Slashdot Mirror
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.
The police are unlikely to do anything.
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
...a possibly armed criminal face to face...
...inevitable armed criminal....
...following bloodbath.
Christ, you're a coward. Enjoy your long, safe, life hiding away from any potentially dangerous situations. It's almost sad to know you're not capable of standing up for yourself or others.
You have to turn off the television and get out more. Half the time the 'hardened criminal' is just a teenage kid being opportunist. Even a retired American lady I know here tried fighting off a mugger here last week, and the worst she got was a bruise backside when she was pushed over. I've stopped robberies, and had a number of people arrested. I'm still here, no bloodbath.
However you can be 99% certain that the person with the laptop the next day is not the thief. As soon as they steal it they sell it immediately no matter what the price. The last time I was robbed it was hell getting back my stuff as they'd sold it all within 10 minutes. My 250e shades they sold for 20e. The watch, phone, etc went for similar ridiculous prices. Just ask for the laptop back and the person in possession will give it straight away (as they did in this story). There might be a little initial bluster, to simulate indignation hence innocence, but they know perfectly well they bought a stolen laptop which is a criminal offence.
Just how little do these folks think their lives are worth?
With an attitude like that, you are one sad member of your society and I'm glad you don't live near me.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Just how little do these folks think their lives are worth?
If you have so little self-respect that you won't help defend the innocent given an opportunity, your life is worth nothing to society.
"These folks" have demonstrated said self-respect, and thus are welcome in my society anytime.
It's open source, the summary didn't claim the software to be FLOSS, they claimed it to be open source, and the client is open source. Yes, it would be great for the whole thing to be open source, but having the client open sourced is sufficient to claim that the application is open source.
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!
So what? Nobody is going to lose any sleep over a bunch of dead geeks. Many people would actually celebrate such a merry happening. Anyway, you want to confront the perp, you bring a homemade flamethrower. Problem solved.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
The server may be open source as well. But if they don't release the binary, they don't have to release the code.
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 ?
Read the prey website. It doesn't "require" a proprietary server to be useful. You can set the client to periodically connect to the URL of your choosing, and the client triggers an alert when that URL returns 404. No alert is sent if it gets a 200 or 500 response, so if the page is up, or if the server is down, nothing happens. All open source, doesn't need an account, doesn't need to talk to the prey servers at all.
If you use their servers, they can provide you with a history of tracking info, set some filters on the alerts, remotely change some settings on the client, etc. The paid account allows you to change more of the client settings remotely. I suppose that since it's open source, you can write your own server to do the same things. Or you could support these guys by paying them. Your call.
John
Years ago, I made a long trip to the other side of town to sell my old Programmable Calculator. I had gotten a new one and put an ad to sell the old one in the campus newspaper. I got a call from some guy who said he was interested in it, so we met at a McDonalds.
Lo and behold, he brought along a few of his fratboy thug buddies, because what he was REALLY trying to do was get back his Programmable Calculator which someone had recently stolen. He assumed he and his thug buddies would be 'recovering' it. What a fucking asshole.
Anonymous Coward calling someone a coward, oh the irony. Anyway, this isn't about standing up for oneself or someone else, this is a simple risk/benefit calculation. Even Power himself told them not to do it. IMO vigilante justice sometimes works out well, other times it crashes and burns. Apparently not a popular opinion to voice on Slashdot though.
going from stealing a laptop to murder is a pretty big leap, believe it or not there are people that would steal a laptop but wouldn't dream of murdering someone (they weren't related to at least)
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
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
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?
Totally different situation in the UK. They'd arrest the people trying to recover the laptop for being racially insensitive.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
bring a homemade flamethrower, point it in THEIR direction. Problem solved.
You have to be specific; there's no telling what kind of crowd reads this stuff.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
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.
Most opportunistic thieves are not armed, and I doubt they would pull a weapon on a group of people in a bar. It would be far more likely that the thief would leave the laptop and run if they were scared. Armed criminals tend to commit armed robbery.
So what happened?
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...
It's deeply wrong of the victim to say "it's just a piece of plastic." It's that plus an unpunished crime.
What did you expect, he is Canadian after all. Not to mention the fact that our society is constantly pussifying our youth. One example is the hugely popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid franchise that is teaching kids that it is cool to be a pussy. Political correctness has been being pushed in this country for far too long, it is part of the reason much of the world laughs at us.
I forgot to add, god forbid we actually teach kids to have self respect and to stand up for themselves. If we did so they wouldn't be complacent, mindless, sheep when they grow up.
While I agree with you about the relative value of the laptop and a life, I don't think the ethical calculation is necessarily as simple as weighing those two factors. I'd be quite willing to exonerate the people who retrieved the laptop of any *duty* to risk their lives for a hunk of plastic, but I'm not quite ready to condemn them for choosing to do so.
The world is full of so many huge injustices that it hardly seems worth bothering with petty ones like this. Even the guy who lost the laptop wasn't going to bother to fill out a complaint. These are the little affronts to our sense of right and wrong that are so commonplace and measly we can't really rouse ourselves to do anything about them, even when they happen to us. And in isolation this decision may be the sensible one.
Yet I think this steady drip-drip-drip of petty indignities takes its toll on us. Indignation no longer pricks us to action because we've allowed it to become a constant, niggling, unsatisfiable itch. Our problems may be nothing compared to the murdered people being piled up like cordwood in places like Syria and Libya, but habitual acceptance of those little injustices doesn't sharpen our sense of outrage at the great injustices. Far from it. I think we' re more likely to look on a great injustice as just one more unfortunate thing we can't do anything about.
So, once in a while somebody has to stand up and do something that looks a little ridiculous from the standpoint of any utilitarian calculus of value, because our confidence our ability to do anything in the face of injustice is rotting away in that interminable stream of almost-but-not-quite-inconsequential grievances. Every so often (as in the scene from the movie), somebody has to stand up and say, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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
bring a homemade flamethrower, point it in THEIR direction. Problem solved.
You have to be specific; there's no telling what kind of crowd reads this stuff.
Why? I don't put myself between undesirable underpersons and Darwin's Mighty Hammer of Evolution.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
Exactly. I don't understand all the fuss in TFA about it being "just a piece of plastic", either. It's property. The institution of personal and private property is the core pillar of our society. If we don't have respect for even our own property, enough so to confront a thief (not a robber, where there's is at least a strong likelihood of a forceful confrontation - but a petty thief!) out of cowardice, then how much does it say about the state of society as a whole?
And, seriously, is the risk that great? I understand that there is a well-entrenched (thanks to TV) image of criminals as essentially subhuman, moral-less animals - today this guy steals your wallet, and tomorrow he shoots a granny, that kind of thing - but it is not like that at all in reality. There are not that many people who would consider stealing, to begin with, but even if you take just them, most would consider the idea of taking something by force abominable, and even fewer would even consider murder (and I'm not talking about fear of punishment here, but actual morality). There's no thin line between law-abiding citizen and a heartless villain that is crossed once and for all. So, no - confronting a thief is very, very unlikely to result in him taking out a gun and shooting you right there and then. In most cases they would happily just hand the stolen goods over, especially once it's made clear that no charges will be pressed.
Blame the English language for not having gender-free pronouns. This is standard usage of the language, because it's just too cumbersome to say "you know what he or she looks like and where he or she is hiding...." Some writing styles push that the author should use his or her own gender's pronoun for a generic person, but this is just equal opportunity wrongness, rather than being any more right.
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.
Thank you for this eloquently written post, which conveys what I actually wanted to say but obviously failed horribly with. I wholeheartedly agree with all of it. I just wish there wouldn't be a need for a Peter Finch, and that when something needs to be done it should be carefully calculated to reduce the damage as much as possible - something that is rarely on the agenda for mobs. If we all considered our actions more carefully there would be a lot less violence in this world.
I use a different program to protect my laptop. It's called Pray. It involves 5 cubic centemeters of C5 explosive. Nuff Said.
In the immortal words of The Coach (?!?), "Pardon?"
Ask the Dutch what they think of Canucks. We're in Afghanistan too, and have taken hundreds of casualties.
Read a book, you ignorant fsck. :-P
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
You know what they look like and where they are hiding ...
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Haven't you seen 'Canadian Bacon'?
Bullshit. Making part of something open source does not mean that the entire program is open source. "Prey" consists of a client application and a server application. Without one the other is worthless and if both parts are not open then neither is open.
I might as well publish a closed-source application and claim it as open-source because I used the printf() function, which is free and open. Part of my application is open therefore the entire thing is open.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
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.