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O'Reilly Author's Laptop Rescued By 'Twitter Posse' and Prey
An anonymous reader writes "Bad news: a Canadian who visited New York had his laptop stolen. Good news: it was outfitted with Prey, the open-source computer tracking application. Better news: a group in NYC made a 'geek squad intervention,' faced the culprit and retrieved the laptop safely. This case naturally raises the usual sorts of questions about the 'Twitter posse' culture." The victim-turned-victor is author and consultant Sean Power.
If you steal a laptop for the hardware,why wouldnt the first thing you do be formatting it.
If you steal it for the data, why would you connect it to the internet at all?
I would definitely prefer to use full-disk encryption on my laptop, and write off the hardware. Much better than having who-knows-who access to all my data.
A bunch of people monitored the thief for a while and then confronted a possibly armed criminal face to face without even bothering to call the police? For a laptop? Just how little do these folks think their lives are worth? While it's always nice to hear these stories when they end well, I'm just waiting for the inevitable armed criminal who gets a little too nervous during such an intervention and the following bloodbath.
I read this story like a week ago when it hit Fark. The owner went to the police and they told him to piss off they can't do anything. So thats when vigilante justice took over and got shit done. However if the laptop was part of a drug investigation then no knock warrants and GPS surveillance would be in use that same day.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"Power tweeted that he had called police but said they told him they wouldn't pursue the case unless he filled out an incident report."
Let this success story be a testimony that you can still rely on your neighbor when you're in need! Kudos to those who helped, when the police bureaucracy let it fall through the cracks.
http://www.allometry.com
I can't see the server side code. Is it possible to install your own server? Why do people still claim a software to be FLOSS if it requires proprietary server implementation to do something useful ?
I can steal a laptop, sell crack, ride a unicycle, play the accordion, juggle a raw egg, a bowling ball, and a flaming torch, and sing "Never gonna give you up, Never gonna let you down, Never gonna run around and desert you, Never gonna make you cry, Never gonna say goodbye, Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you" all at the same time. The same time!
If my laptop has a boot password and the OS requires you for a password to log-in, how does Prey turn on?
Anyone who steals a laptop will try and sell it, not turn it on.
Those who want to steal data rarely resolve to actual physical theft.
Since Prey is a script, it can be easily modified to do many other things, for example, instead of sending back the boring process list, it can include other base64 encoded files, like browser history, saved browser passwords, the log file of a key-logger, etc. Also useful is letting it open an open-ssh tunnel to a server somewhere, so you can remote login through the tunnel, even if the stolen laptop is used behind a nat-router. /home for the accounts you use yourself, Prey only runs on the default non-password login account, so prey can never be tricked into uploading your real personal information.
Prey also uses the SSID's of nearby wifi-networks to do very accurate geo-location, even if the laptop has no GPS, but when I tried it, Prey did not enable wifi if it was off, so you may want to play with the scripts a bit.
Obviously you use an encrypted
Prey sounds all well and good, but who's watching them? How do I know they aren't using this to track where I am?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
It is pretty amazing that hardly any Slashdot commenters seem to value justice here. It's deeply wrong of the victim to say "it's just a piece of plastic." It's that plus an unpunished crime. Web analyst Sean Power has let the world know he is the softest of soft targets.
How much can one take from one of these other hot house flowers before it begins to think some sort of punishment is warranted?
But when remembered about the software a couple days later, he set about to track his computer down.
Are there no editors left in Canada? Who writes this stuff?
I agree with ArchieBunker and people seem to be commenting completely on the sidelines. I really recommend RTFA if only to avoid going to the joint that the thief co-owns (I don't care what he says at the end, he should have given it back, he didn't, he's a thief).
"I'm taking this loop off." - Jack O'Neill
I've been reading Slashdot for a loooong time, so you can understand my surprise to read a useful article! I've got some kids coming through my neighborhood ripping off electronics from inside people's cars. I shouldn't have to lock my car in my own driveway. Luckily, I have an old laptop that I was getting ready to donate. It's going to be fun!
I don't respond to AC's.
After checking the Prey website it seems they assume that only guys steal stuff. They are constantly talking about "you know what he looks like and where he's hiding." or "you may catch the guy" and so on. Girls are generally great but I'd think some are stealing mobile devices as well.
I've been seeing this story all over the web the past few days. Some people have brought out some very interesting points that seem to have got lost in the promotion of this story:
The author happens to be a Canadian SEO marketing person who published a few books on SEO techniques with O'Reilly
The author's completely random twitter contact,Nick Reese, who helped him turns out to be also an SEO marketing person. Interesting coincidence there.
The author claims to have lost his Canadian health card, his birth certificate and a significant sum of money along with the laptop that were all in his laptop bag yet he never reports this to the police at the time of the theft. Only several days afterwards in a twitter post does he claim to have contacted the police. Does this make sense?
A young woman that the author describes as "Purple Sarong Girl" was the one who actually recovered the laptop as twittered by Nick Reese. Yet both Power and Reese refuse to release Sarong Lady's name even though she was the one who actually recovered the laptop. Sarong Lady remains an unsolved mystery.
The author says he installed Prey but "completely forgot about it" untill several days after the "theft" after which he twitters about the Prey screen shots that re remembered to look at. If you installed Prey and your laptop was stolen do you think you would have forgotten about your primary recovery system for 3 days after the theft?
So a LOT of questions remain here as this story continues to be pushed out to all major tech sites around the world. Really good SEO technique wouldn't you say. In my mind the question remains whether Sean Power really had a theft here or is just demonstrating his use of marketing technique ("hey - look what we did for Prey in just a week !" ). It is probably very hard to determine one way or another but this story fails the "Does this make sense" test in so many ways that I have to question it's legitimacy.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
He lost all that and never "had time" to make a police report. Does that sound a bit strange to you? It does to me.
I take it you've never used a bargain air fare that was non-refundable and non-reschedulable?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Unfortunately Prey has not been of any help in getting my laptop back. :(
It was stolen from my house while my mom was out on her day off running errands and I was at school. My best guess is that the person who stole it just nuked the windows install. I have a suspicion of who may be the perp, but no real evidence, we're waiting on DNA results that should come back 3-12 weeks from being collected.
The machine was stolen almost a month ago, I doubt I will be getting it back, but I guess the good thing is that I will be replacing it with something a bit nicer, and not Sony, like the one that was stolen ~10 months after I bought it.
Ironically, I had been trying to show my friend what Prey did, and was a little curious why it didn't have a report 20 minutes after I marked it as missing to show Prey off, then I got a phone call from my mom that the police were at the house and someone had put a brick through the sliding glass door.
Here is a good log of the relevant tweets, by both Sean and others that were connected, and some commentary: Man tracks stolen laptop hundreds of miles away, calls thief - storify.com.
I use a different program to protect my laptop. It's called Pray. It involves 5 cubic centemeters of C5 explosive. Nuff Said.
From TFA: "police told him they wouldn't pursue the case unless he filled out an incident report". So, what exactly is the reason he chose not to fill out this form and have the police handle this for him? Seems like a pretty simple solution to me...but maybe I'm missing something? Too much work to walk to the police station and spend 30 minutes filling out a form in order to get your $2k computer back?
... Maybe we'll find s/he wears a Purple Sarong?
Herve S.