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Stolen Laptop Calls In! - Will Police Act?
broswell asks: "We rent computer equipment and occasionally our equipment gets stolen. I wrote a little VBS script that calls our webserver every hour (script below) and installed it on our laptops. Sure enough, some laptops went missing. One of the stolen laptops is now calling in from a Verizon Internet account which appears to be in a neighboring town. The Baltimore City Police grudgingly filled out a police report 'so we could collect insurance' but don't seem willing to subpoena Verizon, find the address of the end user, recover tha laptop and prosecute the thief. They seem clueless. The Maryland State police has a computer crimes unit. The have a clue, but they claim they don't have jurisdiction. It is not about the money (our customer signed for the computers and will pay for the stolen items), we just want justice." With all of the necessary information in hand of the proper authorities, how likely is it that the stolen laptop will be recovered?
For those interested, here is the script the laptop used to report itself back to its owners:
Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objScriptExec = objShell.Exec("ipconfig /all")
strIpConfig = objScriptExec.StdOut.ReadAll
myvar = "send=" + strIpConfig
do until 0=1
on error resume next
a=HTTPPost("http://www.yourtrackinghost.com/cgi-bin/locator.pl",myvar)
WScript.Sleep 3600000
LOOP
Function HTTPPost(sUrl, sRequest)
set oHTTP = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
oHTTP.open "POST", sUrl,false
oHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
oHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-Length", Len(sRequest)
oHTTP.send sRequest
HTTPPost = oHTTP.responseText
End Function
For those interested, here is the script the laptop used to report itself back to its owners:
Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objScriptExec = objShell.Exec("ipconfig /all")
strIpConfig = objScriptExec.StdOut.ReadAll
myvar = "send=" + strIpConfig
do until 0=1
on error resume next
a=HTTPPost("http://www.yourtrackinghost.com/cgi-bin/locator.pl",myvar)
WScript.Sleep 3600000
LOOP
Function HTTPPost(sUrl, sRequest)
set oHTTP = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
oHTTP.open "POST", sUrl,false
oHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
oHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-Length", Len(sRequest)
oHTTP.send sRequest
HTTPPost = oHTTP.responseText
End Function
Cops basically are dickheads with guns, many of them were on the other side of the law until they decided to jump to a more stable occupation but still have a testosterone outlet and easy access to drugs. Oh, there are exceptions, cops who really believe they are helping everyone and fight FOR GREAT JUSTICE! I've had to work with many cops related to some issues with very unstable neighbors who were practicing arsonists. I never met a cop who worried about protecting citizens more than where the next donut was coming from.
Also, the war on drugs? Take this example, gleaned right from COPS (an overwhelmingly pro-cop show): they were doing a day of drug stings. Guys in cars hitting a neighborhood asking for drug deals and catching the dealers. Know what the guy in charge said at the end of the show, tossing a bag of evidence up and down in his hands? "Yeah we are probably going to move on from here, after a couple days you're likely to 'burn out' a neighborhood and not get any more results." OH FUCK, we might scare the dealers so bad we STOP ALL DRUG DEALING in the neighborhood, BETTER QUIT WHILE WE'RE AHEAD or we won't have jobs in a few months! So the idea is to keep the drug dealing going, so you can come back to that neighborhood over and over again, but not crush the market there? This shit makes me want to start a revolution.