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Wifi and Laptops Adds Up To Theft
Ant writes to mention an SFGate article about the increase in laptop theft in the world of ubiquitous wifi. From the article: "San Francisco police statistics show a disturbing trend. Just 18 laptop computer robberies were logged in 2004, but the figure jumped to 48 last year. There were 18 as of the end of March, a pace that could surpass 70 crimes this year. 'It's a changing culture, and crime is following it'"
Attacking someone for their laptop isn't really any different than attacking them for anything else. This isn't new. Whenever you reveal in public something of particular worth, there's a possibility that some moron is going to attack you in the hopes of stealing it from you.
TFA points out that people congregate with laptops at hotspots. This is true. Thiefs know they can find one or many at such a place.
Before I RTFA'd, I had the same thought. Afterwards, I still have the contention that people would still sit at starbucks and work on excel wireless or no.
More laptops does = more crime. Hotspots may be a factor, but not nearly like they make it out to be.
in Milpitas (McCarthy Ranch) that thieves have been targeting. They do there during lunch and right after work, and do "smah and grab" style robberies on cars. The target: laptops in bags left unattended while the victim shops. Police have had to issue special alerts to shoppers.
Put your laptop in the trunk when you leave your office, so that potential thieves don't see you place it there when you arrive at the mall.
If you consider that San Francisco consists of millions of people... is 18 really a lot? I mean sure, stolen property it stolen property, but the figures sound rather minute.
In a recent speech Negropante said: "You see. When I said we were building $100 laptops for developing countries, you people assumed I meant Africa. What I was referring to was Caliifrnia. Have you been to some of the neighborhoods in LA? You can get killed for your shoes. In order to make it safer for folks in cities like San Fracisco where, let's face it, they cannot defned themselves, I developed this idea. Give them an etch-a-sketch interface, and an off brand of Linux, and NO self respecting thief would even bother.
Sure, thre will be the occasional bully who takes your cheap computer just to break it and watc you cry. That is life. But there will be no secondary market for these computers. EVAR!
I fully expect to win a Nobel for this."
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
18, 48, and 70? In San Francisco? I would have guessed that number to be several times that.
Hmm...actually, for 2004, there was nearly 5 times as many murders as there were laptop thefts. Moral of the story is that if you carry a laptop, you are 5 times less likely to be murdered!
While it is unfortunate that one person got stabbed for their laptop, I have to wonder if this is somehow being blown somewhat out of proportion. Yes there has been an increase in this sort of crime (at least in the SF area), but how long before Starbucks gets cameras and the like to make these environments less appealing to thieves? My guess is that it won't take long. After all, the laptop user is a user who is willing to pay for their coffee, which means that they want to keep that cash rolling in.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Did anyone happen to consider that, since there are MORE laptops in the world, there might be more thefts?
Correlation doesn't mean causation and all that jazz.
(wtf - this is news now?)
Please check out my reasonably priced notebooks on EBay!
I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.
I'm not saying this is the only precaution one should take, or that it's guaranteed to work. But it's easy to do and increases the likelihood that some evidence will be captured. It depends on the stupidity of the thief, and those kinds of people often just aren't that smart.
I have a Thinkpad (pre-Lenovo, so it'a good one) with wifi, and a biometric figerprint scanner. Can I assume that I am at a greater risk of being robbed and having my finger(s) cut off?
That would really be the only logical conclusion.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I'd like to see the creation of a publicly accessable stolen property registry, to make it harder for thieves to sell their loot. Auction sites, like eBay, could require sellers to list the serial numbers, if any, of all items that they are selling.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Once again I think the summarizer has confused the words and thus the discussion.
The key word here is robbery, which means violence or intimidation being used to steal the property.
I'm sure the number of laptop thefts is vastly higher. I worked at one company in the south of market area a few years back that was broken into several times and lost nearly 10 laptops alone.
Seems to me there's a couple things one could do as a precaution:
- Load an application that would have the laptop occasionally contact a server to see if it's been reported stolen, and if it has been, start reporting IP and MAC addresses it hears on WiFi in its vicinity, connections it has made for landline internet, perhaps taps on email going through it, and so on - and turn on the WiFi transmitter to broadcast the occasional "Here I Am" packet for direction finding.
- Record the WiFi MAC address of the PC and sniff for it once it's stolen.
- Record whatever info the PC will use to identify itself to Microsoft if/when somebody tries to register/authorize a fresh load of one of their products. (Here's where Microsoft could do the law abiding a service by reporting IP address and date/time to law enforcement when a stolen machine is reauthorized.)
Sort of a software LoJack.
If the theives don't eload the software the PC will "phone home" once the ultimate recipient starts running it, and it will be trackable. If they DO reload it the may call the cops down on themselves directly - and even if they do workarounds they still need to leave enough identity info on the machine for it to be usable - and forgeries in a global namespace also leave tracks.
Wardrivers could do a service by reporting approximate locations of reported-as-stolen MAC addresses, as a starting point for a direction-finding bunny hunt. A public-service distributed application (in the same vein as SETI-at-home) could do the same - or could blanket userland with beacons of known location for a WiFi-only replacement for GPS that would let the phone-home software identify its own location (if it can't do that adequately via currently known WiFi beacons such as hotspots.)
Recover a few (and identify and question the people who got them, with the threat of a "receiving stolen property" bust if they don't cooperate) and police can work back up the reselling chain to the thieves.
And yes I'm QUITE aware of how such systems could be abused.
Note that some of these can be done privately and in a moderately secure fashion. (For instance: open source phone-home app with strong encryption, using an owner-generated key to enable its reporting functions.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I work at a large book retailer that has a well-established network of coffee bars outfitted with wireless hotspots.
This company loves for customers to hang out for hours (and truth be told, many hang out all day and night several days a week) because they invariably buy more stuff the longer they stick around. The longer they stay, the more relaxed they become. When it comes time to get a new book, many will simply get up and walk away from their unattended laptop for anywhere between 1 and 20 minutes (don't get me started on table camping). Many days I've stood there during slow periods in amazement at the amount of very expensive hardware just left in the open with no one to watch it.
It's inevitable that thieves will begin to exploit this as I've seen the same level of carelessness at similar retailers and sister stores in several states. There really isn't much I can do about it other than make friendly reminders when talking to customers - which risks offending the all-too-common customer with the over-inflated sense of self importance who finds any suggestion that they alter their behavior in any way (even if it will benefit them) as a severe insult.
I try to keep an eye on things, even though it's not my responsibility, and I'm usually too busy to notice what's going on in the seating area unless there is a major disturbance (in other words: never).
"Casual" laptop theft is going to increasingly be a problem, but not one that I fear to any great extent as in most cases it can be defeated with the help of common sense which itself is a rare commodity these days.
So why not concentrate a few plain-clothes cops in the same areas and tip the balance the other way?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Everyone knows that it's the lack of pirates. Lacking their true career in naval piracy our potential pirates are forced to plunder laptops.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
It's nice to see someone taking the other side of the situation into account, but in my area, the starving muggers trying to feed starving babies are more like addicts looking to score cash for their next fix, or idiot kids looking to get their next $300 Sean John sweatsuit to wear to school. Unfortunately, the law does not make this distinction.
Your argument is in my opinion invalid, as there are much better ways to get food for your starving baby, or your next overpriced clothing article. We are not living in an impoverished country, and jobs (not necessarily six-figure, but jobs nonetheless), government aid, and private help systems (think food drives and charity locations) are readily available.
As for having to live for a month off of soup, please spare me. If these people were willing to work and use the resources made available to me, they could eke out a decent lifestyle legally for themselves and their families. The ones that resort to crime are in desperate circumstances (which is still not an excuse) or just too lazy to do something constructive.
And a victimless crime? Hardly. How many people have theft insurance on their laptop? How many want to spend the extra cash on it? Not I, and not many people I know of.
Perhaps if muggings only happened to the upper class, I would not be so concerned. Someone that makes $5,000 in a week is not going to be troubled too much to spend $3,000 on a new set of toys. Someone who had to work all summer for that one laptop or iPod (and, in my experience, students with a passion for tech like myself are much likelier targets because we have no choice but to go through dark, poorly-policed areas to get to and from school/work.)
Granted, my perspective is biased from having been the victim of several muggings and assaults myself, but here in NYC, the most common type of mugger is in high school, listens to 50 cent, and has absolutely no legitimate means or need to dress himself in $300 sneakers to show that he is "pimp" to his classmates, which he sees about once a month in class and about thrice a day smoking weed, an activity also largely funded by this type of action.
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.