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This Guy Has My MacBook
- leriksen 15y agoCrime solved - your laptop was stolen by Deuce Bigalow, male gigolo
- jlgosse 15y agoI enjoy how the alleged "stolen" macbook pro has absolutely nothing on the dock. This story is becoming less and less realistic and more and more like a plug of "Hidden".
- wolfparade 15y agoYeah all I see is genius plug for Hidden. This thing has some virality too. Good for them.
- akronim 15y agoIsn't that just the default dock? i.e. in the screenshot the guy has just created a new account for himself, and is deleting the original owner's account?
- gsivil 15y agoDoes really the HN community find this story interesting? I wish I knew the psychological reasons behind that massive upvoting
- taphangum 15y agoProbably just to help this guy out and get his laptop back from that douchebag
- JacobIrwin 15y agoBeautiful
- JacobIrwin 15y agoNot the guy who stole. Instead, the story that is told.
- pnathan 15y agoVery clever use of technology.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- fizx 15y agoHe just tweeted that they caught the guy.
- rtrunck 15y agohttps://twitter.com/jmk/status/75766707834200064 https://twitter.com/jmk/status/75766707834200064 Arrested
- bbg 15y agoWhen you've activated the Hidden app, and the computer is taking pictures, does the little green light turn on when the camera is on?
- sorbus 15y agoI've always heard that the status LED is hardwired into the webcam, so that there is absolutely no way for software to prevent it from turning on when the webcam is active. So yes. It would probably be a very brief flash, though.
- espo 15y agoYes it does. The light on the MBP is wired to light up when the camera has power.
- bkhl 15y agoGood to know that OPD has arrested the bastard. :)
- savramescu 15y agoIt looks like he got it back. That's nice to hear in the end.
- iantimothy 15y agoA question. Is there a way for anyone to know their laptop is taking photos of them? Be it a Mac or a PC. And is there a way to know if my computer is transmitting those images. I wonder whether such apps can be installed by malicious individuals to spy on people.
- linlijunjj 15y ago--Something unexpected surprise-- Hello. My friend === http://www.betterwholesaler.us/ http://www.betterwholesaler.us/ ==== Dedi cated service, the new style, so you feel like a warm spring!!! WE ACCEPT PYA PAL PAY MENT YOU MUST NOT MISS IT!!! thank you!!!
- mgh2 15y agoQUESTION: If I was a guy that bought a second hand Mac, how can I make sure that I was not being watched? This issues a new privacy concern too.
- alxp 15y agoDon't buy anything second-hand unless they can show the proof-of-purchase so you know you're not buying a hot item. This isn't new advice.
- rumblestrut 15y agoGreat story! I'll have to check out Hidden now.
- meric 15y agoSeems like the guy has his mac back. http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/police-nab-laptop-thief-exposed-by-hidden-security-camera-app-20110602-1fhag.html http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/police-nab-lapt...
- equilibrium 15y agoshowcased and most read article on BBC news. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13624265 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13624265
- stretchwithme 15y agoGlad to hear this guy has been caught. http://digitallife.today.com/_news/2011/06/01/6763712-police-arrest-macbook-thief-caught-on-camera-by-victim
- vizzah 15y agohmm.. for some reason it feels like a viral ad for that Hidden app.
- habitatforus 15y agoThought the same thing.
- skunkworks 15y agoThat would be awesome marketing, but wouldn't that involve intentionally leaving a MacBook to get stolen somewhere in Oakland?
- skunkworks 15y agoJust wanted to come back and gloat a little bit. Downvoters, guess you were wrong.
- yeahsure 15y agoI think it would be a lot easier/cheaper to pay someone to pose as the thief...
- djcapelis 15y agoReally? Leaving a macbook unattended in Oakland for about 5 minutes doesn't seem that hard.
- lallysingh 15y agoVersus having a coworker (or actor) take a few photos with it, and never having it stolen?
- catshirt 15y agoat the risk of being pedantic; yes.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ajju 15y agoIt's got to be really frustrating, knowing where your laptop is but not being able to have the police get it. Any lawyers want to chime in on whether the owner has a right to reclaim his property legally? May be if it is in plain sight in the public?
- zmmmmm 15y agoI was thinking that. If you rent some private security guards for an hour, show up at his door with overwhelming evidence that he has your stolen laptop, make a pony show for him about how he's 1 minute away from you handing it all over to the police and him getting arrested, but if he gives it back you'll cut him a break ... I think you'd probably get it back safely.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoIf you steal it back, how would the original thief prove anything was taken?
- rdl 15y agoI think the issue is that other crimes might end up happening during the recovery of the macbook, such as assault, battery, discharge of firearms within city limits, theft of kidneys, abuse of rented power sanders, etc.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoNow I kind of want to steal something of yours.
- ltamake 15y agoUsage.
- ltamake 15y agoI know, I would be tempted to just break in and crowbar the fker. And, of course, steal my MacBook back. ;P
- 15y ago
- mbateman 15y agoWhy did he blur out the guy's google username?
- phxrsng 15y agoSeems to me it could be he doesn't want anyone emailing the guy and tipping him off that the owner knows who has it and that the app is tracking the laptop until it can be recovered. Its unlikely that any of the guys friends read HN, but its not that unlikely that some idiot seeing the blog post would send some email to the guy that would alert him.
- ltamake 15y agoI have no idea. Maybe he thinks the guy deserves /some/ privacy (as this gets spread, people would be tempted to spam the e-mail). :P
- michaels0620 15y agoMore likely that he wouldn't want someone emailing the person telling him that he is being tracked.
- jessedhillon 15y agoAlso: he may not be the thief, just someone who bought from the thief and perhaps did not know it was stolen.
- hyperbovine 15y agoC'mon, he posted the guy's photo. More likely it's so that people wouldn't e-mail him and tip him off.
- TamDenholm 15y agoThe reason this makes me (and others by the looks of it) suspicious that this is a well made ad for the app, is that if it shows where the macbook is, why not just go get it, i certainly would, with a couple of my larger friends.
- codenerdz 15y agoAssuming that the thief doesnt live in a lone house, you would have to go knocking on doors of number of neighbors which in oakland would probably be a reason to throw police at you and your larger friends. But I guess a print out of the picture would help :)
- albedoa 15y agoThat is illegal in many jurisdictions. He should let the police handle it.
- bxr 15y ago>He should let the police handle it. And if they don't do anything? They're not required to. Should he just forget about it?
- albedoa 15y agoIt's a crappy situation, but he has to weigh the value of his iPad against the cost of possibly being charged with trespassing, breaking and entering, or worse. He could end up with more severe charges against him than the thief. If this is not a marketing stunt for an app, then he seems to be going about it the right way. The publicity will hopefully put pressure on the authorities to act.
- jemfinch 15y agoIn what jurisdictions is it illegal to recover your own stolen property?
- dagw 15y ago
- georgieporgie 15y agoI reported the crime to the police and even told them where it was, but they can't help me due to lack of resources. They must be too busy installing illegal exhaust systems on their police Harleys (http://motorcycles.about.com/b/2008/06/16/oakland-motorcycle-cops-stir-controversy-with-loud-pipes.htm http://motorcycles.about.com/b/2008/06/16/oakland-motorcycle...). Sorry to be off-topic. As a former Oakland resident, it's the first thing that comes to mind when I hear Oakland PD. Seriously, though, if you can provide the exact location of your stolen property, how can the police not see tremendous value in following up on it?
- anamax 15y ago> Seriously, though, if you can provide the exact location of your stolen property, how can the police not see tremendous value in following up on it? How is recovering your property "tremendous value" to the police? They're not paid on the basis of property recovered. In fact, the more robbery and so on, the more likely it is that they'll get more money.
- georgieporgie 15y agoBecause doing nothing to serve up justice simply reinforces the behavior. This guy is probably out committing more property crime right now because, hey, it worked last time. Maybe he'll graduate to mugging, at some point. I'm not going to address your implication that the police are attempting to maximize their market demand. This is an issue of short-sightedness, laziness, and oblivious focus on more glamorous crime in order to placate the electorate. For more examples of Oakland PD's short-sightedness, look at the enormous crime wave following the Acorn Gang sting. They arrested a bunch of gang leaders, which left the unsupervised lackeys to wreak criminal havoc across the region.
- gburt 15y agoI think anamax's point was that there's no incentive system for police to act in anything but their own interest. Their interest is not to solve crimes, its simply to not get fired.
- JacobAldridge 15y agoIf some guy had my MacBook, and I did this, I would generally include details like, I don't know, my name and contact email or phone number. You know, so the Mayor's office or Police Department PR people could reach out to me, or others might help me ("hey - that's Joe from Flat 3") retrieve it. Unless, this guy had my MacBook in a viral ad campaign that is. Edit: Here's the owner of the MacBook http://twitter.com/#!/jmk http://twitter.com/#!/jmk He seems real, but he does work for an agency that specialises in interactive ad campaigns.
- d0m 15y agoYeah, my first instinct is that it's really a pure ad campaign. I'm also really surprised that hiddenapp.com didn't link to this blog on their splash page. Let's say you build an app and someone use it and popularize it, would you link to it on your frontpage? Of course; that'll give you even more credibility. It probably doesn't link to it mainly because they don't want to be associated with this ad campaign.
- ibejoeb 15y agoFTA: > I reported the crime to the police It's typically frowned upon, in a manner of speaking, to file false reports. This would be a terribly stupid campaign. edit: I suppose he could be lying about filing. Don't know if that's a thing...
- pavel_lishin 15y agoLying? Oh yeah, they came out with it last year. I've been having some limited success with it.
- brudgers 15y agoSure you have, Cretan. [edit: only on hacker news would it be necessary to post a link: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox]
- 15y ago
- calbear81 15y agoThis is the guy's Twitter account: https://twitter.com/#!/jmk https://twitter.com/#!/jmk I don't think it's a fake. He works for ExactTarget, an e-mail marketing services company.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoSo, you don't think that a story that looks suspiciously like marketing is a piece of marketing ... because the guy that runs it works for a marketing firm?
- calbear81 15y agoNo, I don't think it looks like marketing because he's an interaction designer who doesn't seem like he has anything to do with the Hidden app besides being a user. If you look at his twitter feed, he has tweeted about trying to get the laptop back since April (check-in at Oakland police station). What makes you think this is marketing vs. a guy who has no other avenues to take besides asking the internet if they have seen/know who this person is?
- pavel_lishin 15y agoBecause he's specifically erased identifiable information about this guy, specifically his google account.
- calbear81 15y agoThat's a great question. I just tweeted at him and referred him to this thread. Maybe he'll show up.
- reid 15y agoI'd do the same thing, since I wouldn't want him to dump my computer after realizing he's being tracked from tips sent to his GMail account by random internet folks. Sure, we have his photograph, but we can't contact the guy nor do we know his identity... only very few people would know that and hopefully they mean well.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoI wish Hidden's site had more information. I don't want to pay until I can find out more - like, can I schedule how often the system takes screenshots and photos with the camera? Will it store screenshots and try to do a bulk upload if the laptop isn't online at the time of screenshot? Does it run even if nobody is logged in? etc., etc.
- matthavener 15y agohttp://preyproject.com/ http://preyproject.com/ has a little more information, plus you can try it for free.
- mbateman 15y agoSeems that this is the guy whose laptop was stolen: http://unraveled.com/ http://unraveled.com/ Nothing about him working for whoever makes the Hidden app, though it's hard to find info about exactly who makes that app on their web page. I still can't tell if it's legit. EDIT: He works for ExactTarget (http://www.exacttarget.com/ http://www.exacttarget.com/) which is a marketing firm that does social media stuff among other things. Seems pretty likely to be an ad for the app. Or a huge coincidence.
- fjarlq 15y agoHiddenapp's privacy policy says they're: Flipcode Ltd, PO Box 8946, London, WC1N 3AX, +442071938418 http://hiddenapp.com/privacy/ http://hiddenapp.com/privacy/ Google says Flipcode Ltd is http://flipcode.co.uk/ http://flipcode.co.uk/
- flyosity 15y agoI posted up above: this is not a joke. I've known Josh for a long, long time and this situation actually happened (or, is happening). He's not a marketer, he's a very well-known interaction designer that's been in and around the web design community since 2003. One of the nicest guys out there.
- mbateman 15y agoOkay, I believe you. Probably being a marketer also made him write the tumblr description like marketing copy, which is part of what makes it seem fishy.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- thematt 15y agoFor a free and open-source alternative to Hidden, try: http://preyproject.com/ http://preyproject.com/ It supports all the major OS's, including phones.
- djhworld 15y agoHey thanks man, just installed it now. Seems like a neat bit of software!
- 1amzave 15y agoA word of warning on Prey -- I looked into it myself and last I checked, it stores your email password unencrypted in a plain text file in your filesystem. Better still, a comment in the file describes it as "base64 encrypted". Sure, your average laptop thief is probably too clueless to run the trivial command to "decrypt" it, but it still strikes me as highly irresponsible of the developer. That alone was plenty to convince me not to install it. EDIT: it still does: https://github.com/tomas/prey/blob/master/config#L44 https://github.com/tomas/prey/blob/master/config#L44
- tomaspollak 15y agoAs someone noted, this only applies for the old standalone mode, as Prey needs to store your SMTP password in order to send the report via email later. Most people use Prey + Control Panel nowadays. :)
- there 15y agoaside from mac os which has an encrypted keychain, how do you expect a password to be stored that is used by open source software, which has to be accessible by software that cannot prompt the user for a password?
- biot 15y agoEvery hour, generate a random passphrase and output it to a source file. Trigger an automated compile of the project and bake it into the executable which is then auto-bundled into the installer. Upon installation, generate an additional random passphrase and concatenate the two together to form the symmetric encryption key. It's still security through obscurity, but it's a hell of a lot better than base64 encoding.
- oasisbob 15y agoA nice free alternative to Hidden: http://preyproject.com/ http://preyproject.com/
- SeoxyS 15y agoThere's something very very wrong with the city of Oakland. I lived there for one year, before moving to SF and while everybody told me I should constantly be watching my back, I mostly ignored it and was fine. But after I moved to SF, I found myself in Oakland for a party and sure enough, with a couple friends, I got myself mugged at gunpoint by three scary-looking local gangsters. The scary part, though, is the cops' handling of the situation. Luckily for me, I was quick enough to react and hide away my most important item, my iPhone 4. As soon as they were gone (within 30s) I called the cops, and soon thereafter we had 5 squad cars show up. They interrogated us and made us write statements, but would not send a car after the suspects, who had fled in a direction we had indicated to them. After telling us there's no chance they'd recover our stolen stuff, they took off. We asked for a ride back to the bart station, to the police station, anywhere (it was night in a shady part of Oakland. We had nothing… no money for a cab, and we sure as hell didn't want to walk alone around Oakland.) They just refused, saying they had "other shit to do" and left. The fact that I got mugged at gunpoint in Oakland comes as no surprise to me—I shouldn't have been there in the first place. However, the police's blatant incompetence came as a terrifying shock.
- armored 15y agoTempe, AZ has an Oakland style PD I guess. After calling them and reporting an assault they asked "what do you want us to do about it?". I want you to do ... your f*ing job!
- temphn 15y agoAmidst hundreds of comments in this thread, few will explicitly point out that there are obvious differences between the demographics of SF vs. the demographics of Oakland, Hunter's Point, Camden, South Central LA, and Detroit. Most likely the police you encountered were also drawn from that different demographic.
- khsdf7 15y agoThe Oakland PD is corrupt and incompetent. This has been well-documented in the local media, and there has been at least one FBI investigation into the matter. This is part of the reason why the main red light district is in Oakland, not SF. As far as I can tell, no one has the will, political or otherwise, to take steps towards a remedy. It isn't just the police department. The state had to come in and run the schools after the school district went bankrupt. Did I mention that Ebonics as a second language originates from Oakland? When they were rolling up the 60s, a lot of the batshit insane got swept towards Oakland, and it has been festering ever since.
- omouse 15y agoIf you can afford a MacBook you can afford to be a vigilante and pay whatever fine there is for that.
- sean422 15y agoSeen a lot of stories like this coming out lately. The best one being when a guy showed up at a bar to reclaim the stolen laptop: http://gizmodo.com/5801592/twitter-vigilante-reclaims-a-strangers-stolen-laptop-after-police-refuse-to-help http://gizmodo.com/5801592/twitter-vigilante-reclaims-a-stra...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jhermsmeyer 15y agoI'm curious if there is anything like this available for the iPad 2. Does anyone know?
- gavingmiller 15y agoI've used it before for the iPhone and it works great: http://www.apple.com/ipad/built-in-apps/find-my-ipad.html http://www.apple.com/ipad/built-in-apps/find-my-ipad.html Just be sure to setup a password to lock the device, otherwise a thief can just turn it off.
- run4yourlives 15y agoBrought to you by Flipcode Ltd., the makers of Hidden. (I don't know that for sure, but it certainly seems that way, and there are very few details on the site, particularly a disclosure.)
- chrisjsmith 15y agoThis app just makes people worry even more. Worry is bad. Worry kills you from the inside. Leave it behind and carry on. Also, get something not worth stealing then you don't have to worry about it. Anyone half decent can be productive on a piece of junk. If you have something valuable or desirable, you have to spend $15 on an app to track it, deal with insurance companies, deal with the police, buy a burglar alarm to keep your premiums down, buy gates to protect your house, worry about getting mugged, worry about leaving it somewhere, worry about status etc. It is just not worth it. I live in the knowledge that if someone decided to nick my laptop, they would be seriously disappointed (and I'd be 80GBP down rather than 1000GBP + all the above down). Ironically I left it in a McDonalds in London for 2 hours and it was still there when I realised and went back. Even the staff left it there and cleaned around it.
- ora600 15y agoHeh, its nice to see a version of "don't wear a short skirt when you go out, and don't drink" aimed at the 50% of the population that normally don't get blamed when they are victims of crime. They don't seem to like it either.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- noonespecial 15y agoI think maybe some people around here might think "don't have nice things" is not the greatest way to solve a community's crime problem. I think a better way to solve it than having a shitty laptop that I hate might be to quit arresting people for having bits of politically incorrect plants in their pockets and start arresting thieves and muggers. Especially when they've got the evidence of the crime right in their house and the police get told the address. How much easier could it be?
- juiceandjuice 15y agomy Macbook Pro only goes places I'm comfortable with, home, maybe neighborhood coffee shop, other friends houses, and that's it. My Thinkpad X61s goes everywhere. I took it to NYC, walked even drunkenly walking around in the middle of the night with it in my backpack in Brooklyn and Manhattan and on the subway. I've hesitated upgrading my iPhone 3GS just because it's starting to look a bit busted but gets me along perfectly fine. I was using it to sync photos while there to Dropbox in case either/or got stolen. Of course, I've had my car broken into three times, and each time has made me more and more anal about it. The first time was the worst though, a 1965 Fender Bandmaster at work on christmas eve, worth about $800. What was shitty about that was I had just got out of band practice, hadn't gotten home, it was in a very conspicuos, non-hidden place on a very busy day (I worked at a grocery store) and nobody saw anything. Other times were much less severe, a shitty CD deck ($40), some CDs (maybe $60 I spent?) and a crappy coat. Mostly I just got sick of replacing the window, but that was only $15, so it didn't matter so much.
- raganwald 15y agoI hate to be the Devil's advocate in a case involving a stolen laptop (I regard stealing my laptop as a crime even lower than stealing my bicycle), but I'm more than a little troubled by the idea of plastering someone's face and private life (such as the inside of their home) on the Internet before they have been convicted of a crime. Sure, we could say "Yeah, but this software let the blog author see them absconding with the laptop," but debating the evidence is conducting a trial of sorts, without giving the accused the benefit of a chance to cross-examine their accusers and present their side of the story. I'm very comfortable with the idea of using software like this to gather evidence, and I'm very comfortable with criticizing the police for failing to act, but I'm not comfortable with publishing these pictures.
- tghw 15y agoIf you are in public and someone snaps your photo, they can and use it for pretty much anything non-commercial. This is because, in public, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. In this case, the guy is using a photographic device that is not his (we don't know if he stole it or not), specifically, he is pointing the camera directly at his face. My gut feeling is that it would be a fine line to walk, but that there might be a decent argument that he has no reasonable expectation of privacy. It's not his device, he knows there's a camera in it, and he's pointing that camera at his face... Just another way to look at it.
- PostOnce 15y agoNot in this particular case (photos of him driving away from the scene of the crime?), but in many like this, the pictures could be of someone who thought they had purchased a legitimate laptop on craigslist. People would still be eager to punish the guy in the pictures, pre-trial and regardless of his story.
- xutopia 15y agoThe same is happening right now with the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sexual misconduct allegations. In the USA these kinds of allegations are made public whereas in France both parties (alleged victim and alleged per(p|v)) are treated the same private way until a court deliberates.
- thedeuce 15y agoI'd put electrical tape on the vid if I wanted to check out what I just acquired,and re-install soon after..
- danielsiders 15y agoSomeone suggested posting the car image on vwvortex or a similar car forum to have the users identify the make, model, and year
- klinquist 15y agoIt's a Lincoln Town Car.
- mirkules 15y agoJudging from the car's leather interior, it looks like an older-model midrange-or-luxury sedan. Lighter leather with that texture usually cannot be found on lower-end vehicles. The rear window exhibits low visibility and the rear seat has a pop-out armrest. Furthermore, you'll notice that the rear seat does not have an adjustable headrest, but is fixed (an indication it's probably not a VW). The seat belt clip also looks kind of unusual, but I can't make a good guess what this car would be (maybe a 90's Mazda 626?)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Apocryphon 15y agoWas anyone else reminded of this Defcon video (Don't Mess with a Hacker's Machine)? http://goo.gl/7y6mD http://goo.gl/7y6mD
- philthy 15y agoMark Bao tried to pull one of these promotional stunts once.
- hugh3 15y agoWhatever did happen with that situation? It seemed far too good to be true.
- jaz 15y agoThe thief returned the laptop and apologized. Here's the thread and a news article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359512 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359512 http://bostinnovation.com/2011/03/23/dont-steal-a-computer-from-a-nerd-and-record-yourself-making-it-rain/ http://bostinnovation.com/2011/03/23/dont-steal-a-computer-f...
- markbao 15y agoAnd here's the police report. Not a stunt. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/bentley.pdf http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/bentley.pd...
- lukejduncan 15y agoWhy post the guys picture but blur out his google account info?
- alanl 15y agoSo this happened to me in Feb. I had my MBP taken with http://preyproject.com/ http://preyproject.com/ installed. Now I live outside the US , (in Ireland) and while the police where helpful & curious about how the tech worked, they just did not do anything, even though I got a photo of the guy, his first name and geo location of his apartment block in the first week. So 3 months later, and although I'm still watching the guy watching porn on my laptop, I have built up a substantial profile of him, through persistent (obsessive according to my girlfriend) tracking. So just this week I passed on the following details to the cops - fullname - email - phone number - postal address - bank account no - online betting account no - lots of photos of him and his flatmates/friends. They were kinda shocked I was still on the case, but said they will dispatch someone to go pick up the laptop this week. So my advice; if you stick with it, and hand them the case on a plate it might work out.
- dorian-graph 15y agoHow do you find Prey? I'm trying to decide which one to go with: Prey, Hidden or Undercover.
- alanl 15y agoI haven't tried the others but I can highly recommend prey. You only have to subscribe once your laptop goes missing. Its also open src so I believe you can setup the serverside yourself if you're worried about prey being hacked. It does have a few small bugs, and one thing I didn't like is the 100 report limit. You see, the 100 rpt limit means that if you want to do 2min monitoring you have to really keep on top of the reports. Overall 2 thumbs up from me for prey.
- Danny72 15y agoAt that point, you could of just done a bit of identity theft and bought yourself a new MBP.
- dreyfiz 15y agoBeing able to control your impulses and operate with some level of civilized executive function makes your identity worth stealing, because you're likely to have good credit. Petty thieves and other criminal morons are unlikely to have an identity worth stealing.
- noonespecial 15y agoJust suggest that you might possibly have seen some kind of green/white stuff in a little baggie on the table in one of the pictures. The cops will be there in 10 minutes.
- ez77 15y agoHow does this Hidden app work? Any ideas?
- yread 15y agoSince when is stolen computer hacker news? A clever marketing campaign on the other hand would be of course quite an interesting submission
- 44Aman 15y agoWhat I don't get about these programs (for desktops/laptops) is...do you guys have passwords on your user accounts? And if so, they must have somehow cracked them to get access. In that case, I know if I was going to steal a laptop, the first thing I'd do is format it. Do any of the programs remain after a hard disk wipe? Also, for those using the Prey panel - why does it have an option to save your password? If you're still logged in when the thief makes off with your laptop, and he has any knowledge of these kind of programs, they'll just log in and deactivate your account or change settings.
- UnFleshedOne 15y agoEven for phones, don't most people have pincodes and automatic lockout after some time of inactivity? Stolen phone is useless without cracking that and probably reflashing. Of course if you do have a tracking program you might leave the device otherwise unprotected to discourage reformats.
- sorbus 15y ago> What I don't get about these programs (for desktops/laptops) is...do you guys have passwords on your user accounts? And if so, they must have somehow cracked them to get access. > In that case, I know if I was going to steal a laptop, the first thing I'd do is format it. Do any of the programs remain after a hard disk wipe? I have a non-passworded guest account specifically for that purpose. If someone steals my laptop, I want them to be able to use it so that Prey can get me information. Going along with that, my BIOS is passworded and won't boot off anything but the hard drive, so that the only way to wipe the drive is physically removing it. I'm counting on any thief not being technically sophisticated to go that far, and it also gives my information a bit more security (in theory it stops a thief from running something like Orphcrack to get my account's password). I don't believe that any of these programs will persist after the hard drive is wiped or replaced, though I have heard of manufacturer-provided solutions which live in ROM and install themselves into the operating system automatically (I'm probably getting some details wrong). > Also, for those using the Prey panel - why does it have an option to save your password? Yeah, the "Remember me" checkbox is really weird (I'm assuming that that's what you're talking about). I suppose that it makes life more convenient for some people, if they're using a desktop or suchlike to manage other devices. Or maybe it's just something that the developers reflexively included.
- kloncks 15y agoSo many context clues in the pictures. Guy's probably Muslim, for example. Looks like he might be of Arab descent. (Third pic has "Muhammed" and "Allah" on the wall written and framed in Arabic).
- pknerd 15y agoDoes his religion matter or are you saying that non-Muslims in US never stole anything?
- mattdeboard 15y agoBy this rationale one ought not include descriptions of a criminal's race, height or hair color for fear of offending them. Facts are facts; how they make you feel doesn't make them any less factual.
- kloncks 15y agoI'm both Egyptian and speak Arabic. No racism here. In telling the police more about the identity of this individual (who might be the thief or someone who bought the product from the thief), gathering any additional details can be important. That's all. This is like an eyewitness report. Sorry if it seemed malicious.
- juiceandjuice 15y agoI'm totally down to go gangbusters on this dude and help get this laptop back, FWIW.
- diamondhead 15y agoHow did you make sure that that guy didn't get your laptop from somebody else?
- Youareannoying 15y agoSo what? Guilty!
- yblokhin 15y agoGenius marketing. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is a fake tumblr account made with the sole purpose of getting traffic to the app website. Excellent execution then :)
- valjavec 15y agoJust check first picture on Tumblr. "Guy driving away with my MacBook." So guy steals a laptop and drives away, puts laptop on a seat next to him, with screen up?!?
- thepumpkin1979 15y agoToday is May 31, the MacBook was stolen on March 21... enough days to sell the thing to someone else, don't you think?
- Jun8 15y agoAre there any open source alternatives to the Hidden app?
- Super_Jambo 15y agopreyproject
- kizel 15y agoThis is unbelievable. Great app...I wish there was something like this for my bike, but whatever "that" would be, would probably get stolen.