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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder if these are actually just astroturfed advertisements for HiddenApp. They always seem to follow a pretty common pattern [1] of a small collection of images of people showing them doing silly things, and the name of the HiddenApp utility is always named at least once, with a link, in the article. Probably the cynic in me, as the laptops do seem to be found eventually....

[1] http://thisguyhasmymacbook.tumblr.com/

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I had the same thought when I saw the obvious product mention and link. They've built a page which is destined to get many inbound links from high ranking sites. This page has exactly one outbound link (to Hidden), and a clear topic of laptop theft.

Real or fake, it's going to help Hidden's search traffic.

[Edit: Also, how many people really set up a separate blog just for a specific event like this? Setting up free blogs like this with very very narrow topic is yet another extremely common black hat SEO trick]

I thought it was just cynical old me thinking this, in fact as soon as I saw a hyperlink to HiddenApp I had my suspicions.

However, if I were trying to sell HiddenApp I'd probably not make a point of demonstrating that even with the app sometimes your laptop ends up in Iran with no hope of recovery.

Then again, just getting people to talk about the product is good advertising for their product.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was clear marketing, TBH

Take a look at http://preyproject.com/blog/cat/recoveries

Pretty sure its legit, but thats just me.

The telescope picture shows a date of "21 Farvardin" which corresponds to April 10th. If he has been monitoring his laptop for a month, this date would've probably been earlier than yesterday.

http://www.iranchamber.com/calendar/converter/iranian_calend...

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