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Back in 2011 (!) I went to a wedding in Denia, a medium-sized town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by th
by teoruiz 8mo ago
Back in 2011 (!) I went to a wedding in Denia, a medium-sized town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs.
Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.
Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.
When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.
You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.
So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.
They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.
It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.
- reaperducer 8mo agoSimilar story for me. Except in Rome, and the ending wasn't happy because all I could do is watch my wife's iPhone go to Tunisia where it disappeared. Still, in those very early days of "Find my" I could see how this was going to eventually change things.
- littlecranky67 8mo agoSimlar (sad) story in Spain, very recent. Airtags and Find My are known by police by now. When my friends bag was stolen, he located it on the police station via Find My. It was located in a residential multi-story house nearby, which was known by the police. The place is known to house several members of organized petty crime. Police told him they cannot do anything as they can't enter the house without a warrant and won't get one just based on his testimony.
- LoveMortuus 8mo ago[flagged]
- littlecranky67 8mo agoBecause they happen to be at the mediteranian cost (for reasons related to how the roman empire conquered and reigned) and are popular tourist destinations today.
- jonwinstanley 8mo agoI don't think you'd find any link between countries with latin based languages and theft. Differences in crime rates are going to be much more likely to be based on economic inequality, social policy, enforcement, and how crime is reported
- TheDong 8mo agoDo you read Chinese, Hindi, and Vietnamese to read about thefts in those countries? Latin-based-language countries also have more relations to the english world (mostly through Britain historically conquering most of them), and so as an English speaker you're more likely to see news about those countries. I'm not sure if you're trying to imply something else, but if you are, please don't. The relationships between languages, what countries are reported in the western news, what countries americans (i.e. the HN audience visit), and so on is complicated, multi-faceted, and cannot be easily boiled down to language as a root cause of anything.
- bmn__ 8mo agoThe connection to the language spoken in the countries that you are making is completely spurious. The real reason is the the current elected politicians have a great deal of tolerance for the African thieving and fencing gangs, and exert their influence so that the gangs enjoy protection from the consequences of the justice system over the native population. A reduction in crime could happen from one day to the next if the people are willing to abolish the two-tier system, reintroduce a measurement of accountability and enforce the law.
- ErneX 8mo ago