Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Here's the video from DefCon 18
Uploaded Dec 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4oB28ksiIo
Enjoy the photos and story :)
What do you a new Slashdot meme has been created.
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.
I don't really think we should be taking ethical advice from someone who conflates stealing a computer with being lent a computer, much less being gifted a computer.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Obviously, there's nothing illegal with what he did. The laptop is his property.
Sympathy for a robber? What are you?
This is revenge. The mugger can stop it anytime by turning himself in. But he keeps using the stolen computer. No sympathy, to hell with him. Go on exposing his personal life and ebay failures. Someday he might reveal his whereabouts - go visit him and bring a baseball bat. With nails in it - rusty ones. Recover the computer (and monetary losses) in as bloody a way as possible.
The robber has no right to "date" using a stolen machine - hence no moral right to privacy . . .
and he cannot hide
And I guess the submitter missed the other story that came out of England a few weeks ago where the theft victim similarly posted the "thieves" photos all over, only to discover the people he was harassing were innocent.
#DeleteChrome
I thought the English were safe from crime, given their disarmed society and their Orwellian surveillance society?
A disarmed society is not a crime-free society. Crime happens, you just don't get killed, that's all. Getting mugged merely means you loose some stuff. No burial. Surprising a burglar merely means you get pushed aside as he runs for it. Mindlessly walking into a bad part of town might mean that you walk out without your wallet - but you still walk out.
According to him, his drink was spiked.
Calm down polemics aren't much use if you don't address the facts.
Seems to have strong evidence this chap new the laptop was stolen, even if he didn't steal it himself.
Laptop belongs to the insurance company now. It was insured.
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? Because I think you have.
This is crap. Where I come from, possession of (i.e. buying) stolen goods is a crime. It is almost always obvious that what you are buying is stolen. Laptop with just the power supply on eBay? STOLEN! You deserve the consequences. Owner contacts you? RETURN THE ITEM!
The case of the Iranian family was something of an exception. They are still a bunch of stolen-laptop-buying dirtbags; they just don't deserve the Iranian consequences for that (torture, loss of hands), which is why the guy decided to relent.
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...
Case with Iranian family was not an exception. They bought stolen goods. Period.
The fact that the owner was playing to be a nice guy in particular instance has nothing to do with facts.
And I guess the submitter missed the other story that came out of England a few weeks ago where the theft victim similarly posted the "thieves" photos all over, only to discover the people he was harassing were innocent.
That's not really relevant because in this case the mugger also used the victim's debit card to buy a subscription to the fat chick porn website he's been caught wanking over. There is no question that he's 100% culpable here.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Well yes that laptop just flew on its own to iran - Just like all those Mercs and Beemers just arrived in Albania all on their own.
Reviving stolen goods is a crime just ask any Gawker hack.
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.
Cool! I'm listing all my stolen goods in Canada from now on.
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.
Exactly this. yes.
He lives in England where they practice common law y'know.
Where - if I want to change my name - all I have to do is say : My name is now 'Humpert Merrywinkle'. If enough people know me as 'Humpert Merrrywinkle' then I am that person.
And I should know - My passport and my birth certificate contain different names. I never 'legally' changed my name anywhere. Ie: I never submitted a 'name change form'. It just works like that. 'merikans can't seem to figure this out.
So - yeah. PIN Number is right, On account of an imperial arseload of people say it. And that's a whole lot bigger than a metric buttload.
Boy are you butthurt.
Also wrong.
So now the erstwhile owner of the laptop is committing the crime of unauthorised access to the insurance company's computer.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Where you come from that may work. Try that in any state of the USA and you'll receive a minimum of 11/29 in jail, mate.
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.
So if enough people commit a wrong, it simply becomes a wright (not a typo)!
Correct as far as language is concerned. By the way, the commonly used word you apparently didn't hear about in that prescriptivist bubble of yours is "sic". Enjoy.
That might well be, but it's pretty clear that the "victim" in all of this has himself broken the law and is liable at bare minimum for libel, if not various other laws.
It's unfortunate the the mugger would get away, but ultimately, the UK has a system of laws and you don't get to break them just because somebody else has broken them first. That would lead to anarchy, oddly enough in the UK.
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 ]
While I accept that the mook might possibly have thought his mate was offering him a great deal on the laptop - he should have questioned the credit card that went along with it that has been used to pay for online purchases such as subscriptions to porn sites he accessed. It does make the suspicion that he was the actual mugger reasonable.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
That might well be, but it's pretty clear that the "victim" in all of this has himself broken the law and is liable at bare minimum for libel, if not various other laws.
It ain't libel if it is true.
It's unfortunate the the mugger would get away, but ultimately, the UK has a system of laws and you don't get to break them just because somebody else has broken them first.
A system of arbitrarily enforced laws is anarchy. The blogger can't get the law enforced in the first place.
Besides, this isn't about what's legal, its about what's moral. The mugger is sending the blogger those pictures. He made that decision when he stole the laptop. He's probably not cognizant of that decision, but it is a reasonable assumption that using a stolen computer will result in the webcam sending photos to the rightful owner. After all, the guy did put a piece of tape over the camera for the first 4 weeks.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Do you work for an american bank or something? Just because you stole it and sold it to your sister doesn't make it actually hers. She isn't entitled to it, she was robbed of the money. Your retarded logic is the same bullshit banks are using to keep houses the fucking stole from people and rapidly resold knowing they were doing it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You live in a retarded fucking country, but we knew that already.
How does it protect pawnshops? It gives them a green card to sell stolen goods. The logic is insanely stupid on your part.
In America, we hold pawn dealers responsible for selling obviously stolen goods. We will shut them down and put them in jail for selling stolen goods. We require them to report every thing they buy and in most states, they must hold on to it for several months so it can be claimed as stolen.
What kind of idiot makes laws like that? I steal your shit, sell it to someone cheap, and they keep it? All they have to do is pretend that buying a Porshe for $15k was a good deal and they had no idea it was stolen? really? REALLY?
I doubt you actually understand the laws you speak of. We really should kick you guys out of the US and sell that land to Russia or something.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Next you'll tell us how the mugger can sue him if the laptop catches fire because he stolen the wrong power brick too.
He isn't going outside the court system. He has infact, informed them, and asked them for help, using the very evidence he is making public.
They didn't care.
You'll have a REALLY hard fucking time putting someone in jail based on evidence they actually took to the police and the police rejected. Any lawyer that isn't still in his mothers womb would tear you a new asshole if you even thought about pressing charges.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
That's a matter of semantics. He reported it to the police and there was insufficient evidence to proceed. Yes, that sucks, but vigilantism isn't going to solve the problem nor is trying to prosecute with insufficient evidence.
Based upon what I've read they could get him for at most receiving stolen goods and charging a small amount on somebody elses credit card. Most likely it's the British equivalent of a misdemeanor and the so called evidence that he has is unlikely to be admissible in court as the rules of evidence are unlikely to allow for that.
So, yes, he's operating outside of the courts and he had better hope that the person that he's outing doesn't realize that he can sue for libel as that appears to be exactly what's going on.
And your point is what precisely? Report it to the CC issuer and get it cut off. Breaking the law himself isn't justified just because the police aren't able to do anything.
Didn't we just cover this the other day? In the UK truth is not an absolute defense against libel. It should be, but it isn't. It's pretty clear that the intent behind posting what he's posted was malicious and as such he could very well be liable for that.
Not to mention whatever wiretao laws are in place in the UK.
As for morality. I'm sorry, but this isn't moral. Moral would be referring it to the police and the CC issuer and insurance company and accepting that there isn't anything that can be done. This is outright immoral and likely to cause all sorts of problems for society. Vigilantism is just not something which is acceptable in a civilized society.
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.
Right, the reason people kill you during crime is because they happened to have a gun on them.
It has nothing to do with the not living a witness or fear and intimidation to keep you away from the cops.
No, no gun just means they beat you senseless and leave you maimed if they want to, or beat you with a pipe, or sock full of quarters, or a pillow case of rocks.
A disarmed society is a herd of sheep. Ignorance like yours assuming that you can magically stop people from hurting others because you take away their preferred method of doing it. Thats as retarded as pretending that taking away guns means no crime. You must live in a bubble, out here in the real world, there were wars, murder, and all sorts of other crime tens of thousands of years before the gun existed as far as we are aware.
I'm not sure what town you're walking into that you're just going to get robbed at gun point and left to walk away, but thats not how it actually works. You aren't left to walk away even if there is no gun. Criminals are generally not real bright but I'm fairly certain they're still further up on the IQ scale than your kind of logic.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Newsflash: knives can kill, a broken bottle can kill, a brick to the head can kill, and if the muggers feel like having fun, even bare hands can kill.
Of course they can. But they are less likely to do so as often.
It's pretty clear that the intent behind posting what he's posted was malicious and as such he could very well be liable for that.
Could be... but do you think the civil damage to the thief exceeds the thief's civil damage in physically injuring the original owner and making off with his property?
Before he can be liable for his actions, the thief's liability for his actions has to be exhausted too.
As for morality. I'm sorry, but this isn't moral. Moral would be referring it to the police and the CC issuer and insurance company and accepting that there isn't anything that can be done.
Which he did, and they failed to establish justice.
After you have exhausted options that are legal. Morality does not require that all your actions are legal.
Morality would permit you to take further actions to equalize injustice and discourage the mugger's activity.
Vigilantism is just not something which is acceptable in a civilized society.
So-called vigilantism is not what has happened here.
He has not committed any violent act, or attempted to physically restrain, arrest, injure, or kill the mugger in any way.
He has taken advantage of the fact, that his property has been put to a use without his authorization, and used that fact, to make his property do something he has authorized, but the current illegal possessor does not approve of.
Yoda it was...
A matter of semantics ... yes indeed, and his reporting it to the police ... having already showed them the evidence he was posting on the web, wasn't enough for them to do anything to him ... was it?
So basically, you're saying he's at risk ... when he showed the cops what he was doing ... but the guy who stole his laptop is clear and free.
Fortunately, the world doesn't actually work that way. As shown by the cops being fully aware of him 'spying' on the thief (He IS the thief, he was seen entering stolen CC numbers with a fucking screenshot so his guilt is 100% beyond contestation). You might have something if it was some 6 year old girl he was spying on but again, known not to be the case here.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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
Moral would be referring it to the police and the CC issuer and insurance company and accepting that there isn't anything that can be done.
You have a peculiar definition of morality there. I am not kidding. The law does not define morality. While the law may attempt to codify a certain set of morals, it is well understood that the law is frequently immoral - e.g. "the law is an ass." Look at your own example of libel - if the truth is an absolute defense of against charges of libel then the law is moral in the US and immoral in the UK, if that's not true then the law is immoral in the US and moral in the UK.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Bah. You haven't seen creepy until someone quotes something you said back at you 3 months later. On the internet.
And then follows up with your Name, Address, and Phone Number.
Just sayin'
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Well than in your nation, the laws suck.
What about the overwhelming majority of cases when people were unknowingly sold stolen goods. It's not as if Dodgy Dan, the pawn shop owner has a sticker differentiating stolen goods from legitimately acquired goods. What actual crime did these people commit, why should these people be punished when they were under the impression that the goods they were buying were legitimate.
Thieves dont advertise that their goods are stolen precisely because no-one would buy them. So they intentionally device those who receive stolen goods... So again I ask, what crime did these people commit?
Actually, you contact the police, surrender the goods to the police and let the police handle the transfer (and determine that the alleged owner is the actual owner, not some con). In my country, you wont be charged for turning in stolen goods because you didn't steal anything.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Right, but all of those things you have a much higher chance of defending yourself against, can simply run from, and cannot kill so many in such great numbers.
That means that when guns are taken out the equation you're far less likely to be killed.
Yes, yes, if you have a gun you're more likely to be able to stop them, yeah, except they're the ones attacking you, which means they get the jump, they shoot first, or worse, they take the gun off you before you even realise you're being attacked and shoot you with your own gun.
There's simply no escaping the fact that more guns = more deaths as much as NRA propaganda would like to pretend otherwise. I have no problem with the argument from the US that guns are essential to defend liberty or whatever, and that's fine, if you want to make that argument you can. But don't try and parrot the arguments that are blatantly false. You've only got to look at homicide rates to see at very least guns do absolutely nothing to reduce homicide rates, and may well be the cause for increased homicide rates in countries where gun ownership is prolific. Correlation may not be causation, but in a decent sample size (like every country in the world) it's a pretty good indicator and powerful enough to show with a strong degree of confidence that gun ownership most certainly does not decrease homicide rates.
Yes, but none of these methods can instantly kill you from 20 yards away without giving you the chance to react/retaliate.
Worst. Signature. Ever.
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 ]
[...] it is well understood that the law is frequently immoral
The word you're looking for is amoral.
A disarmed society is not a crime-free society. Crime happens, you just don't get killed, that's all.
Outlawing arms does not result in a disarmed society.
Criminals would still manage to acquire weapons.
A disarmed society is a herd of sheep.
No, we still have knives, bricks, bottles, boots and fists.
People who carry guns are cowards and weaklings.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Newsflash: knives can kill, a broken bottle can kill, a brick to the head can kill, and if the muggers feel like having fun, even bare hands can kill.
The difference is that it takes a lot of effort, whereas any twat with a gun can kill you without breaking a sweat.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Didn't we just cover this the other day? In the UK truth is not an absolute defense against libel. It should be, but it isn't. It's pretty clear that the intent behind posting what he's posted was malicious and as such he could very well be liable for that.
We've been through that, and you don't understand the meaning of "malicious". 1. There are plenty of ways to damage someone's reputation maliciously while saying literally the truth, which is why "truth" is not an absolute defense. But 2. Informing others truthfully that someone is a thief and general scumbag doesn't damage the thief's reputation; he does that himself by stealing. And 3. since the thief damaged his reputation himself, exposing him is not malicious.
I thought the English were safe from crime, given their disarmed society
No, what we're mainly safe from are significant number of gunshot deaths in our major cities every day, and double at weekends. It's still news if someone gets knifed to death, even in London.
(Chechnya is our enemy. Chechnya has always been our enemy.)
At least some of us had heard of Chechnya before last Thursday. I'm quite amused by the mental acrobatics that you Americans now need to do to reconcile hating Chechan Islamists and supporting Russian repression. Sort of the opposite of what you did with the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Those are the same tired old lies.
"No taking Guns out of "equation" means that you are much more likely to have violence done to you, often with the same guns you disarmed from law abiding citizens."
There's absolutely no evidence of this, if it were remotely true then in the UK we would have far more gun deaths, and in the US, Mexico and South Africa violent crime would be largely a solved problem and yet they're some of the most violent Westernised countries on Earth.
"Just look at the crime statistics of any major City where they have extremely restrictive gun laws (Washington DC, Chicago, NY etc or the UK, incidents of violent crime are way higher)."
Sure, if you cherry pick outliers you can prove anything. FWIW the UK's violent crime incidents consist almost entirely of alcohol related brawls and football hooliganism, gun crime is such a small component that it's pretty much immeasurable in the stats.
"Guns are a great equalizer. Criminals want easy targets."
Right, and how does a gun make you not an easy target? Do your guns give you magical psychic abilities that let you know when someone is approaching from behind? Are criminals in America special such that they just happen to be the only segment of society that draws slower than everyone else and is less able to pull the trigger when pointing at another human being?
How do you reconcile your NRA sponsored world view with the idea that the leaked gun registry lists a few months back put the owners of those properties of being burgled? Surely all gun owners should have their address and fire arms publicly listed because criminals wont touch houses with guns right because they deter crime? Obviously the MIT cop didn't die to the Boston bombers the other day either as they'd never attack someone like him, a trained firearms user and holder. Oh wait.
Honestly, you don't need to give me the propaganda treatment, I've heard it all before and I'm fully aware of the logical inconsistencies and FUD required to give it at least some semblance of a valid argument as pointed out above. The FUD is tiresome, it makes no sense due to often being contradictory, and has no statistical merit.
Come back when you have some evidence of value for your point rather than hearsay and arguments that can be trivially pointed out as nonsense with only a few seconds of critical thinking.
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.
Agreed. Vigilantism is still a useful tool. He might be right if we lived in a perfect society (he just says civilized). But at that point the government would have done something and you'd have no need to deal with the criminal yourself.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
If he does get arrested for this, he'll probably get his laptop back, because for the thief to make a police report he has to go to a police station with enough information to connect the stolen laptop to this evil guy who's stealing all the thief's privacy. A new lead!
Because he was confused and bewildered and his new "friend" convinced him he needed cash.
How can you be personally responsible for someone else spiking your drink with a roofie?
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?
a) Rohypnol causes retrograde amnesia, too. That is, you won't remember things that happened even before you take it (it prevents short term memory from being converted to long term)
b - d) It causes disorientation and loss of inhibitions. You not only not understand what's going on, but your guard is down.
e) Yea, he says he waited, or more precisely was recovering from being drugged.
f) I don't see where he claimed that. He just said the police wouldn't follow up on it.
g) What's to report? It would just appear to be a sloppy drunk being taken home by friends. It wasn't a kung fu style brawl.
h) If the police aren't doing anything, what do you want him to do?
i) The bloody glove! Maybe a recurring charge, perhaps? It did occur on the first of the month
j) Would they? What would he say to them? For what purpose? He already has the thief's mugshot and address.
k) If he wasn't planning on getting blind drunk, then this would normally be ok.
l) Hardly evidence he was hiding anything. Would you want to blast to the entire world you were surreptitiously taking secret recording of someone wanking?
And, anyway, what would the motive be? What, in your opinion, really happened? Did he sell the laptop to somebody and then decided to smear his name and reputation on the internet for no reason? Occum's razor here...
That could have happened, It seems awfully silly to pass out at an ATM machine with your laptop in tow, though. I don't see much evidence either way, so I choose to believe him. Besides, I guess using roofies to rob someone is a common occurrence in the UK:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/dec/19/ukcrime.prisonsandprobation
Morality does not require you to exhaust legal means first.
Morality would insist that the destructiveness and pain not just to yourself, but to society, created to achieve the just outcome be minimized.
The good of the whole outweights, even the desire for vengeance.
This would insist that you don't flaunt the law for light or transient purposes, as it harms society -- so yes, in general, morality means that legal and nondestructive means be exhausted first; otherwise there's no real respect for morality.