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I Use Twitter, Please Rob Me
nk497 writes "Developers looking to prove a point about the information people are sharing on social networking sites have unveiled a new tool called Please Rob Me. It hunts out tweets from people who are also using location-based services telling the world that they're out of town, and then directs the world to go rob their house. The creators of the site said: 'Don't get us wrong, we love the whole location-aware thing. The information is very interesting and can be used to create some pretty awesome applications. However, the way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information is less awesome.' How long until the first actual robbery takes place?"
Thank you Please Rob Me! My new LED TV is awesome!
I sense some legal trouble for these guys in the near future..
This isn't news. People's houses are cleared out regularly due to their Facebook status.
welcome our new squatter neighbors.
after the site get's /. I figure about 6 hours we should be seeing reports LOL
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Yes, physical security, you're away from your home. So are a vast majority of people from between the hours of 9AM to 3PM every day. There's been a lot of backlash over this site, including Twitter suspending their account, which is just silly. It's the same level of surveillance that someone can do by just parking in front of your home. It's just that now they can see you over FourSquare (speaking of silly...). It's the same as posting on Twitter that you're stuck in traffic, or sending an email from a work-only address. Just another in a very, very long list of ways to see where you're currently at.
Criminals will still just sit out in front of your house and wait for the cars the leave.
I can also imagine guys tweeting as if they were on holidays, but being home-entrenched and armed to the teeth, just for the fun of shooting at thieves.
but services like Facebook where less privacy-sensitive people might actually reveal where they live as well as when they aren't there... that's worrysome. Then again, they'd just be reaping what they sow - not that it justifies the robber, of course.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
doesn't mean you should.
It is one thing for unscrupulous behavior to happen, it is another to encourage it. Their motives may be "pure" in that they are trying to bring awareness about what people know about you and what "could" happen. That doesn't mean it should happen. Not everyone is a crook and we should all strive to not be crooks, it is better for everyone. There used to be a time when everyone left there doors unlocked and trusted the community to not rob them. Now the community is encouraging people to rob people. The issue isn't people sharing their information, its people like these guys who are just being ass holes. We shouldn't have to hide our information, people should just respect each other enough not to steal their stuff.
and companies providing location services as they are more likely to have money.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The site doesn't tell you whether everyone in the household is gone, only if one person in the household is gone. A robber would still have to peek in the windows and do whatever it is robbers do to make sure the house is empty. But they could do that just by walking around some random neighbourhood and peeking in random windows; they don't need Twitter to tell them to peek into someone's windows.
But if this raises awareness, full steam ahead. People need to figure out that if they have minute-by-minute updates of where they are and what they are doing, all of which is publically available, they will sooner or later have consequences.
Moreso than robberies: I'm surprised we don't have rapes because of this, i.e. a girl tweeting while drunk.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
It's just like those "bait cars" the cops use.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
good idea but i cant help but think this is going to be a catalyst for the "first twitter robbery"
There won't even be bones for their families to bury by the time the lawyers, both prosecutors and trial lawyers, are done with them for aiding and abetting this if the robber used their app. This is so stupid that it would make running a mirror of The Pirate Bay in the middle of Hollywood look slightly intelligent by comparison.
Basically, there's nothing wrong with the technology. The defect comes with the users. People are unreliable and untrustworthy. If people weren't such assholes I wouldn't mind letting everybody know my sexual habits, or even my fantasies. But there are spoilers out there; the type of people who say I have a bad attitude are also the same type of people who steal staple removers at the office and use "private" data for personal gain. The backstabbers are the people who smile a lot and are heavily into "family values" and "morality". I once heard a psychologist say that people in prison are more likely to be Conservative in there beliefs (by being pro-death penalty, pro-capital punishment and anti-crime) then people who are not in prison. Average, normal people tend to be irrational.
I thought this has already happened a few times in the United States. Im at work so I cant research for it though.
This is yet another reason I don't use a number of the social networking services. Just like the one which shows your location to your friends. Unless I am lost in some massive state park, I see no use. And if you going to say that "Only those who you want to see you profile can" (regardless of social service), who's to say that one of your "friends" robs you. Just dont see the practical point in most of these services.
You could always make a fake post stating you're going out of town for a night, then wait and see if someone shows up. Arm yourself with a ball bat and claim self defense.
Sounds a bit premeditated.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
I hear insurance scammers quietly whispering about new schemes throughout the US about how to use this to their benefit.
Wouldn't this only work on single person households where that single person twitters all day long?
At the risk of web whoring (I hope this isn't considered that, because I'm on topic), I posted a webcomic on this topic today at www.lunatechfringe.com. I'd just post the comic directly but I don't think there's a way to attach images.
Webcomics Posted Monday-Friday http://www.lunatechfringe.com
If I give my phone to someone else, then sit at home with my webcam streaming to the web, and a gun....
Can I kill an intruder in legitimate self defence while it happens to be broadcasting to the web?
I always set bear traps in my house when I'm out of town. Take that, PleaseRobMe.com!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Robbery means taking something from your person or your immediate control by force or threat of force. They most likely mean burglary.
Profit? NRA endorsements, talk-show circuit, book deals ...
I'm going to Greece for a week!
I live at 123 Main street anytown, USA
Bye everyone, I'm leaving now!
(Don't really leave, sit just inside door with shotgun)
?
Profit!
A little bit of common sense can go long way.. most of the people are not in their house during day-time.. umm when they leave their house for work..
i don't think posting that you are out of your home for few hours is going to make much difference... the robbers have to make sure that your neighbors are also not at their home
may be we can go one step ahead and make a website that does that too..
in addition to XXX, three of their neighbors have also left their house
Please try my ex-wife's house. That's where you'll find my stuff.
There's money to be made scaring grandma, isn't there? I die laughing at people who worry about their secrets.
When God goes to war, He drops big bangs.
23:00 - crap, forgot to feed the rotwheiler. Ah well, I am sure he can find something around the house.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Mmm, well according to my Simpsons guide to everything I need to know about the US of A, it don't work if you invite them in. Could be called entrapment. Honey traps by the cops are legal because they don't entice people to break into those honey pots, they don't leave extra valuable stuff in the car or leave the door open or something like that, just another parked car, no enticement == funny arrest videos.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
10am, hibernating.
11am, hibernating.
12am, hibernating.
1pm, hibernating.
2pm, hibernating.
3pm, hibernating.
4pm, hibernating.
5pm, hibernating.
6pm, hibernating.
7pm, ate hitchhiker.
8pm, hibernating.
9pm, hibernating.
Mind you, considering the average tweeter, this is actually pretty riveting stuff.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Domain name: PLEASESUEME.COM
Administrative Contact:
Pruett, Mike mlt@mltgroup.com
4012 5th Place NW
Rochester, MN 55901
US
507-281-3490
So really, this should be called "Please Rob Him".
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Cool, I dont understand how people can still state there is no money in these twitter web 2.0 services. The site needs some improvements though: there should be a twitter robbery feed to better spread the news which robber chose which house, its quite sad to look through the broken window of MrsMelanies house with 10 other potential robbers and see, that the flatscreen tv is already gone. Keep up the good work, its time for the premium services!
1. It needs to be "please burgle me". If you aren't at home, then you are being burgled, not robbed. A robbery is theft with violence or the threat of violence (at least in English law - Theft Act 1958 - it is). If nobody is at home, then nobody can be the victim of violence or the threat of violence. So your home is getting burgled - or, if you are an American, burglarized (what the hell kind of a word is that, right?).
2. PleaseRobMe seems to be built around the premise that one home = one person. If you know where I live, please be assured that I am currently not at my home. But other people live where I live. Families exist. Flat sharing exists. Communal living exists. (Yeah, go and raid the kibbutz - I'm sure it'll be empty!) This may be true for Web 2.0 valleyboys. It's not true of the rest of the planet.
That said, this kind of thing does show why most location-based services are stupidly designed. I have played around with a few of them, and the only one I'm a real big fan of is FireEagle. Sadly, it's been a bit neglected for business reasons - i.e. Yahoo! financial situation. What is great about FireEagle is you share you location with FireEagle, and they then share it with whatever services you want to share it with. So, I have the little iPhone app which updates FireEagle. FireEagle knows exactly where I am. Then there's a Facebook app which connects to FireEagle, but I don't necessarily have to let it broadcast my location if I don't want it to. Or I can only give a vague location - perhaps at a country or city level. I have it wired in to my SSH setup, so if I SSH in to my Linux box from certain places, it updates my location. Because it is a location broker, it can be updated in any way people think of, rather than having to use a specific application (say, for the iPhone) like FourSquare etc. do.
This is useful as I can build applications that sit on top of it. One I have been meaning to build is a "remind me when I'm at X" app. So I could basically dump a string (SMS/tweet length) into a database with a broad location in it. It could check against my location and when they match, I could be reminded of X. Remember to buy ice cream when I'm at the supermarket - well, when I'm at the supermarket, I should get a text message saying to buy ice cream.
Location-based services shouldn't be tied to devices but to people. This is what everyone gets wrong. They need really good granular privacy controls. They need a big "forget me" option. This is something Google Latitude doesn't have. There is no way I have found to tell Google Latitude "Hey, take me off the radar. I'm not anywhere anymore."
When I have some time to build it, I'd love to build something like FireEagle but running on my servers and just for me. Location is too important, useful and fun to trust Google or Yahoo! or some venture-backed Valley startup with. But if you are building location-based services, look at FireEagle and learn.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
1. I have a couple of large dogs.
2. The dogs need feeding.
3. Food is expensive.
4. Tweet I'm going away for a few days and have left xyz on the desk oh dear.
5. Dogs fed.
6. Profit!
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Not only did you completely miss the joke, but at least to moderators did as well. It's a honeypot, you don't want a deterrent like a dog post.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
8:35 AM: On vacation until March. However, I'm contributing to the American economy by having hired 24-7 shark handlers and focused light and radiation engineers. The night shift guy is precisely 1/8th my size.
8:37: Muahahaha. Muahahahah. Muahahahahahahahahaha.
TWO
Augh
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Anyone mash this up with googlemaps and streetview yet? That would really drive the point home.
At last a little payback for all this unfettered twitter narcisism. It's probably not very nice, but I can't help feeling more than my share of shadenfreude...
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The only thing they're doing is scanning twitter for foursquare addresses, and prepending an "I'm out of the house".
They aren't publishing information that wasn't already public, or even aggregating it in new and creative ways. They're just recontextualizing posts people are already putting online!
It's not stupid. It's Advanced.
Robbery, by definition, means the victim is present, as in, the robber steals from the victim. If you are away, your house may get burgled, but not robbed.
The issue isn't people sharing their information, its people like these guys who are just being ass holes.
That's exactly right. The only value of any security measure is to increase the costs for the bad guys (whomever that is from your perspective) to do you harm.
This service decreases the costs of finding people to harm. Without this service, the costs are much higher, so this service potentially does real harm. Heck, an unlocked house without this service is probably more secure than a locked house with this service - that speaks to the level of harm.
Maybe when somebody posts the home addresses of those involved they'll get it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Maybe I'm not home, and maybe I have announced that on twitter. But my pit bull is always home and he doesn't use twitter.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
If your location based service isn't using your GPS but is using your IP address then openvpn helps here. And maybe there's a market for a personal WAP which is connected to your home network via openvpn. As devices get smarter, so should we.
I wonder if any of these new smartphones can double as a WAP while using either 3G or Wifi for Internet connectivity?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
This is why some 12-year-olds really shouldn't be allowed to use the computer unsupervised.
#DeleteChrome
I'm not home, however I have a nice alarm with lots of fun motion sensors. When armed, standing in my yard for a few minutes sends a warning out to security. Basically, you break in, you'll hear a car siren in about a minute, assuming you can hear it over the sonic shockwave of my custom built alarm siren. (I think I may come close to violating some noise ordinance with that thing, you can hear it for blocks.)
Set your status to away, park your car down the block, get out the "home defense" technology guaranteed under the second amendment. Vigilante justice, baby!!!
Umm, just to confirm, I'm kidding...
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Posting "currently out of the country for two months" and sitting in the living room with a shotgun could be fun.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
...BAITTWEET!
39 But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on (your) right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. 40 If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well. 41 Should anyone press you into service for one mile, 26 go with him for two miles. 42 Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow. 43
When God goes to war, He drops big bangs.
This happened a few years ago.
A family discovers that the BBQ has been stolen.
There is a note in the mail the next day. The note says that they are sorry over the BBQ, since their kid stole it. There is some Tickets for an event a few days later.
The owners of the house come back to discover that they had been robbed.
Everything was gone.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
Only if you live in a neighborhood where that's possible. I never have. There's no on-street parking where I live now. I knew the cars of all my neighbors in the last house (and would certainly walk up to strangers sitting in their cars and ask them if I could help them with anything). In my first house the elderly lady next door maintained 24x7 vigilance over the entire street, and would either call police or come out with a shotgun if she saw anything amiss.
Of course, if you live in an entirely soulless white-collar suburban community your remarks are 100% applicable. But I can't stomach those sorts of places, where nobody ever tears themselves away from the TV/Intertubes/Xbox for longer than it takes to hire a Mexican to mow the lawn. I know all my neighbors and chat with them frequently, I know what cars belong and when.
This is sort of the point I try to make when people say that their innocuous emails (e.g. "Yes, we'll come to your party on Saturday night") don't need to be encrypted.
At least the "nice" thing about having your bigscreen TV burgled, is that when you get home, you'll know that it happened. If your car insurance premium goes up $5 per month, you'll have no idea that it's because the insurance company figured out that you happen to travel through areas that have higher-than-average accident rates.
Think about what you're leaking. And hell yes, fear the government, but they're not the only parties whose interests might conflict with your own.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"How long until the first actual robbery takes place?"
How long until the liability suit against the coders takes place? Insurance lawyers are the hungriest of sharks. IANAL, but come on, there is some responsibility to be taken for facilitating crime with an application made specifically for encouraging crime in spite of what purpose you say it's for. Just ask the developers of Napster or Morpheus.
"What brought you to pick this particular house to rob?"
"Well, there was this computer application that alerted me to an empty house, I got it from www.pleaserobme.com"
One whois and a warrant or two later...
" Hello Mr.Clerk, We're filing a suit against these developers, set me up a court date with Judge R. Bean ASAP"
There doesn't appear to be software to tell you when coders are clearly" out to lunch", but there is code that addresses the problem.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
They left out the most important sentence, that everyone from the press MUST hear when he hears about this:
The world does not need our site, for robbers to use this information to rob people. Robbers do that anyway.
The world does need our site, so that we become aware that they do it anyway!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Some prankster did something similar with dating sites. He put up a pic of some random hot chick as his profile and posed as a nympho looking for sex. He asked guys to send pictures of their faces and their junk and he got a ton of results, often with personal information that had them completely pegged as if faces weren't enough. Now at this point he could have just said "I could really drop the bomb on these people, the point has been proven" but no, he released everything instead. I don't know if there were any repercussions from this but that really didn't seem like a smart move.
I think these guys are making a great point here but if they're really showing real info, nothing obfuscated, then a robbery is bound to happen. Even if the robber had no idea about this service and just happened to hit the house, the victim wouldn't know that and would naturally assume that's why he was hit. Liability out the ying-yang, methinks.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
@NRA tweets "Bob Smith at 142 Flower St., Green Park, MI is not at home. Visit for burglar-shaped target practice."
UTF-8: There and Back Again
...and that's why a lot of us are glad US law doesn't quite rule the whole world just yet.... sueing somebody else for emotional damage because you posted on the public internet that you're not at home, because this causes you "a great deal of emotional unrest". Presumably the same people will be sueing Google and every other search engine that's archiving these posts as they scrape the internet?
Grow up, take responsibility for your own actions. If having the world knowing that you're not at home causes you "emotional unrest", well then don't tell the world. Seems to me that some folk are incredibly child-like, unable to take responsibility for their own actions. Not sure who to blame for this. But I sure hope these people don't have any influence or authority in the wider world, seems like they should be kept in some sort of kindergarten.
Dear Rob(ber),
Sorry I didn't tweet about Rex. He's embarrassingly frisky so I tend not to bring it up.
My daughter and I are going out of town this weekend. We've both Facebooked it and she's Twittered it.
Now if, someone surmises from that, it's a good weekend to rob my house, they're stupid. Upon breaking in they'd find my 6'4" 275 boyfriend and a loaded shotgun and two enormous dogs that don't cotton to strangers.
And even if they get through them, they'd have to get past our Militia Member neighbor, who, when we first moved in 11 years ago, told us plainly upon meeting, "I don't have no use for blacks." He's since taken a better liking to us since his wife died a few years back and my daughter insists on baking him cookies every week and seeing after him when his own kids stopped coming by.
He never sleeps, is watchful of every house in our neighborhood and will shoot anything in his yard (or ours if we simply call and ask) after dark.
So, good luck. God speed. Cuz they'll definitely be picking you up in pieces should you choose to rob our house. You may get in, but you won't get out.
One of the reason why i hate these sites, people who do not know any better, trust them, and think life is honky dory, but problem is giving too much info can get you in trouble. So now they can get robbed, because someone knows they are in miami vacationing.
I gotta say, brings a whole new era of data mining.
1850: Slaves that run away are criminals. They shouldn't have rights.
1910: Women who try to vote are criminals. They shouldn't have rights.
1940: Jews trying to leave the ghetto are criminals. They shouldn't have rights.
Yeah, that's a helluva world you're trying to build there.
Maybe there's a reason we judge a society by how it treats the least of its members.
I always announce on the Internet when people I don't like leave their homes for vacation. "Joe Asshole at 125 Main St will be gone from Feb-12 to Feb-29!"
Does this new website have a way to add arbitrary information like this, or do I need to set up a fake twitter account?
Great. Thanks for giving douchebags ideas.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I came home after tweeting I was out of town to find my house broken into and HOLY CRAP WHERES MY TV!?
This reminds me of The Stalker's Home Page - which Glen Roberts put up as a warning about the many places that personal information is published on the web. It lists a large number of personal-information resources available publicly on the web.
Glen's a privacy advocate. (Early on he filed a freedom of information request on the CIA asking for their manual of procedures for responding to freedom of information act requests. B-) ) The page title is a shocker to attract attention to the risks of these databases - which he wants to go away.
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 don't know who this Rob guy is or what he has in mind but I don't like the sound of it.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
And by "criminals" we're talking about everything that was considered a crime throughout all of history. Nice Strawman.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I lived with a douchebag housemate for a while and he was fucking paranoid that the neighbor was sneaking into our yard by hopping a fence, so he called the cops and he asked them if it would be ok to put razor blades on the top of the fence that would slash up any intruder's hands if they tried to hop it. I was glad he asked because I figured the cops would put him in his place. Instead they were all like, "Oh sure, I don't see a problem with that." I practically shit my pants when I heard that. Of course it was my own fault for living with this prick in the first place. I finally got him to take down the razor blades only after about 2 months of verbal humiliation....
A practical use for twitter!
Instead of robbing them, go to where they are right now and give 'em a good, hard slap.
Oh, OK. You can rob them first. But they won't learn anything either way.
Self-Defense Act The law was apparently specifically enacted to get the guy out of jail and overrule the Michigan Supreme Court. More power to them.
I can leave my doors open when I leave my house, and still nobody comes in and loots my stuff. Having good social security system prevents awful lot of robberies. Also not letting corruption crawl into government + keeping mafia outside your country's borders helps a lot. ...still, we don't use Twitter because we kinda had this crazy SMS-frenzy back in 1990s.