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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
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.
psst. ... . take note of the date.
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.
For sale:
Second hand Mercedes, second hand laptop and second hand mobile phone.
Total price: 501
Hate me!
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!
I'm usually the first to bemoan non-news postings, but the fact is that slashdot is also a community (see "Ask Slashdot"). While posting every single theft report doesn't make sense, you have to admit that it would be cool, in this case, if the slashdot community came up with a way to track this auto down using technology, yes?
so he might be telling the truth....
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..."
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.
> I can't believe all the people that don't catch april fools.
OK, if it's an April fools joke, whats funny about it?
Don't mind me, I'm just pissed off that they didn't accept my story about using chickens in nuclear weapons.
A latent existence
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.
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
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.
Is this your Mercedes
I metamoderate, therefore I am
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
HEAR HEAR!!!!
Never forget that we are a community, and that is what makes us strong!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Huh?
Why is someone posting my MAC address?
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.
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?
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
You realise that not everyone in europe speaks english? 17 April 2004 makes sense in many languages, including french.
besides, how cool would a story be:
today, a notorious car thief was caught by a mob of computer nerds...
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,
Seriously, it would be real cool to have some vigilante nerds solve this case.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
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
Remember, In soviet russia, the fool Aprils...
I think...
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
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
I can't believe all the people that don't catch april fools
Please enlighten us as to how this qualifies as an April Fools? I doubt that that's the intention, but even if it is, by definition it still is not an April Fools:
April Fools: April 1; celebrated by playing of practical jokes
Practical Joke: A mischievous trick played on a person, especially one that causes the victim to experience embarrassment, indignity, or discomfort.
And I second the parent post in that I certainly don't see why this is put on the front-page either. These are the type of things that you don't put on the front because it's stupid. It's stupid because there's many MANY more people that have stuff (laptops,cars,cell phones) stolen. Should they all get front-page attention? I don't think so.
What WOULD be front-page material is a link to a website where you can register stolen items, with information such as MAC addresses of the network interfaces. And the website has an 'API' so you can write software to automatically scan your network for those MACs, or a program that you can run before you buy it, to see if hardware is stolen.
That would be news for nerds.
But I'm sure Michael will soon enough find out about his mistake as the submission queue gets overladen with similar stories.
(don't get me wrong, I feel sorry for the person that got all that stuff stolen. But putting on the front page, [nl]daar kan je niet aan gaan beginnen...[/nl])
No doubt...we just had our house burglarized last week, and they got 5 laptops (then the neighbors came by to see why the dogs were barking and scared off the guys, or they would of had a lot more (: ). Would be nice to hear some stories of ways to "find" them in a /.'y way.
/. was trying to use its power for good (; Oh well...
Personally, I've been watching for VPN connections at work that aren't the few usual people that use it...but I'm counting on thieves being smart enough to plug in a laptop and turn it on (;
On the note of the actual story...I had hoped it was real, and
Yuma, AZ...You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.
However, I'm not sure 500 Euros is worth the effort.
Are you kidding? That's, what, $1,000,000 USD?
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
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!
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...
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.
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 have a cron job that runs every few hours and grabs a web page from my web server. This is already a good start, because my logs will show the IP that grabbed the page, and nothing else even knows the page exists. But I went one better, and wrote a small program to parse the page for commands. So for now, the page is blank, and nothing happens. If I should need to, I can change the contents of the page to have my computer e-mail me the output of 'ifconfig' (which would also give me juicy headers to look through), open an ssh connection to my web server with a tunnel allowing me to connect back the other way, or just run an arbitrary command on the shell. I have no idea how useful it might be, but it was a fun little project.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Slashdot will probably post a dupe 365 days from now.
No. In _America_ they switch the date and month in their numberic dates. We go the sensible route and put the elements in order.
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
...The thief, who was blind in one eye and severely crippled, kicked all two hundred of their asses and escaped unscathed.
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.
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
Quite standard? You can't get more standard then ISO-standard! :)
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.
That would be the VIN Number and it is written in several places on the car.
(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'
I guess that means you've never heard of Microsoft. :-)
but I need your Paypal account information first ;P
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.
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.