4. 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.
To 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.
More generally, boobytrapping stuff has lots of potential harm to lots of potential people. (gas company employees, police, etc). The fact that it's also harmful to thiefs is tangential.
Intending to you kill someone for robbing you is illegal as well if you are not in danger
Actually, that depends entirely on which state you live in. Some states under Castle Doctrine allow deadly force to prevent the commission of any felony in your home, including robbery.
That, so far as I know, does not apply to booby traps.
You're correct--the Castle Doctrine only pertains to places when you physically occupy them (home, or car/work in some states), so setting up something to injure or kill someone on another one of those premises does not fall within those guidelines.
I thought all that was necessary was to place warning signs. i.e. if you leave a big sign that says "warning this house is booby trapped and unsafe" that's sufficient to protect you against a burglar who sues you for the leg that your spring-loaded machete hacked off.
My middle school got bitten by this. The roof collapsed on a burglar and he successfully sued the school. At the time he was not doing anything illegal (as he was outside a public school). The roof was unsafe and we have laws against that to protect HVAC technicians and the like.
That's the thing. As a public school, at least in our area, you're allowed to be on the grounds when the school isn't open. You just can't go inside.
I once was ticketed for being at a park after sunset in our town. The cop explained to my friends and I that if we had just been across the street at the elementary school then it wouldn't have been a problem.
This is true, I forget where but a few years back a burglar sued a homeowner and won because he entered a cabin and a springloaded shotgun blew off his leg
I don't get how they can win a civil case. Maybe if the homeowner broke a law and get criminal charges, but why did the burglar win for having no good intentions being in the house?
Same thing for the burglar school case. If the roofs weren't safe for hvac technicians, why does the burglar win the case? They should at least be able to defend their reason to be there, and the school should be charged seperatley for shifty construction.
Hmmm... I always assumed those laws were there to protect police, firefighters, paramedics, etc... Protecting "burglars and other lawbreakers" certainly makes more sense though. :/
The laws are there for a number of reasons but mostly to protect the general public. If someone has to break into your house to save a life (like someone choking) they shouldn't have put their lives at additional risk by having to avoid traps.
The laws have to be apply to everyone for them to be effective.
However, it is legal to use deadly force against an intruder if you're in a life threatening situation. An interesting test case would be to install a wall switch that remotely disables the brakes on your car (so that an intruder can put you in a life threatening situation even when you're not home) and a booby trap that automatically kills anyone approaching it.
Nope, that is not interesting, it is plain dumb. The intruder here has neither knowledge of the situation nor intent to kill you. You might as well put such a switch on a public sidewalk and shoot anyone approaching it.
I 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.
I'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.
Or 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.
Consistently using the same non-home ___location is probably better. If you're moving it around, the average ___location for your pickups is probably pretty close to where your home actually is.
For the ultra-paranoid, pick a spot away from your home, and always pick a ___location randomly within a predefined circle around that point.
The issue is that unlike simply observing someone leaving for their regular job, with Foursquare you know exactly where/how far away someone is. If you're watching a house to rob, there's still a remote chance that they might come home randomly (sickness/forgot something). With these 'check-in' services there's no doubt that the user is X miles away and therefore X minutes away from returning.
Unless you "cheat" and check in places you are not. Just check in somewhere far away _while_ hiding in your closet with the shotgun. Like shootn' fish in a barrel.
Yes, 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.
True but it's much safer to rob a house when you know they won't be home for a longer period of time. Or when you know they won't just pop back cause they forgot something.
If you fill your home with a bunch of generic, replaceable crap that has no meaningful value to you other than that it is available for your use then yes, this is mostly just a hassle for the insurance company, assuming you have receipts and whatnot.
Most people, however, are not borg drones and though a check from the insurance company may allow for acquiring replacements for lost items it won't make up for the damage done by a robbery.
Yeah, 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.
This 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.
There 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.
Having 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.
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.
It'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.
I 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.
Everything you said is true, but remember almost no one will go to lengths unless they think you have something worth it. As a Defense Contractor you likely had access to such things, hence the training. Most people just have their personal possessions, and robbing a house is often relatively easy without going to lengths for social engineering.
Most 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.
I searched for my city, and found the most recent listing on the site. Clicked through to that Twitter user's profile, then to their website which was about yoga classes. On her yoga website, she lists her home address. It's in the WHOIS data of her ___domain too.
Chances are it's not that rare to be able to get an address for someone that's connected enough to be tweeting their ___location all the time.
Does the web site also list class schedules? Because that is also a source of “when she is not at home”, as someone else already said, most people who have a job are out during the day, so finding “empty homes” is not exactly rocket science.
Also, in addition to “empty home” you also want a place where no-one hears you if you break a window or similar, a place where it is easy to leave with the stolen goods without being noticed, and a place that has stuff worth stealing.
Given the variables, were I a professional thief, I would scout for locations first, then find out when the residents were not at home second, which is probably fairly simple even without the use of Twitter.
Take it even further. Scout the ___location, observe the 'regular' schedule (of leaving for work/school) and then use Twitter to make certain they are not close to home.
You can't take too much time observing, since you will probably want a better hourly wage than working at Burger King when you are going to rob someone.
Given that google acts as a phonebook, simply googling someone by real name has a good chance of digging up their address. I picked a friend in the US at random, simply knowing which state he lived in, and I found his phone number, address, and ZIP code. Also a handy link to google maps.
People are no where near as isolated as they'd like to believe.
Agreed. What would make this app REALLY insteresting is if it tried to automatically analyze all of a users geotagging, guess a home/work ___location, and then alert when the user is over an hour or two away.
Twenty minutes to make sure no one is in the house followed by a quick peek through the mail box (or windows) will give you a pretty solid idea if they do, though.
I 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.
Sure, 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.
I think this falls into the same jurisdiction as Wappr does (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.
Yes, 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.
This 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.
In 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.
Now 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.
Not sure why UK English vocabulary should apply to this site; it does not appear to be based there, and the people who make it appear to be from the Netherlands.
I'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.
Something 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.
What 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.
Makes 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.
It's useful for other things. I was only joking about the "I am at home" bot. But I think such things exist, that create shadows of moving people if you are not at home.
So 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.
Not for finding the robber in the first place, but it's going to look very bad if the police think it's you and then confirm that you visited the site just before the burglary.
lol 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..............................................................................
Same 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.
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.