Show HN: Please Don't Rob Me
pleasedontrobme.com
pleasedontrobme.com
If victim's age > 25 && < 60
If hour of day > 10 and < 17
Rob house
That algorithm will fail in many cases of course, but I'd argue it covers a much larger number of people than the supposed problem identified here.For added safety, the implementor may add this feature prior to the "Rob house" step:
Knock on front doorI've been burgled before. They dressed up in white "painters" overalls, carried some tools and no one asked anything. Broad daylight, broke the door.
[1] http://homesecurity.lifetips.com/faq/139392/0/do-burglaries-...
[2] http://www.apartmentwiz.com/houston_apartments_information/w...
We once cut the lock on a friend's very nice bike (she lost the key) using an angle grinder and a miniature generator, in the middle of the high street in the middle of the afternoon, and nobody batted an eyelid. We were dressed in normal clothes. TBF we probably got away with that because it was so blatant. Still, it's amazing what people will ignore. Bystander effect and all that.
What should have they done?
Call the police? What would the police do? Question you? Ask about your identities? How would they identify your friend as the owner of the bike?
I suppose that's my point really: most of "security" is just the social contract in action. The reason you don't get robbed is because nobody wants to rob you.
That might actually be useful if the record your ID and later connect it with a bike getting reported as stolen at that location.
Two of them said they owned the bike and gave some plausible explanation and way to back it up, and were prepared for me to check. They both thanked me for asking.
The third one told me to fuck off, and ran away.
Certainly the first two could have been thieves, I'll never know.
Yes! And then you can write a blog post about living in a police state and getting interrogated for going about your business.
There's also this one. First, a white guy. Then, a black guy. Finally, a woman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7i60GuNRg
If it has an automatic answering system, you can't "let it ring for minutes", and if it has the ringer turned off (and there are lots of people who, with an answering, do this by default) then it won't even ring at all (though you'll think it is ringing.)
VoIP# -> unpublished home line (+ Mobile)
Home line 'protected' from autodialers by old fax machine, 4 rings then silence. Only political calls seem undeterred.
For the average person it's much more likely that the burglar is just using opportunity. For example they saw you leave shortly before 9:00 or your house just happens to look empty during the day.
That's by no means to say that this project is a bad idea. I think anything that attempts to teach people to be more careful about the information they put out there in public online is absolutely a good idea as this kind of information could be used for purposes other than burglary.
So what are you left with? A few hundred? That's assuming the average burglar would even bother to do any of this as opposed to just staking out a house for a few hours with poor security.
They also went around on trash day recording on their map who was throwing out giant cardboard boxes formerly containing large screen TVs, but those are now getting so cheap and so uncomfortably large that they're not so much of a target anymore. My 42 inch would have sold for several thousand maybe a decade ago, but now its just a couple hundred bucks, why even bother, compared to grabbing some laptops or jewelry.
Most home robberies are of the kick the door in, grab the obvious valuables in literally seconds, and get out and away variety. The door-to-door ruse is a perfect filter that there probably isn't a person or a big dog behind the door.
Door-to-door campaigns have always been an enormous nuisance, but in light of their use by criminals (well, more obvious criminals), it really needs to be prohibited.
If you also had data on whether or not they had an alarm system then that could be a very dangerous combination.
I would never rob anyone though, risk too high, reward too low, and I'd feel bad.
Plus, where I live most people own a gun, it would not be wise to break down my door. Yes, I put a gun in the bathroom when I shower and poop.
One of my biggest fears is being asleep and having sleep paralysis and not being able to defend myself at night. Although I'm not sure if I'm just dreaming that I have sleep paralysis or not, I strongly suspect I am but it's hard to test.
But this seems like a very high-threshold way to find out whether someone is home. I mean, if I'm really interested in robbing someone, am I really going to go through the trouble of searching through social networks, cross-referencing information from people in my area, and only then starting to figure out which homes are (and aren't) worth robbing?
And of course, there are a number of very important variables that such an analysis ignores: Whether the person lives alone (or is renting the place out via AirBNB), whether they're in a building or single home, whether there is a burglar alarm, how good the police force is in that city, how easy it is to get into (and out of) the home in question, and whether there's anything worth stealing.
So it's an interesting experiment, but telling people to remove their names and geographical information from Instagram to avoid being robbed strikes me as a bit far fetched.
I run an e-mail list for people who live in my city (Modi'in, Israel), and we now have nearly 3,000 subscribers. People are constantly saying, "I'm going to be away on vacation during such-and-such a period of time. Does anyone need a short-term rental?" That strikes me as a far greater invitation to mischief and robbery than Instagram or any other social network.
There are examples of this, popularized by the movie The Bling Ring[1].
If you are a professional robber, you might. This is something that scales well; you write it once and then you just sit and watch how the list of potential targets generates itself.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised to find such thing available as a service somewhere in the Deep Web. Hell, if one doesn't care about morality or law, then this is one of the best SaaS opportunities I have ever seen.
I guess they would be better served by knowing which houses have a burglar alarm, and at least in my country, homeowners themselves provide that information (by putting a visible sign outside the house that basically says "don't rob me, rob my neighbour").
I think PDRM is a great initiative and hopefully it will become widely popular.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/17/please-rob-me-makes-foursqu...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/7266120/Please...
Privacy is indeed important, but fear of robberies is not the reason why we should protect it. Nor is someones home address the supersecret info I desperately need to protect. There were maybe two facebook post triggered robberies worldwide. It is much easier to rob one of hundreds seemingly right now empty houses robber goes around every day then to analyze pictures and maps to find one random target.
As a quick example, http://www.tributes.com/obituary/show/Mary-Ida-Cammisa-10153...
Sharing the information with the internet at large is just being irresponsible in order to try and show off, no matter how many disclaimers are on the site.
"PDRM is meant to demonstrate how easy it is to find out where someone lives and if they are at home or not. The aim of this site is to educate and empower people to protect themselves better while using social media."
The target audience of a website like this is us on HN, not the people who need to receive the message about privacy.
Realistically speaking, neither of these cases will be addressed. Although properly using the privacy settings can help, the entire reason people use tools like these is to express themselves about things they're seeing, and that usually doesn't happen at home. This coupled with the fact that the risk is extremely low, and that there are much better ways for a burglar to obtain this information, I don't think this is the best way to go about privacy awareness. It was probably fun to build, though.
You want to find my specific kid for nefarious purposes or rob my specific house, modern technology makes that about a billion times easier than decades ago.
You want to find a kid for nefarious purposes or rob a house, any moron can find the nearest elementary school or drive around a subdivision watching cars pull out in the morning and swing back in 5 minutes and technology doesn't help very much at all. If anything technology makes it worse, too easy for nosy neighbor with an omnipresent cellphone to make a call.
So it's being marketed as technology makes it easier for a random scary dude to go after a random victim, but in reality the problem is crazy addicted coworker, crazy ex, crazy relative, not just random scary dude.
The reason is that too many house alarms go off by accident, they don't have the manpower to check them all.
Police does not respond to house alarms here either (there's one in my block that sounds every other day, it defeats the purpose of having an alarm).
Anyone can rob your house/most apartments if they look like Construction workers/Landscapers.
Hide your jewelry where no one will find it; you might need to know a little bit about construction though.
In the end, make sure you have an ip cam that captures license plates, and a few in your house.
A smart criminal will have flip up plates, and wear desguises though.
Maybe that jewelry should go into a safe dep. box? Make sure you have no active judgements though? They can snatch it all up. They can also empty out your bank account. Be proactive, and don't give them a cent. Become Judgement Proof--if you have any one you trust your life with?
Burying in the backyard is not a bad idea, but don't do it drunk. I know a guy who lost $800,000 in Muir Beach after a night of hard partying. He woke up and couldn't find remember what he did with his ill gotten money, or maybe that's just what he told his wife?
Robbery is about theft (usually using force) from a person, whereas burglary is unlawful entry to and theft from that person's property. Since the person is not going to be there, the property is empty and ripe for burglary.
A more interesting and challenging PleaseDontRobMe would focus on where the target is, away from home securities, who they are with, the security situation of the country, the best escape routes relative to their location, locations of police, CCTVs etc. Much more interesting geographically in my opinion!
The US vs. British difference is the verbage of "burglary" (though interestingly this article also confuses robbery with burglary). http://grammarist.com/usage/burgle-burglarize/
I stopped using Instagram because I couldn't keep up with me post-dating my activities. It was more of a chore to remember to post a week or so later and 'pretend' I'm doing such activity now, instead I just didn't bother sharing.
I got a brand new car a few months back, and even though I wanted to share a pic (not to gloat) I knew it would be easy to track down, and due to where I live it's easy to see whether I was home or not. Not a rare car by any means, but how many '14 plate cars in particular colour in a particular model do you see in any one area? Matching cars could be 5-10 miles apart easy
Does anyone else think like this?
- look on instagram for nearby recent photos of fancy cars to steal
- visit neighbourhoods where rich people live and look for fancy cars to steal
Thieves mightn't be cross-referencing databases using various API's, but they're not so thick as to miss opportunities that might present themselves through Facebook posts etc.
I don't see a problem with increasing awareness of the possibilities.
Some have gone to the extreme of bringing and installing an entire car dashboard to bypass custom keys.
I've seen videos of devices that purportedly copy most common alarms. Heck, it apparently costs U$ 5.
Snopes thinks it's fake:
http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/lockcode.asp
however most mainstream news sites report it as true:
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/new-5-device-easily-unlocks-car-doors-for-thieves-in-winnipeg-1.2288826
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/06/after-burglaries-mys...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DshK4ZXPU9o
When the risk/reward of theft is skewed so poorly in a thief's favour, and considering that there's a precedent of unscrupulous technological usage, I don't think it'd unrealistic for people to monitor social networks in this manner to look for opportunities.
In your experience, are certain new cars more likely to be stolen? I suppose any car can easily be taken by waking the owner up at night with a weapon in their face and asking for the keys...
Your remark about any car being easily stolen reminded me of
- if instagram?
- if on_vacation?
- if shared_home? == false
- if dangerous_pets? == false
= rob_them
- else
// wait
- elsif roommates_home?
- if dangerous_pets? == false && if security_system? == false
= rob_them
- elsif house_guests?
- if house_guests_home?
// wait
- else
= rob_them
- else
= kill_pets + rob_them
- else
= rob_them
- else
// wait
- else
= chill_with_friends
Seems legit.[1] http://cdn.imghack.se/images/c226811e44f418ab538c336f156d1b3...
[2] http://cdn.imghack.se/images/db6a53b635f7d471f747117aada7f2f...
They steal anything that they think they can sell and convert to cash. iPods, phones, laptops. Also of course cash, credit cards and jewelry.
Crime organisations moved from drug dealing to organised burglary because the risk is much lower.
Not sure if they use Twitter and instagram to identify targets.
Police say the ring of thieves averaged two burglaries per week and netted approximately $2 million over the past year.
...
Pentis says they found the suspects the same way the alleged thieves found their victims — through Facebook. “A lot of these are Facebook, MySpace, Instagram, where they’re bragging, showing gold and cash from their robberies, with their face,” the asst. sheriff said.
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/06/04/police-nab-alleged...
I'm not sure what kind of houses you have in mind that have nothing that can easily be transported and sold... Except for the furniture, most houses are full of stuff, and most of it can be sold.
From all the things listed, jewelry seems to be the most likely target.
50 bucks is a lot of money for some people.
Which brings up another point. Burglary can be a dangerous business. I know if someone accidentally burgled my house while I was home it would not end well.
Can't you just wait till you get home to do that? Is it that critical, or do you just like announcing that hey, we're not home.
Step one look at picture. Is the area they're in awesome? Step two go to area, or repeat step one.
Way better than robbing people nonsense.
a tune-dependant sign-in procedure would doom me and the other 'arrhythmics' among us.
Robbery != Burglary.
better ban yellow pages or anywhere else addresses can be found