Hello, My Name is Stupid.
A few days ago, Workspace, a shared work environment in Gastown, got broken in to. Six laptops were stolen. One of them had a plug-in for Flickr which uploads photos taken from the machine. I guess one of the criminals (or someone who purchased the stolen machine) decided to have fun with the built-in iMac camera… Which went directly to the community Flickr stream that Workspace had created.
Uh, how stupid is this criminal? His tattoos will obviously be recognized by one of the 80,000 odd viewers of stream since the news hit (and has been dugg close to 2000 times today) — I hope he gets caught. I hope his friend(s) get caught, too. At least they’ve got video of the theives entering and removing the equipment… It’s only a matter of time.
If you recognize this guy, or his ink… e-mail Bill MacEwan at info AT workspace DOT com. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you!
Oh, and Workspace has already heard from Flickr, who has given them the IP address of the connection used to upload the photos.
Dumbasses.
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I find it deeply disturbing that he seemed to be in a state of undress….
Err, ya. Actually, he’s quite disturbing, period. Yuck.
This has had me giggling all day. Oh, and nice tattoos buddy, that’ll sure help you stay incognito.
I was just sent this link from a friend of mine…and I have to say that this is freakin’ brilliant. I truly hope that this results in the guy being caught. It couldn’t be more clear.
But in the spirit of peace and love amongst honest types…I wanted to just pass on that I highly recommend you pass on this info to the police, but that you remove these photos and the story from online immediately! Why? Well…
- if this guy actually is the originally thief and he/one of his friends/associates sees this, they will dump the gear and then you will have no conviction (thief MUST be caught with the gear…and even then it likely may not be enough for prosecution)
- you don’t know just how nasty this person is…and you may become the target**
Sorry to ruin the fun. It is a great story, and Vancouver has way too many criminals = not so much fun. I just don’t want to hear that something bad has happened – I only want to hear the person has been caught red-handed.
There was an item on News1130 this morning: the guy in the picture turned himself and the laptop in, saying he’d bought the laptop from a friend and had no idea it was stolen. Been trying to find it online, but so far, no luck.
BTW, David, reasonable suggestions, but… the pics have appeared in the major papers, I don’t think having them on Tanya’s li’l blog is really going to be a concern to anyone. (http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/story.html?id=f29d0671-9a1f-4338-809b-c6844f5a22a7&k=27728 for example).
Hey guys,
There’s a follow up story here: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=f7ef05c7-1668-4ebe-a08e-af0dde5af1f1&k=11356
There it is!
The downside to all this furor, of course, is that someone buying the other stolen machines is a lot more likely to be careful of their own pics appearing on the ‘net, which will reduce the chances of any of the other machines being recovered (at least not in the same way).
Anyway, props to “Mr. Stupid” for being smart enough to turn himself in…
Being known to police, his current lawyer advised him to do so.
He didn’t really have much choice.
The key here was that Photobooth (a Flickr plugin) was what gave him away. It was a community use machine, so it made sense to have that feature installed for ease-of-use.
The other machines were owned by individuals that rented office space at Workspace. Hopefully some of them have Absolute.com tracing software on them… And there’s pretty much no way around that — Wiping the machine won’t help.
I highly recommend that software on any portable computer suseptible to theft. Well worth the $49 a year for the service.