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Stolen Laptop Owner Outwits Mugger, Police, and the Media
An anonymous reader writes "What do you get mugged in Central London and the local police are too incompetent to find a mugger even with his address and photograph? You may not be able to get to the laptop, but you still own the photos and data on it, so you set up the NSFW Plumpergeddon blog which gives details of the subsequent 'owner's' 'Brick House Butts' fetishes. Now of course later the IT media might get interested and offer an interview with a promise to let him review the article and keep his name secret. luckily our hero is not so innocent and demonstrates the value of using a false name on the internet as well as planting your own monitoring software on your laptop."
What do you post articles that are unintelligible?
Editing is a lost art.
Based on the content of the summary, I have no fucking idea what this story is about.
Just delete this and start over. Really. How does this word-salad get approved for publication to millions of people?
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
I've read this twice and I'm still confused.
I'll try to translate what I think the article says: ...
1. Man was mugged and lost his laptop.
2. Police won't do anything about it.
3. He has hidden software on his old laptop that was sending images and data back to him.
4. He posted it on the Internet under a fake name
5.
6. Profit?
Incompetent editing can't write good but maybe give interview in IT media if keep name secret yesno?
Sense making this summary very much doesn't however is okay because Slashdot's really been going downhill these past 15 years.
Haha fucken fagets can't edit for shit. What do you get mugged? You get fucken mugged in the butt, fucken fagets.
I...I have no idea what is happening. I think I knew more before I read the summary.
I are unintelligible and I are endorse this message.
Life needs more saving throws.
The article consists of English words stringed after one another, and it looks like they form valid English sentences at first glance, but they really don't.
This is the stupidest shit ever.
All our informant remembers is waking up on Oxford Street when the sun came up to find his Macbook Pro had gone, along with his credit cards, which were subsequently to used to run up a £7,000 bill.
A fucking Mac was stolen from a game designer: "He's f*cked with the wrong nerd", so now this moronic game designer is spying on some clueless fellow who likes chubby girls (which need love like anyone else, I might add).
So, imagine your friend of a friend's acquaintance doesn't want his laptop anymore, and sells it to you for a really reasonable price. Now you're having your character assasinated by some hipster indie game dev fuck who thinks he's the digital version of Super Man. Oh, and even if that guy is the actual mugger, he can say he's the one who got it from a friend and now he gets off free: It's his word against yours -- "Are you sure this man mugged you, or did you just SPY ON HIM so many times that you think he's the one?"
Stupidest. Shit. Ever. You call the cops. If they tell you to piss off because bigger shit than stolen laptops is going on in the world, then you fucking piss right off, dork. It's called "insurance", if you care about shit you get it insured. The police report is a formality to make it less likely you're trying to defraud the insurance company... Not because the cops are breaking out the drag-net to hunt down the dude that YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE stole your laptop. Hell, for all we know you got drunk and gave it to him.
Despite the uncertainty as to exactly how "Plumpy" might have come into possession of the laptop, the author is unapologetic about the blog, which he now plans to expand with video content of the unwitting subject.
“My plan was always to go public with this if the police failed to act. I don't feel a connection with him as such but I am at last feeling some closure. And it's a lot of fun.
That's right. It's a fucking excuse to fuck with some other sad fucker -- Hey, guess what? I feel sorry for the fucking guy now. He clearly needed a laptop or else he would have sold it for smack by now, right? The owner was being a careless self entitled prick with it anyway. Hey, here's a fucking Idea. You've got the guy's address then why not send him a letter or ring 'em up and ask for your shit back, like a fucking HUMAN would.
the "mugged" victim somehow gave his PIN number without remembering it? after reading the whole site, it seems very hoaxy.
Here's the video from DefCon 18
Uploaded Dec 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4oB28ksiIo
Enjoy the photos and story :)
Having read the article, there is no bones about it, most of us would be devastated , by the loss of our computers...and its not about the hardware which can include memories, videos or life changing moments (births deaths marriages), months or years of work...a whole host of personal information. If this story would have helped bring a little justice...or helped recover the laptop, It would have been a nice story.
I would be astonished if this is legal (its ethically wrong), as notices normally have to be shown...although are often small; hidden in reality. This opens the doors for people leaving usb pen drives in the street, lending computers to friends...or hell just buying someone a usb camera.
Most here service other peoples machines at one time or other, and have the opportunity to be invasive, but do not do so because we simply recognise it as morally wrong, even if I think "fucked with the wrong nerd", and all here are pretty careful of "not finding" anything we find, because we *understand*.
I won't talk about the whole waking up in central London with a laptop missing. His house was not even broken into. He should take some responsibility for his own actions.
I'm struggling to identify the hero of this story...everyone is a victim.
I thought the English were safe from crime, given their disarmed society and their Orwellian surveillance society?
Whoops, there I go again, letting my doublethink slip and allowing reality to intrude on my thought process. I'd best be off to the two minute hate (Chechnya is our enemy. Chechnya has always been our enemy.) Wouldn't want to get into trouble with the thought police.
What do you a new Slashdot meme has been created.
looks like it was generated by a markov chain :(
This is _exactly_ why we still have the possibility of starting private prosecutions.
All he has to do is start the procedures at his local Magistrates court, starting proceeding for theft; where _he_ will act as the prosecutor.
It seems as if he should have all of the necessary evidence.
What open now reading blogosphere panopticum O'Hara.
Special /. edition
You can't handle the truth.
You need subtitles and translation like in east Enders over here, I know most of the American shows consist or grunting an yelling
and he cannot hide
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? Because I think you have.
Aside from his just "waking up" to find his laptop and wallet gone.... yeah - he was probably at church at the time, and the sermon was dull... I seriously doubt that anyone at The Reg would "offer an interview with a promise to let him review the article and keep his name secret."
Keep his name secret? Possibly, and not that uncommon. Let him review the article? I really, really, really doubt that. No journalist - hell, no J-school student - would be that dumb.
Once you've been interviewed the deed is done. Unless it involves highly technical information - say interviewing a top scientist in specialized field, where there really is a need for detailed discussion - there's no way you'll be asked to "review" anything.
Three Squirrels
moving on...
The whole thing seems like a hoax to me. It doesn't ring true in the slightest.
Most reasonably sharp thieves will quickly wipe your HD and install a "fresh" OS on your laptop after they take it from you. Your monitoring software will be gone quickly; though fortunately your data will go with it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I don't think it makes sense to put more value on the hardware than on your personal information. Full system encryption and full system backups are the best approach. If you really want to be a hero, at the very least install your everyday OS to a hidden partition and have a decoy OS on the main partition that the perp will use so you can have your "hilarious blog material". But overall, get over it man, because your laptop is gone. At least the most valuable thing (your information) will not be accessed.
Thanks for listing that dude's blog as NSFW. If you don't read The Register article first then you can end up with some problems.
So what are people around here considering reading instead of Slashdot? This indecipherable summary is extremely common around here along with click bait, exaggerated headlines (click bait again), news that's days behind every other tech news site. I'd love to hear some fresh ideas for Slashdot replacements.
A sad state of /. when reddit has posts that are both more informative and cogent.
In A.D. 2101 War was beginning.
War was beginning.
Captain: What happen(ed) ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What ?
Operator: Main screen turn(ing) on.
He hasn't tracked the thief, but his laptop regularly sends photos and screenshots while the laptop is in use. This is old news, from a tech perspective.
But, in any case, it's not a terribly interesting tech story.
The tech part of the story is that, although the laptop-tracking software technically works without any fault (well almost, but the thiefs stupidly worked around the part that didn't work), it has done nothing on the overall to help the case.
Police just ignores him.
This kind of software has always been sold/touted as the ultimate solution for lost and stolen laptops, as the best weapon against thieves.
But ultimately, it doesn't make any difference that the software worked flawlessly.
I my opinion this boils down to the motivation of the various parties involved.
For the police, handling the case would require lots of resource (paperwork, permits and warrants, interrogating the suspect, searching his home, more paperwork, etc...) and some risks (usually stolen laptops are resold, so often the people using them aren't the thieves but are thinking they use a legitimately bought 2nd hand latop, so in theory there's a risk of harassing the wrong guy - although in this case, the robbed victim has found a lot of credible arguments, including that the suspect started using the laptop a couple of hours after the mugging [too short for the laptop to be sold as 2nd hand] and using the same asset [porn site access,articles for sale on ebay] that were billed on the stolen bank card during the dozen of hours after the mugging until the bank blocked the card. That's quite a lot of coincidence and would require further police investigation) for a crime which - from their point of view - wasn't really a violent crime (no one got kiled) happens regularily and isn't a high threat to the general population.
So they didn't do a lot.
Meanwhile, the bank has quite a lot of money at stake in this case, (7k british pounds), so *they* did take the case seriously, did consider the victim's arguments, did their own internal investigation, and finally decided to reimburse the victim.
He should probably contact the insurance company. Lost laptop cost a lot to the insurance companies, so they would pay more serious attention to the information that the victim has gathered, and have a strong financial incentive to pressure the police to retrieve the stolen goods.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
WTF?
I couldn't get past the first non-sentence.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
... but you had me at Plumpergeddon
This is the MET, they won't do anything cyber crime related until they get the cyber crime laws they're lobbying for. A very *political* police force the Met, they know how to play the game.
He'll have to do it himself, he could make a citizens arrest, him and a few friends, but the Met won't take kindly to be made to look lazy, so that might be risky. They could always flip that and claim him and his friends mugged the guy.
Difficult one, the police just don't want to do their job and if they won't do their job there's nothing you can do to fix that yet.
Yoda it was...
By "Outwit" you mean he gets the laptop back, or, at least, the perpetrator is apprehended. Neither of these things has apparently happened yet as I write this so, other than the usual "Look what the thief is doing through my webcam" posts, this is not a story.
Kriston
If the police continue to fail to do their work, just post ALL the details on this guy some place filled with immature souls with the know-how to do some serious damage... I'm thinking 4chan or similar.
When he finds his mailbox full of kiddie porn, himself (using his credit card) subscribed to kiddie porn and much worse (and more illegal), his identity stolen and all sorts of nasty stuff delivered on his doorstep - I think he'll regret what he did, and in ways much worse than if he had turned himself in for the laptop theft.
Any chance of someone not a work giving us a SFW summary of the NSFW blog post?
Otherwise this is a pretty pointless story, telling us nothing. What is this guy's response to The Register's story?
I hear it's the new trend in high tech crime!
GPS coordinates of the laptop are in most scenarios insufficient to achieve this. Under the best of circumstances the error range on a non military grade GPS unit is too high and a laptop indoors is far from the best of circumstances.
Forget about "military" GPS. You'd be surprised by what is achievable with a-GPS: we're down to a few centimetres of error margins for outdoor. For a stolen car, for exemple, that means enough precision, not only to know where the car is parked, but even it sits correctly or if its across 2 different park marking.
(Military and civilian separation of GPS is done by having the signal available to civilians be unprecise and drifting a bit around what the real value should be in a unpredictable way on purpose. a-GPS is done with an additional set of ground-level fixed beacons which now perfectly their actual position, and broadcast [over radio frequency {GPS or FM-RDS/DAB} , or over the internet] the exact delta between their real position and the one theoretically obtained by vanilla GPS. a-GPS thus compensate for any source of error: for example atmospheric distortion... but also including the intentional drift in the non-military signal).
But in this case the laptop doesn't have a GPS, it's only extrapolates it's probable position based on IP and visible neighbouring Wifi SSID.
So it only has a vague idea of the city block its in.
The police can't just bust down doors whenever the hell they want to, they need a warrant, which means they need evidence they can take before a judge {...} Aside from that, unless they get lucky and walk in on a treasure trove of stolen loot and/or drugs and guns
Now the question is how much evidence is required...
Though he didn't have cm-precise GPS coordinates (only a block), the victim got a fuck-ton worth of other information:
- (probably) unlawfully-obtained goods (correlating with stuff bought on his stolen credit card) that the suspect is selling on ebay. Worth 7k GBP in total.
- the laptop itself was used within a too short time frame after the mugging, which leaves a rather high probability that the suspect is the one who mugged the victim, not some poor schmuck to whom the laptop was sold as '2nd hand'. And the suspect did need to bring the laptop to an unlocker in order to be able to use something else than the guest account (how could you legitimately buy a 2nd hand laptop and not have access to it) (also, according to the victim, this step enabled the software running on the laptop to start uploading all the evidence it gathered previously).
- numerous screenshots with personnal data of the suspect (ebay transactions, social websites, dating website) some of which correlate nicely with transaction on his stolen credit card (reselling of goods, passes to access adult websites, etc.)
- actual photo of the suspect.
And although by some incredible misfortune the mugger manager to steal the laptop in the (probably only) place not covered by a camera of the whole surveillance-happy UK, the victim has a long list (7000 GBP worth in total) of transactions done with the stolen card, the first within a couple of hours after the mugging. At least a few of the places are bound to have surveillance camera (specially in the UK). so it's possible to obtain photos which are highly-probably the mugger.
In short he can pretty much identify exactly the suspect. And has good reason to think that the suspect might be the one who mugged him.
Well from the point of view of the police, the victim might have planted some of the evidence. But in that case, they can turn against him if they discover he was trying to frame an innocent suspect for the stealing. And beside that would be quite a lot of work....
I know we think our precious precious tech is worth killing for, but it's not.
The value of the hardware itself isn't necessarily a lot (although in this
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Of course doing so is false economy - the cost to the government of employing police to deal with the crimes is transferred to the public whose insurance premiums go up and the companies who get burned by credit card charge-backs and refunds.
And thus the insurance companies themselves have a very strong incentive to presure the police into solving this case, specially given the high amount of evidence that the victim has gathered, and the amount of money involved (7000 GBP worth of goods bought with the stolen card had to be charged back - the bank did their own internal investigation and considered the evidence of the victim as sufficient).
Hence, I supposed it would be worth for the guy to disclose the gathered evidence to the insurance company.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What really bothers me is that mugging is a violent crime, and yet the police have done nothing about catching the perpetrator. That, for me, is the real issue, everything else is crap. Surely this ought to at least interest a UK local paper that the police is not doing their job.
The next Londoner to get mugged could be you ...
Most of us lost our ID's long ago and are too vain for seven-digit numbers.
What do you mean back up?
I'd have to build a mail server to regain my original id.
I really like the idea of the 'Hidden' app, for when your Mac or iPhone is lost or stolen, Hidden will show you where it is and who has it. Is there something similar for PC laptops, preferably open source?
The moron running this blog, insulting the other moron who supposedly has his laptop:
"I don’t think most of it’s not in English."
Way to make a point. I don't think you isn't not smarts.