Why you don't steal from a hacker. (opens in new tab)

I think it is great that the average person can now do all those things from a web app. It is funny though that they still consider themselves to be hackers because they can use that web app. Another example of misuse of the term hack that I see all the time is when people use someone else's logged in Facebook session and then claim they "hacked their Facebook" because that person left their session logged in. Silly...

Others take a pitchforks and torches approach. I recall people saying, “publish and let him sue if he doesn’t like it,” which is pretty much the same thing as saying “it might be wrong, but thanks to the difficulties of suing for libel, we can get away with it.”

I guess this is where we peel away all of our nobility and reveal the savages underneath. Some of us strongly believe in the justice system and the importance of treating the accused extremely fairly in theory, but in practice "we know the bastard did it, so there."

As for his privacy, he surrendered that voluntarily when he stole the laptop; the government didn't impose that sentence on him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/10/uk-riots...

Furthermore, I don't see how putting someone's information on the internet is comparable to physically depriving someone of their property. The latter has obvious effects, and the former may not even cause much harm. It would have never happened had the thief not stolen the laptop, so I'd say the ultimate blame rests on them anyway.

Why should I respect his privacy when he has absolutely abused mine?

I know from experience (not me of course, but that of some kids who stole some stuff from a neighbor) that juveniles who are caught and convicted of petty theft basically get a slap on the wrist, a stern warning about what will happen if they do it again, and sent home.

  The story you have just heard is true. The names were changed to
  protect the innocent.
  
  On August 12th, trial was held in Department 98, Superior Court of the
  State of __London, in and for the County of __London. In a moment the 
  results of that trial.
  
  Shillip Herbert Keaver was tried and convicted of robbery in the first
  degree - five counts - and received sentence as prescribed by
  law. Robbery in the First Degree is punishable by imprisonment for a
  period of not less than five years in the __London penitentiary. Because
  of the viciousness of the suspect, it was decided that the terms would
  run consecutively.

  You have just heard "DragNet," a series of authentic cases
  from official files. Technical advice comes from the
  office of Chief Constable, Scotland Yard, __London.

we (the Prey team) don't have the time or the interest to pay people, thieves or whomever to build and publish these elaborate stories.

I spent almost all afternoon yesterday on Reddit -- where some guy published a similar story -- trying to make it clear that we had nothing to do with it (besides having developed the software).

I'd be happy to answer any questions regarding Prey, but please don't make me go repeating today the same thing all over again.

I don't know of a single person who directly connects their laptop to the internet. This would have been sitting behind a NAT device which, unless port 22 was explicitly forwarded to the IP address that his laptop happened to get via DHCP, would have stopped him from SSHing in :)

It seemed perfectly clear to me that you meant that a hacker is going to have some means of finding his stolen laptop rather than that using Prey makes you some kind of hacker.

And to the criticism that you are running a product, that's ridiculous as well. Do we all solder our own motherboards? Devout Not-Invented-Hereism isn't a prerequisite for being a hacker, and in fact it probably makes you much less effective of one.

The issue is that the article is titled "Why you don't steal from a hacker". This is not actually an appropriate name for the article, because it's not the writer's status as a hacker that leads to the final result. It is the writer's position as an application user that leads to the final result. In that sense, this article be should called, "Why you don't steal from someone that knows how to use an application to track their stolen laptop". Hence, by replacing the the "application user" with "hacker" you are diluting the meaning of hacker that everyone here loves to use. I'm not trying to be critical, just explaining why people are stating this and that they are attempting to express a consistent stance. You may associate this type of activity with a hacker, but understandably, it is not what you'd come up with when you attempted to define a hacker.

As far as I know, they never caught anybody, but at least they tried. I'm pretty sure it was my drug-dealing neighbors two houses down... especially since the guy three houses down claims the security cameras on his porch showed them taking stuff from our house to theirs. Oh well.

I think you under-estimate the speed and hassle of dealing with insurance.

Also most insurance has a deductible. You're still out typically hundreds of dollars.

I had a macbook pro of one of our employees stolen. We used prey to get it back, with assistance from the police. Yes we have corporate insurance, yes we backup our data; but we were still very pleased to receive our stolen property back.

There's apparently a safari browser-only mode which can be activated from the login screen there.

This would create the ideal scenario for the stolen laptop: Thief without the knowledge or ability to reformat (particularly if you've slowed them down further with a firmware password) can only use the safari-browsing guest mode; can't get to your full encrypted drive, and Prey is recording and sending off everything they're doing.