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Serial Burglar Caught on Webcam
Metatron writes "The BBC is reporting about a serial burlgar caught after images recorded by a webcam were automatically emailed to an outside server. The evidence was made available to the police even though the computer itself had been stolen! This is also discussed on the victims own web site and the local newspaper in Cambridge." From the article: "I was relieved it did what I'd intended it to when I was burgled again. It was nice to catch him in the act - but it didn't stop him from stealing my things."
I have mine record movements while out as well as speak "Intruder alert, intruder alert" hoping to scare any would-be burglers away while snapping their photo.
Hopefully it will never be "needed."
A great use for the new Mac Mini too!
The victim, Duncan Grisby, is the developer of the excellent omniORB CORBA ORB.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
"burglarized"
burgled.
The word you are looking for is burgled.
There is no such word as burglarized.
A burglar burgles.
See here.
Looks good to me.
The guy plead guilty, so the whole thing would have been shoved through fast by agreement with both sides.
For stats nerds: the average is 66 days, 57 for non-jury cases.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Then you'd better tell the people at Merriam-Webster, as it seems they disagree:
burglarize
He posted it on cam.misc and it seemed to spread from there...0 239a9bdae854818
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/cam.misc/msg/
http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHom e
I used to do this exact same thing (but after having the house broken into once first)
I think it was around 1998 when I first started using motion, still do. Have set it up in a few office spaces for non-profits.
Not trolling, but this is not new.
SmartWater - a clear liquid containing microscopic particles encoded with a unique forensic signature that, when found coated on stolen property, provides a precise trace back to the owner and, when detected on a suspect, can conclusively implicate a felon. It's big with the UK police. Check out this article on Wired
Is it being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost. Isn't that what makes a man? That and a pair of testicles
http://motion.sourceforge.net/
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
or this
ZoneMinder
burglarize (bûrgl-rz)
1. To enter and steal from (a building or other premises).
2. To commit burglary against: The second-floor tenants have been burglarized twice.
-----
burgle (bûrgl)
To burglarize.
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
Yeah come on. If you mean the Tony Martin case it wasn't a rifle it was a shotgun, he is thought to have lied about where he shot the burglar (claiming it was inside on the stairs, but more likely was outside I think), and had in fact shot the kid in the back while he was running away.
British law allows reasonable force, which doesn't specifically exclude killing him. Almost all the cases brought to court by the police, and thus the CPS have been thrown out. Recent advice to the police is the stop taking these cases to court unless it's clear that an offence has been committed.
jh
3. The interesting bit here is that the system used is likely to have been GNU Motion (which means the machine running linux). He even left the thing running in debug mode where it shows the rectangle where the motion was picked up.
:)
I never really intended that as a debug mode...
I added the rectangle to be able to quickly see in a frame what caused the events.
But some might consider that debug info
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Or try this: coral link
Speaking of which, WTF is up with picture number 2!!!
I thinking that must be the picture they showed him to get a quick confession.
The camera is just a generic video camera with a composite output. It's connected to a BT-848 video capture card in a Linux PC. I then use motion to detect motion and capture images. I then have some Python scripts I wrote that upload the captured images to an FTP server.
I'm afraid I had to block access to my server from Slashdot. I don't have enough bandwidth for the onslaught.
Duncan.
Last year, Kenneth Faulkner shot and wounded a burglar. He assumed - incorrectly - that the burglar was armed since he had previously stolen guns from Mr Faulkner.
The CPS decided not to prosecute since the assumption that his life was in danger was reasonable.
Tony Martin shot and killed a burglar who was running away! His life was not in danger.
and US experience has taught us that making it suddenly illegal will probably do more harm than good. I don't see the harm in gradually raising the drinking age, however, until one must be 60 to enjoy a 60-year old Scotch. (And, no, I'm not yet 60, and won't see 60 any time soon.)
I freely acknowledge that the drug problem is complex. That was exactly my point. Legalizing drugs will not fix our problems, any more than legalizing alcohol did.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Funny, but...
The difference is which word is the original.
A Burglar is someone who burgles, with burgle being the root word that you are modifying to describe a person.
Technically, to burglarize should be defined as "making someone into a burglar."
To apologize is to make an apology. Apology being the root word that you are modifying. The apropriate modification is apologizer, which is a valid word with an appropriate definition.
Having been driven to distraction by burgalrized, I did a little research and it turns out that both the words burglar and burglarized are only about 135 years old - before then there was only the word burgled. The first recorded occurrence of the world burgle in writing appeared in 1870 in a London newspaper, burglarized appearing a year later in a New York newspaper. It seems burgle caught on over here in the UK, whereas burlarizer became popular in the USA.
Having grown up with burgle, I had always assumed that burglarized was just down to the American tendency to 'verbize' words - using the word 'leverage' instead of 'lever' for instance.
It wasn't really the fact that Tony Martin shot the burgler that got him convicted, it was the fact that after he shot the guy, he locked the guy up in a storeroom and left him to bleed to death.
The jury reckoned that a "reasonable" person would have phoned the police after the incident, not gone down the pub for a few pints.
That and the fact the shogun he used was illegal as Tony Martin had had his firearms licence taken off him after an "incident" where he took a pot-shot at his neighbour's house.