Wifi and Laptops Adds Up To Theft 329
Ant writes to mention an SFGate article about the increase in laptop theft in the world of ubiquitous wifi. From the article: "San Francisco police statistics show a disturbing trend. Just 18 laptop computer robberies were logged in 2004, but the figure jumped to 48 last year. There were 18 as of the end of March, a pace that could surpass 70 crimes this year. 'It's a changing culture, and crime is following it'"
Or it could just be... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Or it could just be... (Score:4, Insightful)
Before I RTFA'd, I had the same thought. Afterwards, I still have the contention that people would still sit at starbucks and work on excel wireless or no.
More laptops does = more crime. Hotspots may be a factor, but not nearly like they make it out to be.
Re:Or it could just be... (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes sense...that's one premise behind the convoy antisubmarine tactic in WWII. By concentrating the supply ships in a smaller area, you knew (roughly) where the submarines had to be in order to attack.
By concentrating the wireless laptops in a smaller area, thieves know where to go to steal them. Same idea, but working in favor of the thieves.
Re:Or it could just be... (Score:3, Insightful)
So why not concentrate a few plain-clothes cops in the same areas and tip the balance the other way?
Not Likely For Low Value Crimes (Score:3, Insightful)
So why not concentrate a few plain-clothes cops in the same areas and tip the balance the other way?
Police budgets being what they are, the cops aren't likely to be hanging out at coffee joints - there's always people screaming about how the cops have the wrong priorities. The police won't be spending much time on these "yuppie" property-type crimes unless someone dies, and then only due to the publicity.Q-Ship Laptops ... (Score:2)
... like the Q-Ships of WW1 [firstworldwar.com], the cops could deploy a few laptops that, when attacked by a thief, would deploy Taser darts....
... to be followed by lawsuits, of course.
Re:Not Likely For Low Value Crimes (Score:3, Funny)
So, where does your city find its cops hanging out? Around here (granted, it's the Seattle area) it's hard to find a coffee shop without a uniformed cop in it. And we have a fair shitload of coffee houses. Of course with our cops it's not a doughnut and a Farmer Brothers.. it's more like a grande Ethiopia Sidamo (soy, please) with a lemon bundt.
Re:Or it could just be... (Score:3)
This sounds like a Discovery Channel documenatary on the lion and the gazelle. "The lion knows they can find one or many gazelle at a watering hole", except replace lion with thiefs, gazelles with laptops, and watering hole with "wifi hotspot". Unless perhaps you're talking about wifi in a crummy bottled watter cafe, then i guess watering hole is an ok description.
oh god did
Cost of gas! (Score:2)
Or maybe it is global warming...
The real reason is most likely that there has been a big upswing in the use of private laptops. The number of laptops has increased, so more get stolen. Further, in the early days, laptops were mainly exec toys and were well cared for and probably well guarded. Now they're very common and being lost/stolen more often.
Re:Cost of gas! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Or it could just be... (Score:2, Funny)
Doh! I used a double negative. I hate when I self edit and miss the first negation!
FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
My point here is, like the parent poster, you need to keep your eyes open when you reveal that you have something of worth. A wifi hotspot is just a better excuse to pull out your laptop in public.
Don't stare at the screen intently, keep your eyes out for anyone who doesn't look trustworthy. It's not that hard to spot, crimes like these are generally crimes of opportunity (in TFA it sounds organized, though, but note they still picked an easy target) Don't make yourself an easy target, stay in plain view of many people, watch your back (try to sit against a wall if possible, it makes you virtually impossible to sneak up on).
If someone shady approaches you, prepare yourself, if they continue and you don't trust them, make a scene. Even if you look like a jerk (or even insane) you'll be alive and keep your laptop. Most importantly, do NOT take a long, dark path to your car. This is key; many times criminals will "stake out" a place for customers carrying a thick wad or valuables, then mug them on their way to their car. Under your car, behind it, and behind nearby objects are favorite hiding places.
The number one thing criminals hate is attention. Keep in mind the thoughts of a criminal and you'll be fine:
* Quick grab, quick escape
* No witnesses
* They do not necessarily want to kill you or anyone else (most criminals try not to add time voluntarily) but are most likely armed
Re:FUD (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:FUD (Score:2)
Nah, more like the typical scaremongering that the local news channels are so fond of these days.
"A common child's toy COULD cause your baby's eyes to bleed. We'll tell you more at 7."
Need to Know. (Score:3, Informative)
That's why you need to know that some moron thinks your laptop is valuable. This has not always been the case. Paw shops have traditionally shied away from computers because they are tricky to fix and their value falls too quickly. Ebay has changed that. The reality of the situation is not as important as what the dirtbags think. It's a trend and it will spread as th
Re:FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
One has to wonder if muggings would be as common if, in addition to the above gear, mister average guy was also carrying a $900 pistol...
Re:FUD (Score:2)
Not if the mugger's pistol is up to your head or his knife to your throat before you notice him, then he just gets a nice shiny new gun to add to the previous list. Now of course, if someone else happening upon the situation has a $900 pistol (or a $100 one, for that matter), the situation might turn out differently...though of course there's still the possibility for it to turn out badly. Generally, the muggers that don't very quickly wind up in jail (or dead) use ambush tactics in relatively deserted area
Re:A MORON????? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your argument is in my opinion invalid, as there are much better ways to get food for your starving baby, or your next overpriced clothing article. We are not living in an impoverished country, and jobs (not necessarily six-figure, but jobs nonetheless), government aid, and private help systems (think food drives and charity locations) are readily available.
As for having to live for a month off of soup, please spare me. If these people were willing to work and use the resources made available to me, they could eke out a decent lifestyle legally for themselves and their families. The ones that resort to crime are in desperate circumstances (which is still not an excuse) or just too lazy to do something constructive.
And a victimless crime? Hardly. How many people have theft insurance on their laptop? How many want to spend the extra cash on it? Not I, and not many people I know of.
Perhaps if muggings only happened to the upper class, I would not be so concerned. Someone that makes $5,000 in a week is not going to be troubled too much to spend $3,000 on a new set of toys. Someone who had to work all summer for that one laptop or iPod (and, in my experience, students with a passion for tech like myself are much likelier targets because we have no choice but to go through dark, poorly-policed areas to get to and from school/work.)
Granted, my perspective is biased from having been the victim of several muggings and assaults myself, but here in NYC, the most common type of mugger is in high school, listens to 50 cent, and has absolutely no legitimate means or need to dress himself in $300 sneakers to show that he is "pimp" to his classmates, which he sees about once a month in class and about thrice a day smoking weed, an activity also largely funded by this type of action.
Re:A MORON????? (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay here's an example of easy
There is a shopping center in the SF Bay Area (Score:5, Informative)
Put your laptop in the trunk when you leave your office, so that potential thieves don't see you place it there when you arrive at the mall.
Re:There is a shopping center in the SF Bay Area (Score:2)
Or leave it at the office. Why are you bringing your laptop to the mall on your lunch break?
Re:There is a shopping center in the SF Bay Area (Score:2)
Ask that to the idiots who leave archive tapes on their passenger seat which are full of much more sensitive data than you'll find on the average laptop. Or, better yet, ask the idiots who let employees take home those sensitive tapes.
Perhaps this is after work though... you won't be able to hit much more than the food court at a mall during a lunch break, and surely there's some cheaper, better food available closer to the office than wha
Re:There is a shopping center in the SF Bay Area (Score:2)
I currently work near McCarthy Ranch. It's more like a giant strip mall with a BUNCH of standalone restaurants - and except for it and another mall on the opposite side of the freeway it's nearly a services-dead area for miles in all directions. (MIlipitas proper has a few restaurants in the old downtown. But
Re:There is a shopping center in the SF Bay Area (Score:2)
My god... you make it sound like pretty much the most depressing place on earth. Is this really what silicon valley is like?!?
Re:There is a shopping center in the SF Bay Area (Score:2)
I live in Philadelphia (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Easy Cooking... (Score:2)
Really? That's it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:2)
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:2)
I mean that in two ways:
(1) Some people don't have insurance (in the same way that they don't backup their computers, even though they know they should)
(2) Some people didn't know you could get it.
I fall somewhere between 1 & 2. Is this specific insurance you have to buy? Does it come with your homeowner's insurance (if you have that)? If not, can you add it to your homeowner's insurance?
It might not even be worth doing, depending on the deductable.
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:5, Funny)
Of course not.
They're working on the cover sheets.
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:2)
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:2)
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:5, Insightful)
While the metropolitan San Francisco Bay Area consists of millions of people (exactly how many depends on what you consider the bay area), SF itself houses only 744,230 (give or take). The most populous city in the bay area is San Jose, with 945,000.
But your basic point is right. Oakland (another bay area city, smaller than SF at 412,318) has had over 30 murders so far this year, so 18 laptop thefts isn't exactly a crime wave.
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:2)
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:2)
Fremont is particularly attractive right now because it's easily accessible from both San Jose and SF, if you don't mind the
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:3, Funny)
And only circa 300,000 of them are in coffeeshops working on laptops at any one time.
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:2)
Yes, but geeks would prefer to be shot dead than have their laptop stolen.... So this story is indeed a grave concern for slashdot readers.
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:2)
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:2)
Spoken like a true American. I think if anything this level of apathy about crime in the States is more than half the problem.
Re:Really? That's it? (Score:2)
And also, I bet there are more laptops. I'd surmise that the ratio of (laptops stolen):(total laptops) is probably largely unchanged. More items, quantitatively, means more quantity available for theft.
~W
Percentage of Laptop Sales (Score:3, Interesting)
Now I understand! (Score:5, Funny)
Sure, thre will be the occasional bully who takes your cheap computer just to break it and watc you cry. That is life. But there will be no secondary market for these computers. EVAR!
I fully expect to win a Nobel for this."
Re:Now I understand! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Now I understand! (Score:2)
Therefore laptops = meat.
Re:Now I understand! (Score:2)
You don't get it yet. (Score:2)
The $100 computer could just as easily have Konqueror, which highlights your spelling mistakes. That's the beauty of free software, programs that cost nothing works better than the OS that costs more than your hardware. I should know, my spelling is terrible.
Re:Now I understand! (Score:4, Funny)
That's it? (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm...actually, for 2004, there was nearly 5 times as many murders as there were laptop thefts. Moral of the story is that if you carry a laptop, you are 5 times less likely to be murdered!
Re:That's it? (Score:3)
Re:That's it? (Score:2)
Re:That's it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's the problem that I have with this story.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, (Score:2, Informative)
duh (Score:4, Insightful)
Correlation doesn't mean causation and all that jazz.
(wtf - this is news now?)
Re:duh (Score:2)
See my reasonably priced notebooks on EBay! (Score:5, Funny)
A simple precaution (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying this is the only precaution one should take, or that it's guaranteed to work. But it's easy to do and increases the likelihood that some evidence will be captured. It depends on the stupidity of the thief, and those kinds of people often just aren't that smart.
Re:A simple precaution (Score:2)
Re:A simple precaution (Score:3, Interesting)
I've actually thought about doing something like what you suggest but have been repulsed by the notion of not having a password required for sign-on.
Ah well, I don't have a laptop anyway (yet -- I plan on getting a tablet next winter) so it doesn't really matter.
Re:A simple precaution (Score:2)
Solution: spoof screens! The desktop is really a log-in screen (or vice versa?) that only YOU know where to click and access anything. You may need 2 layers of spoofing, the fake password and a fake desktop after that, followed by the real password prompt... I'm messing all of this up, but I think the idea is sound.
Re:A simple precaution (Score:2)
Re:A simple precaution (Score:2)
Great, now you know the other Starbucks they went to.
Re:A simple precaution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A simple precaution (Score:2)
is pretty much un-sellable. Of course it can be parted out, but it might stop
it from getting taken in the fisrt place if it's got your personal logo painted on it.
Re:A simple precaution (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A simple precaution (Score:2, Interesting)
Just don't buy it. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's way too much credit. According to the article, the kind of person who's going to stab you in the chest for your laptop is going to sell it on the street for two hundred bucks. The article did not say so but they are junkies. They are not going to take the time to turn it on, much less check that it works. There are other d
Re:Just don't buy it. (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure that whoever buys it is going to
70 stolen laptops (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe if the city would figure out a way to get the 14000 homeless people in San Francisco off the street, there would be less stolen laptops. Priorities, priorities, priorities.
Re:70 stolen laptops (Score:3, Funny)
Ahh, Soylent Green powered laptop fuel cells. Some problems just solve themselves.
Re:70 stolen laptops (Score:2)
No way man. The solution to poverty is never a free handout as you've clearly pointed out. The solution is to make it unatractive to be homeless in San Francisco. This can be done without being cruel.
Re:70 stolen laptops (Score:2)
Re:70 stolen laptops (Score:2)
You don't know many people who are/have been homeless, do you? Rarely do people go, "well, I don't feel like having a house and I want to sleep on pavement and scrounge for food." What if we had daily unskilled employment? Show up and we'll give you 8 hours of work at at least minimum wage. There are a lot of people on the street who would like to work, but there are lots of barriers. This wouldn't address the crazies though.
And where is this somewhere else I wonder? (Score:3, Insightful)
Biometrics = increase in forced amputations! (Score:4, Funny)
That would really be the only logical conclusion.
Stolen Property Registry (Score:5, Interesting)
Stolen Laptop Registry (Score:2)
Robbery != Theft. (Score:5, Informative)
The key word here is robbery, which means violence or intimidation being used to steal the property.
I'm sure the number of laptop thefts is vastly higher. I worked at one company in the south of market area a few years back that was broken into several times and lost nearly 10 laptops alone.
SF only, not Bay Area (Score:2, Flamebait)
"So far, San Francisco appears to the only major Bay Area city to be hit by the problem. San Jose has been hit by laptop thefts, but it has yet to experience many of the robberies. "We haven't seen it yet,'' said Sgt. Nick Muyo of the San Jose police."
I doubt there's a correlation, but SF recently voted against gun ownership. In theory, everybody in SF is now unarmed, but there's a chance for legal carry in SJ.
More laptop thefts in an unarmed city?
- sitting back to watch the fireworks...
Robbery, not theft (Score:2)
I read an interesting statistic a while back. In the US, most home crime is theft. Crooks try hard to avoid contact with people since they never know who's armed. In the UK, most home crime is robbery.
I don't know if it's true, but it does drive home the fact that criminals adopt to their environment.
Re:SF only, not Bay Area (Score:2)
What the hell, it's worth a try!
PC Phone Home (Score:4, Informative)
- Load an application that would have the laptop occasionally contact a server to see if it's been reported stolen, and if it has been, start reporting IP and MAC addresses it hears on WiFi in its vicinity, connections it has made for landline internet, perhaps taps on email going through it, and so on - and turn on the WiFi transmitter to broadcast the occasional "Here I Am" packet for direction finding.
- Record the WiFi MAC address of the PC and sniff for it once it's stolen.
- Record whatever info the PC will use to identify itself to Microsoft if/when somebody tries to register/authorize a fresh load of one of their products. (Here's where Microsoft could do the law abiding a service by reporting IP address and date/time to law enforcement when a stolen machine is reauthorized.)
Sort of a software LoJack.
If the theives don't eload the software the PC will "phone home" once the ultimate recipient starts running it, and it will be trackable. If they DO reload it the may call the cops down on themselves directly - and even if they do workarounds they still need to leave enough identity info on the machine for it to be usable - and forgeries in a global namespace also leave tracks.
Wardrivers could do a service by reporting approximate locations of reported-as-stolen MAC addresses, as a starting point for a direction-finding bunny hunt. A public-service distributed application (in the same vein as SETI-at-home) could do the same - or could blanket userland with beacons of known location for a WiFi-only replacement for GPS that would let the phone-home software identify its own location (if it can't do that adequately via currently known WiFi beacons such as hotspots.)
Recover a few (and identify and question the people who got them, with the threat of a "receiving stolen property" bust if they don't cooperate) and police can work back up the reselling chain to the thieves.
And yes I'm QUITE aware of how such systems could be abused.
Note that some of these can be done privately and in a moderately secure fashion. (For instance: open source phone-home app with strong encryption, using an owner-generated key to enable its reporting functions.)
Re:PC Phone Home (Score:2)
Re:PC Phone Home (Score:2)
When the PC "phones home" from behind a NATted box, the server gets a return IP address which identifies the subscriber or hotspot. This gets
Re:I wouldn't steal a laptop (Score:2)
I recall a story about such a recovery being posted right here on slashdot, some time back. (It was an unintentional phone-home, due to some package (think autobackup but I'm pretty sure it was something else) trying to hit a server, that happened to stay alive after the laptop was stolen. But it serves as proof-of-concept.)
Oh Noes! (Score:2)
Use your brain (Score:5, Informative)
This company loves for customers to hang out for hours (and truth be told, many hang out all day and night several days a week) because they invariably buy more stuff the longer they stick around. The longer they stay, the more relaxed they become. When it comes time to get a new book, many will simply get up and walk away from their unattended laptop for anywhere between 1 and 20 minutes (don't get me started on table camping). Many days I've stood there during slow periods in amazement at the amount of very expensive hardware just left in the open with no one to watch it.
It's inevitable that thieves will begin to exploit this as I've seen the same level of carelessness at similar retailers and sister stores in several states. There really isn't much I can do about it other than make friendly reminders when talking to customers - which risks offending the all-too-common customer with the over-inflated sense of self importance who finds any suggestion that they alter their behavior in any way (even if it will benefit them) as a severe insult.
I try to keep an eye on things, even though it's not my responsibility, and I'm usually too busy to notice what's going on in the seating area unless there is a major disturbance (in other words: never).
"Casual" laptop theft is going to increasingly be a problem, but not one that I fear to any great extent as in most cases it can be defeated with the help of common sense which itself is a rare commodity these days.
Re:Use your brain (Score:3, Insightful)
Then again, it's just better protection for those of us who DO practise common sense. Security by minority/obscurity does somewhat work in this case.
Re:Use your brain (Score:2)
You know, a simple deterrent would be a large, visible NON-functioning (or randomly functioning) camera that would ward off the stray thief. How this impacts business with regulars is up to you, but advertising it as a service to deter theft would be a good way to keep them on-board.
40? (Score:2, Interesting)
Moral: use a beater laptop for the road. (Score:2)
If you want a really nice computer, keep it on your desktop. Don't take anything with you you can't replace.
Tips for Theft and Loss Protection (Score:2)
Re:What about iPod Thefts? (Score:2)
I would worry more about these than laptops, tbh. You can't exactly hide a laptop in a pocket, and many more people own iPods, I'd theorize.
Re:What about iPod Thefts? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What about iPod Thefts? (Score:2)
Re:The Real Danger (Score:2)
Didn't you hear? That information isn't considered "sensitive" [slashdot.org] any more.