Stolen Laptop Owner Outwits Mugger, Police, and the Media 272
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 get mugged? (Score:5, Insightful)
Editing is a lost art.
Are you kidding me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What the What? (Score:1, Insightful)
ermahgerd! (Score:5, Insightful)
I are unintelligible and I are endorse this message.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:5, Insightful)
And why would any site accept submissions from ACs anyway? Comments? Fine. Submissions? Not so much.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not? The quality of the summary wouldn't be any different if this had been a known user. No one is hurt if an anonymous coward submits a well written summary that points to an interesting article. The real issue here is the lack of editing prior to posting this entry.
Re:This story is in quite really really old (Score:4, Insightful)
Different guy.
Re:Crime in Jolly Ol' England (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Speak English, dickless. (Score:2, Insightful)
I might have botched the line on the Register article. It's (obviously) a little difficult to suss out.
It sounds like they did get a lot wrong, but they also published the name he gave them, despite having promised not to. The good news is he BS'd that part anyway.
But, in any case, it's not a terribly interesting tech story.
Re:Hero..maybe to you. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Completely incomprehensible (Score:4, Insightful)
moving on...
Re:Hero..maybe to you. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What do you get mugged? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not with that ID.
Re:Slashdot replacement (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't really matter what the links are, I never click on them. And most of the time I don't even bother reading the summary. I think the next step is that I'm just going to post without even bothering to read any of the comments.
Seems to me to be the next logical step.
Re:Tech news (Score:5, Insightful)
It would seem to me that he should be filing charges against the police. They are bound by laws as well.
What you're saying though is that the only way to get anything done in our legal system is to involve and insurance company as the police apparently will listen to them.
MET Police (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:What do you get mugged? (Score:4, Insightful)
CmdrTaco leaving is what killed it. No one else left has any sort of standards or pride, this gradual decline into as was said, an inevitable domain recycling.
Its pretty much happens with most companies when the founder, who cares, leaves. Slashdot is no exception.
Why do you think Taco left anyway?
Re:Oh dear! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Speak English, dickless. (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget, and promptly didn't notify the bank that his card was stolen, since I've never heard of a bank that doesn't have a 24/7 line to report stolen cards.
Re:Crime in Jolly Ol' England (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Crime in Jolly Ol' England (Score:5, Insightful)
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.