 1st April 2004 or 2001 April 4th.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell
In my cupboard the other day I found a box of snacks marked with this expiration date: "02 05 04". What the puke is that supposed to mean? I love people who still use 2-digit years, especially when it makes the date almost completely ambiguous.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
go ask my latin teacher
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Wow, we say the same thing about Mexico here in California!
Your car is already in Eastern Europe or Russia and has been stripped of parts or the VIN has been concealed. Your phone as had the IMEI changed, and your laptop has been formatted.
Sorry to break it to you like this, but most cars stolen in Western Europe end up like this. Good luck, though!
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
I must be bored, but of some reason I notice spelling errors...
You can't get more standard then ISO-standard!
than not then
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.
a) The plates would likely be changed
b) The thief isn't as likely to know how to change a MAC
c) You can sniff the mac within the wireless area, you actually have to see the license plate of the car.
Heck, if it were actively seeking connections and went through an urban area you might be able to track it rather well as it wandered in/out of different people's wireless range.
Refresh my memory... French doesn't count because only France and Canada speak it (which is false) and Swedish (which is only spoken in Sweden) counts... That's some kind of logic!!!
In portuguese: "Encontra-te comigo a 17 de Abril de 2004."
And I'm sure you'd have no trouble citing a source for this urban legend?
That statement is so stupid (I am from an European country) that I didn't even understand it. I read it three or four times and even had to read the answers to realize the stupidity you were saying. it just didn't make any sense.
Just an advice, open your eyes and see that there are others places than your office, your house and that little place where you drink beer with your MMDDYYYY friends.
at least he knows the diff between "then" and "than"
In mother russia, car find you!
My Nokia was bought in Australia, but the "Country of handset approval" is Finland.
I think applies only to the manufacturer's home country, or wherever they get the initial approval.
Anda ter comigo a 17 de abril de 2004.
Portuguese.
Nor AT&T's "Consider it Slandered" campaign, nor even this partial redundancy!
(wait for it)
I just saved a load of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico.
Make me aerodynamic in the evening air
Or you could just have the police or Mercedes locate your car through GPS... we're not talking about a Hyundai here...
I found the thief and I'm standing over his sleeping form with a crowbar.
If this is a joke please respond before he wakes up or I run out my PDA's wireless minutes.
YYYY-MM-DD may well be a WRITTEN standard, but in spoken language to actually say two thousand and four April second is hopeless.
Reading the date I would say either "The second of April two thousand and four" or, possibly, "April the second two thousand and four".
Note the presence of "the" in both.
You know what I meant
OK, yes, I admit it ;-)
*of* some reason???
In Sweden we do it like this: YYYY-MM-DD.
Meet me on the 17th of April 2004, that sounds pretty damn natural to me.
Swedish is an official language of Finland, numbnuts. What do you think Linus' mother tongue is, fucking dumbass American bullshit? Try again, motherfucker.