9 ms·
Please Rob Me
- ajvargo 17y agoThat's why I always tweet 'In closet, with gun' before I leave the house.
- rmorrison 17y agoIf that were true, then we'd still know when to rob your house : )
- pwk 17y agoMaybe not, perhaps he also tweets 'In closet, with gun' when he's in the closet, with a gun?
- Skriticos 17y agoThen again, he might also tweet that he is on vacation while sitting on the closet, with gun..
- ErrantX 17y agoIm guessing the general idea is to brainfuck potential theives into simply choosing a different house without the whole gun/closet conundrum!
- mbreese 17y agoYeah, it's all a cost/benefit analysis. When I'm choosing which house to rob, I always try to decide if it is worth the risk of someone hiding in the closet with a gun. So far the risk has always too high :)
- jjs 17y agoI think we can all agree to stay out of his closet.
- jsm386 17y agoAre you sure you're not R. Kelly?
- pistoriusp 17y agoFor those of you, including myself, that didn't know what this was a reference to: "Trapped in the Closet" is an urban opera, R&B opera, or hip-hopera released by contemporary R&B singer R. Kelly in 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapped_in_the_Closet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapped_in_the_Closet
- ohashi 17y agoI am trapped.
- tbgvi 17y agoSomething tells me this is the first time "Trapped in the Closet" has been referenced on HN, congrats sir :)
- dannyr 17y agoSomething tells me tbgvi is an R Kelly Fan.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- KB 17y agoHaving worked for a Defense Contractor and been forced to go through social engineering training in the past, the idea of gathering information like this is very real and happens everyday. Hopefully this makes people think twice before exposing certain personal information online for all to see.
- ShabbyDoo 17y ago>social engineering training Was the class actually worthwhile, or was it just CYA? Some sort of taxonomy/formalisms for thinking about social engineering would be cool. I have no structured mental model now.
- RK 17y agoIt's probably more like social engineering defense training. The usual scenario being: You're at a conference and a hooker type shows up at your hotel room out of the blue, do you a) invite them in and have a good time, especially leaving your laptop/files/etc alone with them while you sleep/clean up/get some liquor, b) not do that.
- modoc 17y agoHow hot is she?
- peterwwillis 17y agoc) hide everything in the ventilation system and leave false laptop/files out as decoy
- Semiapies 17y agoWhat, and be obvious?
- KB 17y agoI would say it was more of a prevention/education type of course that all employees possessing some level of government clearance were required to take. Essentially different real-life scenarios were presented to demonstrate the extent foreign governments will go to gain classified information. An easy example I remember being presented was a case where a foreign government may find out about a defense contractor conference and will send someone to nearby hotels to just sit around at the lounge bar and simply strike up conversations with those around. Needless to say, most people with a few drinks in them and a friendly person to talk to will be fairly candid with who they are, where they work, where they live, what they do, etc, etc, etc. All of this information would then be compiled into a folder on an individual and once enough data is collected it could potentially be used to blackmail or maybe even counterfeit someone's identity to steal government secrets. To me, the main goal of the training was to demonstrate how easily another person or government could gather extensive personal information on an individual and potentially use it to gain access to government secrets. Teaches you to take extra care with the information you share publicly.
- gchucky 17y agoI think this falls into the same jurisdiction as Wappr does (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1123173 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1123173 if you missed that conversation), where you're aggregating info from people that may not want it used as such. I know that this is trying to prove a point, and yes, the Twitter account for pleaserobme sends tweets to people who get listed on the site, but it's still a little heavy handed.
- gruseom 17y agoYes, and it's reminiscent of the Buzz launch as well. People seem to think that "publicly available" is a binary state, i.e. either X is public (1) or it's not (0). By that logic, if X is already public then aggregating/broadcasting it is fair game: you're not putting it through a state change, only going from 1 to 1. I think this is a mistake. There are clearly degrees here.
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agoFeature Request: can you setup an affiliate program that gives me a cut of the "take" when a thuggishly inclined friend uses this to rob someone? thx! -jlb
- slavingia 17y agoWhy do you sign your comments?
- mrcharles 17y agoThis is pretty awesome. I've never twittered when I'm away from my place for a long period of time. I don't post about it to facebook. And I don't set email auto-responders. I guess my inner criminal automatically notified me that were I actually in the job of stealing, I would definitely use social media to pick likely targets. In fact, generally no one knows I was away until I get back, short of close friends and family.
- mrcharles 17y agoIn fact, given how many people on that list have their twitters set up with their own names, I'd say it's probably easy to grab a name from a location, look them up in the phone book (first stop for addresses, or at least it was a long time ago). From there it's just a matter of making sure no one else is at the house.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- maukdaddy 17y agoThis is an absolutely brilliant use of data aggregation.
- eogas 17y agoI love how they are referred to as "opportunities".
- yaacovtp 17y agoThis is the ultimate free source of leads for home security and alarm businesses. Edit: They could drive around the neighborhood dropping off flyers saying, "While you were out at "place homeowner checked into" someone could have been robbing you blind.
- prbuckley 17y agoThere is a lot of money to be made in the lead generation business. I actually heard of an auto repair lead generation company that went around to parking lots and took pictures of cars with damage. They uploaded these photos to their service and then put a flyer on the car with a web address where the person could retrieve the quotes for repairs.
- gridspy 17y agoThat is a really nice service. Most people dread getting quotes, it would remove a lot of the friction required to aquire a customer. I imagine they received a few complaints though.
- edw519 17y ago1. Programmers write apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use. 2. Widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use. 3. Holy shit, what have we done to ourselves? 4. Programmers write apps to minimize the consequences of widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use. 5. Widespread adoption of apps to minimize the consequences of widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use. What a great time to be a programmer.
- barredo 17y agoYou're talking about Google Buzz, right?
- marcusestes 17y agoZing!
- Periodic 17y ago4. Programmers write apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use to minimize the consequences of widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use. 5. Widespread adoption of apps apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use to minimize the consequences of widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use. 6. Holy shit, what have we done to ourselves? 7. Programmers write apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use to minimize the consequences widespread adoption of apps apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use to minimize the consequences of widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use. 8. Rinse, repeat.
- tel 17y ago6ish. Apps release sub-application platforms for apps that we really have no use for but are just so available now anyway.
- keefe 17y agohttp://www.torproject.org/ http://www.torproject.org/ make sure you put on your rubber before trolling for your next "project"
- jrockway 17y agoTor is nice, but what anonymity is required for this?
- keefe 17y agolol well when I'm out committing felonies I prefer not to leave tracks like my IP address visiting pleaserobme.com?
- jrockway 17y agoSo someone gets robbed, then they subpoena the web logs for pleaserobme.com, and then they arrest everyone who visited the site? That doesn't really scale.
- keefe 17y agolol no, it does not scale nor does it have to - person X commits a crime, they go looking for "evidence" and criminals try to avoid leaving this "evidence" and tend to be very paranoid about it, thus the joke..............................................................................
- jrockway 17y agoTo be fair, pretty much every single person with a job leaves their home empty all day. Everyone already knows this. I can't wait until I get to read about someone who decided to rob one of these people, but then gets shot to death by the spring gun they set up. Bonus if the spring gun auto-uploads to YouTube.
- Sukotto 17y agoYeah... if you have a job. The high unemployment-rate these days makes this much less certain.
- henrikschroder 17y agoYes, and a lot of people upload embarrassing pictures to the internet or write sensitive information on their blogs. I always thought that you'd be safe anyway because the stupid stuff you put out would drown in the mass of information people post all the time. But this little website shows that with some simple datamining and aggregation, you can dig out the nuggets of valuable information and make it searchable or target it to the people that can do most damage with it.
- scottw 17y agoI was thinking to myself, "Only single people twitter their whereabouts?" I've got plenty of people left in the house when I leave. I don't think leaving the house is as great a risk as some might think.
- RK 17y agoI'm in the habit of telling taxi drivers who pick me up from my house and ask me "so, you're going to the airport, taking a long trip?" That it's a short trip and that my roommates were just too lazy to take me to the airport. Makes me feel slightly better about someone knowing where I live and that I just left town.
- graywh 17y agoOr you could have the taxi pick you up at a nearby intersection or other non-home location. Bonus points for using a different location each time.
- mortenjorck 17y agoMost of this data is completely useless, because there's no way to tell where these users live, at least without a serious amount of stalking and sleuthing. Unless, of course, they've been geotagging their tweets from a mobile device. In which case it would then be trivial to look at their most frequent location, determine it's a residential one, wait until they're out, and head on over. Which is why I will never enable Twitter geotagging.
- ojbyrne 17y agoEven if their location is available, there's no way to tell if they live alone.
- noodle 17y agoall of this is data from foursquare, which is opt-in and does use geotagging. want to know the home address? check out the user's profile.
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- tbgvi 17y agoSomething tells me that heavy users of foursquare have already considered the implications of letting people know where they are at all times. I don't think this site will deter these people from checking in somewhere.
- josefresco 17y agoWhat about light users? Or users who give it a try, but then forget about it? I don't think we should protect people from themselves by banning it but there should be some warnings attached.
- mrcharles 17y agoNow that I think about it, I could make a pretty neat little social engineering mobile game out of this. With the back end tied in to this, you could make a geo-aware app that lets you "tag" people as robbed or whatnot. Of course, that's more than a little evil, as I'd probably map it, and then you would have a site for sharing all the information associated with opportunities, and I have no doubt that some entrepreneurial spirit would take that information and use it to actually start robbing houses.
- danskil 17y agoThis is an awesome display of the info we freely give out. If this app was fully functional it would also list the nearest pawn shop and crack dealer.
- ericb 17y agoInteresting to see an elegant, functional, web app that is essentially an artistic statement.
- Tichy 17y agoMakes me think a twitter bot might be useful, that takes over the account and twitters mundane activities (cooking, watching TV,...). If you leave the house, you can switch on the twitter bot.
- axod 17y ago"burglarized" still makes me chuckle when I see it written. (It is not a valid word in English). edit: Yes, I know it's valid in American. Burgled (English), Burglarized (American English).
- Semiapies 17y agohttp://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/burglarize http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/burglarize Hmm. Which dictionary do you work for?
- PostOnce 17y agodictionary.reference.com: Origin: 1870–75, Americanism; burglar + -ize It's old, it's popular, and it's well understood. It is certainly a valid word. Saying you were burgled has a Mr. Burns feel to it. It's almost always burglarized or robbed in the United States.
- lawrence 17y agoAwesome linkbait / PR execution by these guys. This has mainstream media potential - it's easy to imagine a hysterical CNN headline. I hope they have a plan for how to put all this great buzz and inbound links to work on a real business.
- Semiapies 17y ago"Going on trip. Please break into my house - my St. Bernard needs feeding."
- tyohn 17y agoI might tweet that I left the house - but my rather large dog stays home :)
- timdorr 17y agoSame here. Not everyone lives alone. Many people have spouses, girlfriends/boyfriends, roommates, and/or pets around after they leave. And this site doesn't give you their home address, it just says that user's house might be empty right now. Still gotta go look, I suppose.
- maurycy 17y agoIt made me wonder what are else things we leak, using Twitter.
- code_duck 17y agoI love it. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but this is exactly the problem I see with continually updating the public about your daily activities and whereabouts. I learned a long time ago that you DON'T tell people you don't trust whether you'll be away from your house and when, but indeed, thousands of people are posting about that on blogs, Twitter or facebook all the time. Time to relearn old lessons - in the 80s there were warnings about answering messages that said "We're out of town, be back next week!". Then, in the 90s there were warnings about email auto-responders that said "I'm travelling for business, be back next week!". Now the opportunity to tell the public your house is unoccupied has moved to the next technology.
- nextpulse 17y agoGenius!!!
- tiffani 17y agoSure, they got us all to talk about the lovely site they've built, but I'm not entirely convinced of the premise. Indeed, there are criminals that would take the time to stake out someone's house just by checking up on their Foursquare check-ins, but for the vast majority of folks, I'm not buying it. We had our car stolen out of the driveway one day after my mom was warming it up in the morning (I'm hearing this is illegal in places like Maryland). She doesn't do this every morning, BTW. What was interesting, though, is that the criminals weren't even smart enough to steal a car that had a full tank of gas. My parents later ran into them (fate is awesome) pushing that car into a gas station not too far from our house after it ran out of gas. I doubt these guys would have been smart enough to case our house based on my Foursquare check-ins. That morning, they were just walking through the neighborhood and saw an opp. Furthermore, I think the site is also rather silly because it presupposes that everyone knows what Foursquare (or any of the other location-based check-in sites) is enough to make check-in data particularly useful. Contrary to popular belief, there is a whole contingent of people out there who have no clue about Twitter, Foursquare, TechCrunch or anything else we hold dear. :) Finally, I have a tendency to check in on FS as I'm leaving a location, so I get the points, but I'm already rolling out of the parking lot and back to my house by the time the world knows where I've been.
- fseek 17y agoFunny app and a good way to show the dangers of posting everything online...
- akadien 17y agoIt might make for an interesting honeypot to catch thieves in the act. Where' Chris Hansen? (Oh, over on chatroulette.)
- armandososa 17y agoI've thought of something like this for Mexico (later expanding to other latinamerican countries) : A mashup of foursquare, gowalla and blippy (the blippy part is important, we won't target poor people) and I would call it 'secuestra.me' (kidnap.me). Huge potential, big market worth several billions.
- petercooper 17y agoAh yes, because none of us have wives or kids who are still at home :-) (or in our case, the other way around..)
- jsz0 17y agoEasy solution: Tweet about your vicious (possibly imaginary) dogs.