“My scooter was stolen. Unknown to the thief, I hid two AirTags inside it.”
twitter.com
twitter.com
I would love to make “enemies” of these guys and see how far the dominos fall.
Unless as a society we push these criminals, we’ll end up back in the heyday of organized crime and mafia run cities. Corruption is a constant battle.
… this is New York.
Probably would get faster police attention, but not the kind you want.
You can go hunting yourself or hope somebody else sees it. If you manage to connect to this network, you can connect to 192.168.1.11 and turn it permanently on/off and also turn audible beep on, for final pinpointin.
And now that the ESP wakes up everyday, it could also look for public Wifis and send and receive emails. From the Wifi-providers name you can get a rough idea of the location.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28051005
A $50 board with ten years free connectivity in 150 countries.
Perhaps a better candidate than an esp32.
Saying the design takes 10 min is only true if you already sunk tens of hours into the ecosystem. Sure, if you got the tools and spent time learning it (and dont count it towards the final cost) you can do it cheaply with ESP. For many people going with $50 board thats gonna trully 5 min setup out of the box can actually be cheaper
you don't want it to broadcast STOLEN_BICYCLE while you ride it?
setting up such a system properly probably costs way more (in valuable time) than the Apple solution
Even better, use the Google Maps GeoLocaion API. You can send a list of nearby WiFi APs, with MAC addresses, signal strengths, and channels, and the API will return lat/long.
The searchers could get a bounty of they helped find a stolen object.
Their app could also connect to the device (using a single well known password) and could switch it into fast mode where it transmits constantly instead of once/day. Making it even easier for someone else in the network to find it.
You might get away with it once or twice but as a habitual thief this creates quite a trail of evidence about you.
As it happens I already have similar Burglar Alarm running on Android Termux. So easy it is. This warns when one ESP wakes up and appears on local Wifi.
import os,json,time
os.system("termux-wake-lock")
os.system("termux-wifi-enable true")
while True:
r=os.system("ping -c 1 192.168.1.59")
if r==0:
os.system("termux-volume music 15")
os.system("termux-tts-speak -l en YOUR GARAGE DOOR IS OPEN!")
time.sleep(60)a. The owner wants to find stolen or lost things
b. Nobody wants to be tagged (privacy, being stalked, &c)
If people being stalked are allowed to discover Airtags, thiefs also can discover them. A conundrum.
Additionally, what about Deaf people being stalked? They can't hear the Airtags. This is an example where they are discriminated by technology.
If the item is simply lost, removal of the speaker is not desired, so that should go in (b).
If the item is stolen, how long do you need to track it before you report it to the police? For me it would be less than 3 days, when the alarm starts beeping. So removal isn't helpful there either.
Apple should make it nonremovable.
Stimmt! You are right. When someone lost the thing there's no conflict of interest.
> Apple should make it nonremovable.
If Apple was my own company I also would make it nonremovable because I wouldn't want to be held responsible for enabling stalking.
Edit: I misunderstood parent first.
I'm curious do you think strangers would notify you if an AirTag was beeping in your bag and you didn't notice, or would you have to rely on trusted people?
Random people usually hesitate to notify because first they think this is not my problem and second if they decide to do something but I don't understand immediately they give up communicating the situation to me.
Imagine you hearing an Airtag beeping and I ignoring it, and you don't know I am deaf. Even if you muster up the courage to broach the subject to me I might react not the way you expect and you think to yourself it's not worth it.
From the article mentioned in parent: «At the worst, if they have iPhone 11, 12, or newer iPhones, it will be easier for them to easily locate the AirTag using precision finding even if you did mute Apple AirTag.»
Police should have arrested this man.
As I commented on the Twitter thread, we used to have tons of break-ins in our area. Miraculously, when they closed down all the pawn shops in the area with a "relaxed" attitude to the provenance of where stuff came from, we saw almost an order of magnitude reduction in b-and-e and theft from vehicle type events.
For this type of crime, you can have about as much of it as you're willing to tolerate. And closing down the operations that make it profitable to steal stuff is way simpler than chasing around perps as it's much more centralized.
I have little doubt that one or more police officers are well aware of the nature of the shop and get their own cut of the profits.
I'd agree they're aware (and don't do anything for whatever reason) but I disagree your run of mill LEO is getting a cut of profits. If anyone is getting a cut, it's not your regular officers. It's whatever title you want to appoint to the person running the police force.
1. The police don't know and don't care. No surprise there.
2. The police do know (holy shit!) and also are directly involved in a criminal operation (holy double shit!).
I don't think it's necessary to posit a 'dark movie thriller' thing where cops are on the take - from a freakin' e-bike chop shop ffs. Both Occam's Razor and Hanlon's Razor suggest that the effort involved here is a combination of laziness, unfamiliarity and institutional disincentives.
That said, a higher level commander may be judged by area crime stats and frankly those guys have rocks in their heads if they aren't cleaning up the fences. A lot of jurisdictions have pretty strict laws about this sort of place being meant to know where their stock is from. If you've got the will to deal with this stuff, you roll in every few days, ask the same questions and shut the doors when the staff don't have good answers.
So, not so long back in the US, there was a car bombing (RV trailer I believe) in... Nashville I think?
Was a pretty big explosion.
Partner of the person who made and detonated said bomb went to the police some days (weeks?) back and literally tried to tell them "my partner made a bomb and is about to go detonate it at this place"
The police, IIRC, brushed it off as a woman being crazy.
The police have a history of not arresting or investigating people/things they should be.
But they don't, haven't, and won't. At this point, you just have to sit back and laugh at how horribly they botch shit on a regular basis, otherwise you'll probably get quite depressed at the reality.
Does that matter re: Apple considering that the location originated on your phone to begin with...? If they wanted to, there isn't really a reason to wait until you walk by an airtag to grab your location.
Tile has somewhat similar functionality, but it doesn't really have the same ability to track the tile's location. And there are a comparatively tiny number of tile users.
Apple products aren't that popular outside of Western countries ( and the US in particular).
Take India for an example - the iOS market share is a paltry 3.2% for 2019. Ukraine, 13%. Nigeria, 6%. I highly doubt those users are nicely spread to give you full coverage everywhere and not cluttered in the bigger cities and their more affluent parts.
Heck, even France is with 23%, that could easily leave significant gaps in coverage.
Furthermore India is 3.3 million square kilometers, airtags have a range of about 10m.
Which is not 100%. OP literally took 3.2% of 1.3 billions and asserted that was the number of iphones in india (compatible with airtag too).
I'm convinced that the solution to crime is not to increase punishments, but to make the speed and likelihood of being punished fast and almost certain.
If theft had a 100% detection rate and a punishment greater than the value of the item, you would never steal anything because it would be pointless. The problem is we let people get away with it multiple times and then eventually destroy their lives over it.
Airtags and other anti theft tech can help here. Make theft extremely difficult to get away with and people will not bother.
All in all, I’d rather not aim for 100% detection + swift punishment as the improvement metrics for deterring theft.
The thing is, even if you spend more initially on stopping crime, it will eventually drop off as people work out you can no longer get away with it. Spend the extra cash collecting all the security video and know it will teach one person that they can not get away with theft and that person will likely communicate it with their peers.
I would personally rather spend $600 extra in tax for police over having the negative feelings of a $500 item being stolen.
I don't believe much in terms of privacy has to be lost as most of the time we already have the data, we just don't have the human resources to do anything with it.
This is the orthodox view among experts in the subject, so yes
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180514-do-long-prison-s...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/27/prison-exper...
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/business-law/do-harsher-pu...
You apply that to every Karen's favorite pet laws and suddenly we're all living in 1984.
Look at the opinions of HN for example. You've got a subset of people who think speeding should be a shoot on sight offense. And you've got a subset of people who think littering should be a shoot on sight offense. You've got a subset of people who think that anyone who uses power equipment before 10AM is Literally Hitler(TM). I'm being only slightly hyperbolic here. It all adds up. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Fast feedback loops are the key here.
Do US really has higher clearance rates and lower criminality as your comment implies or is that just a guess?
Its general crime rates are also roughly typical - median - for the OECD (including for most types of violent crime), except for murder of course as everyone knows.
I have as close as it gets to a perfect comparison. My now-wife was working on a summer school in the UK, shepherding American teenagers around. A few had their iPhones stolen, but with exact location information via “find my phone”. Police did nothing.
It’s a bit sad when mostly they just had to turn up.
Since Android and iPhone make up the vast majority of the smartphone market, and modern devices on both sides have "Find My" style features, it feels like something they aught to know about.
The police know to look for a serial number on a drone/bicycle/vehicle so why not the equivalent for phones?
I called the equivalent of 911 and briefly explained. The said: "wait, we pick you up", and in the same moment I hear sirens a few streets later heading in my direction. What followed was out of a movie. We raced with emergency lights to the current location, constantly updading other units on the current position. We must have missed the thief only by seconds and found construction containers where the signal was coming from. The police said they would call the construction companys 24h contact and open the containers with them, but I could go home for now.
One hour later the GPS tracker said the bike was moving again. I called again and the operator of emergency services said "didn't you call before?" and they picked me up again. When we arrived at the - now outdoor - location of the bike, there were 5 police cars and 15 police around it, but no thief, it was locked to a regular bike stand. They called in the equivalent of SWAT to open the lock and I got my bike back. They took fingerprints of the lock and luckily the thief stopped at an residential address for a minute or two, so we figured that might be the home address. Investigation is ongoing.
I could more or less prove that I was the owner by having the dealers invoice, serial number and pictures on my phone btw.
The audience here on Hacker News has a pretty realistic idea of how quickly you can track down the location of people using a set of credit cards that are known-- not to mention two phones which were also stolen and shockingly not powered down. I am not saying that the process is infallible, but there are companies I have worked for where you could have given the known information (phones, credit cards) and they could have tracked down the location in real time with a 70-80% certainty.
Catching car jackers with a 70% certainty (or 33% even) will shut down a car jacking ring pretty quick. This sort of crime is exploding in Los Angeles this year.
That the police don't try as hard to track a person down as a mobile ad server would, makes me wonder about the incentives to curb crime.
The only solution I have found for preventing thefts from my construction sites in St. Louis is to pay a stipend to local economically disadvantaged people to live at the site, and provide firearms for the purpose of discouraging thieves. At the request of the St. Louis city police, we stopped reporting incidents of attempted theft.
The DA in my area recently stopped attending murder trials. This is what the powers that be want. When the prosecutor does not show up in court, the case cannot proceed.
But it's still an exciting story of vigilance and good life lessons. Who doesn't like that?
That is something I would definitely expect from brazen fencers, yes.
Not sure I could do it with a GoPro. Something small and hidden with a 128gb SD card would be best.
It should be allowed in ALL public places, especially if it’s visible.
I know it's hard to get help from law enforcement and it feels necessary to do it yourself but there's more than a small chance this doesn't end well in many circumstances.
The airtags would have been extremely good stalking tools without these safeties and even with them you can still get some anti theft protection as the airtags do not notify until the holder gets home and your app will hold the last known location (their house)
iPhone users automatically receive a push notification if an unknown Airtag has been “following” them, without its owner, for a random time between 8 and 24 hours.
Wouldn't this be a pain in the ass if you took a long flight and happened to sit near an air tag in cargo while its owner was on the other end of the plane?
> An AirTag will beep at a random time between eight and 24 hours if it is away from its owner's iPhone.
The airtags are by far the best tracking devices ever created and can let you locate your tag with tenth of a metre accuracy on a coin cell battery that lasts 1 year.
They get smaller and better the more you pay. Gps cell trackers are cheap and prolific
Seems to require the extended battery if you want 6 months life and that, as best I can tell, is another $60 and HUGE because it's also a waterproof box with magnet. Plus there's $20 a month cellular fees on top.
I've dealt with cops when helping a friend who was being harassed (literal 100s of calls/texts a day from known burner apps) as well as physical damage to his car. The police did nothing at all, even with a step-by-step guide provided by said burner number apps for law enforcement (abuse@$burnerAppCompany.com). In the end we had to keep pressing the various app's support until they would blacklist my friends number completely from their app network. It was a huge PITA and made my friend's phone almost unusable (they would rotate numbers if he blocked them). Oh, and we knew exactly who was responsible, this wasn't even a "here is a lat/long" situation. The police are fucking worthless for things like this and from what I've heard from friends about their experience with stolen property they are useless on that front as well.
I can understand why they would be hesitant when the find my data is not pin point accurate.
My dad has many high end game/trail cameras. One of his went missing, so he checked the others and found clear as day video of the neighbor trespassing and stealing it.
Took it to the cops, and they acted annoyed and told him to just sue. I was in disbelief.
That said, I'm glad the cop didn't arrest the neighbor. Unless you have footage of the heighbor removing the camera, it's not cut and dry.
I would take the neighbor to small chains court, but then you have to live next to guy with a grudge? A guy with a grudge can make your life miserable.
>> One of his went missing, so he checked the others and found clear as day video of the neighbor trespassing and stealing it.
That's exactly what the OP said they had.
Very Apple of Apple. Terrible design.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212227
To disable the AirTag and stop sharing your location, tap Instructions to Disable AirTag and follow the onscreen steps.
In any case there is an option to disable the alerts for that AirTag when you receive the notification.
I believe the reason this happens at the end of a walk is because it specifically fires off when you enter your own home (either geofence of detection of your home WiFi or something). So it's probably accumulating throughout the day, then we go out, come back, and it shows it.
To this day she is waiting to get any news from it, case closed and archived.
Person was going to go to some apartment building and planning to...knock on doors?
But not?
But then they saw a scooter shop nextdoor?
Whut?
Are the AirTags tied to the owner's phone, or does everyone see the tags?
If a thief had an iphone could he identify other peoples AirTags while creeping around?
The first one, but as the thread notes there is an anti-stalking feature: after some time of being in near proximity with a lone airtag not paired to your phone you get warned about the tag… if you have an iphone i assume.
But for the ordinary car theft, it does sound like a nice idea.
Though you'd have to buy into the Apple ecosystem and the anti-follow feature could be triggered when you don't want it to.
You just need to pry open the case and remove the magnet from the coil and snap it all back together...
My partner's car was stolen out of the parking garage on Grove St. in Hayes Valley (San Francisco). It was recovered three days later in the garage on 5th and Mission. Probably not the same person who had stolen it, but someone had essentially moved in. When we picked up the car at the impound lot, it was full of stuff — dozens of documents that personally identified who was living in the car. There was even a journal with lists of cars and locations for future theft! The garage also had security camera footage of the theft, and the 5th/Mission garage of the person who dropped it off.
SFPD was uninterested. I hung on to photos of everything though. It was just kind of mind-blowing to me at the time that despite very clear evidence that could likely lead to arrests, there was a lack of willingness to do anything about it.
Maybe it would be different in another city, but I'm not so sure. As much as I'd like to think that some folks on the police force are there to build cases and actively catch criminals, I don't think that happens too often outside of TV shows. Of course, it’s also likely a single car theft is too small potatoes for that kind of effort.
People blame this stuff on the new district attorney but I've never seen SFPD lift a finger against crime, in 25 years of living here.
Nitter doesnt need javascript. Theres browser pugins to redirect twitter links as well
Other nitter instances can be seen here: [2]
You can see this is written by a white man, the middle-class status probably also helps. Not sure a non-middle-class person of color or a Latin American would have dared entering said precinct and using that tone ("made a joke") with the police officers.