I am baffled why people still have irreplaceable files stored only on their local hard drive.
Forget having your computer stolen, what if your hard drive dies?
If you aren't backing up your critical files, there are a myriad of cheap cloud-based options: http://tarsnap.com for geeks or the paranoid, Backblaze/Mozy/Carbonite/Dropbox/Arq/etc. for others.
Unfortunately, people don't think about this until it's too late. I learned the hard way when my MacBook Pro's HDD failed unexpectedly, and I lost a lot of music, movies, games, code, etc. (had some of it backed up, though).
I'm glad Mac OS X and Windows include "set-it-and-forget-it" backup solutions, but users are reluctant to turn them on simply because they may not have the time or effort to set them up.
There's really no excuse for not using Time Machine on Mac. I think it's one-click setup (a yes/no dialog comes up the first time you plug in an external hdd to a fresh installation, if memory serves).
If you are afraid you won't be plugging an external hdd in enough, I think it's worth getting a Time Capsule (automatic Time Machine backup over wifi).
Considering a 1TB external drive costs less than a hundred dollars, and back-up software is either free, bundled with the drive, or part of the OS, there really is no excuse other than ignorance.
http://www.jungledisk.com/ is a super cheap cloud-based backup system based on S3 that has some nice client software, less n3rd than tarsnap.
>Forget having your computer stolen, what if your hard drive dies?
That's what the extended warranty is for! /s ;)
Seriously that's what I ask when told about extended warranties when buying a laptop or similar item that would store data, I ask how does an extended warranty magically make my data reappear?
Also most non-technical people I know never make a restore disk right away when they buy a new system, so if they lose the HD and the hidden partition has to only copy on it.
Anyway, Dropbox, Zumodrive, Ubuntu One, Wuala, plus an SSD RAID setup and I back up to two 1TB external drives weekly rotating them out to my office at work.
I've encountered this first-hand a lot. Police are too busy with other larger crimes to work on stolen computer cases. Here's what to do to protect against this:
1. Buy or setup a good, reliable file backup service. (daily rsyncs)
2. Use full disk encryption on the laptop hard drive.
3. Buy an insurance policy.
This way, you keep your documents, your privacy and get a replacement laptop when it becomes lost, stolen or damaged.
Great suggestions. For developers, I think there are a few additional things to consider. While I completely agree that a file service backup and encryption are a good idea, I think it's important for developers to be able to recover quickly even without these things.
1. Yes, use backup, but also use version control. Keep your commits sufficiently up to date that you will able to get back to work quickly with a fresh new computer. Consider it a bad sign if you have to get your new computer restored to exactly the same state as your old computer to resume developing.
2. Encrypt, but just don't keep highly sensitive files on a laptop. I read that 1 in 10 laptop are stolen, and keep in mind that many aren't stolen because they never leave someone's apartment. If you travel around with your laptop, you're in a higher risk group. Use dummy data and dummy databases. Don't store external passwords to real systems on your laptop. Consider it a bad sign if you can't develop to a local database populated with inconsequential data.
3. Definitely buy the insurance policy, if you'd have trouble coming up with the money for a replacement. But they key here is to make sure that it's just money we're talking about. Try to set up your development environment such that the cost to you of a stolen laptop is the replacement cost of the laptop.
I'm a little worried this comes off as overly judgemental, so I just want to be clear that I understand this may not all be within the control of the developer. However, I think that an IT setup that requires people to carry highly sensitive information or passwords on portable devices that are frequently and easily stolen is a sign of a badly broken system, even with encryption.
>Police are too busy with other larger crimes to work on stolen computer cases.
// Do you think this computes (oh, no pun intended). Don't petty thiefs repeatedly steal, don't they steal higher ticket items, doesn't capturing criminals act as any disincentive to continued crime. Is the criminal justice/rehabilitation system so broken that there is really no point in catching known criminals??
Wisely put. People who steal and fence the goods on the Internet are obviously inept criminals who act impulsively without thinking through the consequences. Inevitably, a DIY sting operation is going to end up with a criminal panicking and trying to cover his tracks by killing the "witness."
It's an unlikely outcome, but imagine this as a reverse-slot machine. You get one pull of the handle. Three of any fruit and you win a used laptop. But if three skulls come up, you are executed.
I thought you were being sarcastic but it turns out, from the rest of the thread, that you're serious. You need to get out from this culture of fear you've gotten into. It really is not healthy.
I resent the expression "culture of fear." I wear a seat belt when I drive. I will be wearing armour tomorrow when I risk my life riding DH-MTB. I train extensively to dive deep, cold water. I rock climb. I do not live in a "culture of fear." I do, on the other hand, come up with a different result when asking myself if I wish to hurtle down a mountain vs. if I wish to recover a used laptop from petty criminals.
I am pointing out that it is prudent to consider the risks, rewards, and potential for catastrophe when making a decision. Having done so, you make your own call. If you think the balance tips in favour of trying to recover the laptop, that is your opinion and I do not argue with your conclusion. But there is no "culture of fear" involved, there is simply a decision that differs from your own.
Now if you want to condone the idea of psycho-analyzing strangers based on their HN posts, I would encourage you to ask whether people who set out to recover the laptop are thinking strictly about the utility of the laptop, or whether they have an emotional desire to one-up the thieves or perhaps show the police up as inept.
Or maybe... And I encourage you to spend some quality time with a mirror while thinking about this... Maybe there is an emotional desire by some people to prove that they not afraid. This latter emotion is particularly dangerous. Ironically, it is often motivated by fear of being cowardly.
(And yes, the point is NOT to be taken seriously. I am not Dr. Phil!)
The culture of fear I'm talking about is a social fear, this idea that there are lots of evil people in the world, ready to do you harm. It divides society; makes people even more individualistic, suspicious of one another, and it has corrosive effects on public goods. Instead of helping out your neighbour (metaphorically, and perhaps even literally), you sneak past and think "there but for the grace of God go I". And the irony is that this attitude actually makes the world less safe. Situations can be taken advantage of in the knowledge that people won't interfere, precisely because they are too afraid.
It's a culture that leads to people driving around in SUVs, living in gated communities, to the point of carrying guns where legal, and voting for governments who promise safety and deliver it with mechanisms of control: filtered internet, surveillance society, TSA, etc. Its endpoint lies somewhere in a Ballardian dystopia, like High Rise or Super-Cannes.
Are you saying we should all just trust the laptop thieves of the world a little more? Maybe stealing a laptop is the worst thing a thief will ever do; maybe not. It's not unprecedented for a criminal to murder a witness to a relatively minor crime in order to avoid a third strike conviction. Is it worth the risk to find out?
There's a difference between "living in fear" and "minimizing risk" just as there's a difference between "living without fear" and "courting danger."
I get a lot more out of diving than I would tricking a petty thief into returning a stolen chattel to me. And I do not have any evidence that confronting thieves is less risky than diving.
I suppose it's hard to get good denominator data for confronting petty thieves. However, most people are very unlikely to kill anybody, ever, and would rather die than kill somebody in self-defense. (See On Killing.) By the numbers, Torontonians are substantially less likely to be cold-blooded killers than the average person.
Now, we had a mafioso living in the apartment downstairs from us for several months, with a couple of warrants out for his arrest. Good buddy with the police who patrol our street. Real friendly guy. Name was Teddy (yes, I know that's not a Spanish name). Stole all the landlord's furniture from the apartment, even the refrigerator. I don't remember what the warrants were for, but there's a substantial chance that he was a cold-blooded killer. But if he'd been on the other side of that table, I still don't think he'd be very likely to try to maintain possession of the stolen laptop by killing you. I'm sure he'd do his best to intimidate the living fuck out of you, maybe threaten to call the police himself, but I don't think he takes violence so lightly that he would stab you with a Starbucks knife in order to keep the laptop.
Comparatively, some of these hypothetical slot machines are less likey to kill you than others. But no location is truly safe, thus I contend they all have three skulls waiting for someone.
If a used laptop is enough of a reward to wager your life, I admire your courage, but when I think of it in financial terms, the thought gives me the heebie jeebies.
In financial terms, she could not afford to buy a new one, and I'd wager that she couldn't complete her studies without it.
I would have done the same thing, except I would bring more friends, at least some of whom would have professional photography rigs to get some nice snapshots of the thieves, as well as their car - assuming they arrived in one.
In this scenario, I think that the 'three skulls' result was about as likely to come up getting in the car and driving to the public location as it was during the actual confrontation.
I completely agree with all the other arguments you make here, which makes me re-evaluate my disagreement on this one. But I think my interpretation still holds up:
In 2010, Ottawa saw 27,446 property crimes, and 14 homicides[1]. In general, about half of murders are committed by a friend or family member[2]. So even if the other 7 murderers _all_ started out doing petty theft, there's still only 1 in 3,920 laptop thieves who's going to kill someone.
Now, as a high-falutin' tech blogger for whom laptops grow on trees, that still may be an unnacceptable risk/reward ratio for you. But if a laptop represented a more substantial investment, its value might begin to approach the value you personally would place on, say, 50 separate scuba dives. Which, at a death rate of 1 per 200,000 dives, is about where the risk evens out.
In 2010, Ottawa saw 27,446 property crimes, and 14 homicides[1]. In general, about half of murders are committed by a friend or family member[2]. So even if the other 7 murderers _all_ started out doing petty theft, there's still only 1 in 3,920 laptop thieves who's going to kill someone.
I appreciate what you're trying to say, and believe me when I say that if you consider the risks and want to go get your laptop, that's fine and I'm not arguing with you making your choice.
However, the statistics you quote above do not support your quoted odds. Since the 27,446 reported property crimes did not all involve the owner confronting the thieves, we cannot use the numbers to draw a conclusion about the risk of a confrontation resulting in a murder, much less an attempted murder or assault.
On the flip side, while I do not have statistics handy, deep diving, dry suit diving, cold water diving, decompression diving, mixed gas diving, drift diving, and other activities I have enjoyed of are thought to be associated with slightly higher risks than the overall statistics suggest, although not as high as the three big killers: Cave/wreck diving, rebreather diving, and commercial diving.
This is an interesting problem, and I don't know the answer. If you go to Starbucks, someone assaults you, and you kill them defending yourself, I'd say you haven't done anything wrong.
But if you go to the police about your laptop, they don't do anything, and then you go out of your way to create a possibly tense situation by confronting the thieves... And an altercation breaks out... And you fight to sieze the laptop... And an alleged thief is killed...
It's easy to say you have done nothing wrong because the thief brought it upon themselves by stealing the laptop and attempting to fence it. But blame is a non-zero-sum game. You also made choices that perhaps involved knowingly creating a risk of a physical altercation.
On the whole, if you are going to try to do a sting, I'd hope that you do not press the issue if the thieves refuse to run away without a fight.
Although it may sound like you are defending yourself, in reality you are saying that the laptop is worth more to you than a human life, and that is disturbing to me.
>in reality you are saying that the laptop is worth more to you than a human life, and that is disturbing to me.
// I think you've misconstrued the situation.
If the thief refuses to return the stolen item and save their life then they are the one that has chosen to value their life below the return they can get on a used stolen laptop. Assuming that they are the thief and are not acting under some complex duress ("steal that laptop or we kill your child") then at any point they can return it and save themselves.
The onus is not on those who have been stolen from to act in favour of the thief. The thief assumes, and interestingly controls, all risk.
My instinct is that if someone does a self-motivated major immoral harm to you, are in a position to relieve or remove that harm and chooses not to then you're pretty much justified in carrying out any pre-warned harm against them. (Like I said that's just my instinct, very interested in contra-positions).
The thief assumes, and interestingly controls, all risk.
The hidden assumption you make is that blame adds up neatly to 100%. Since the thief is in the wrong, he controls the risk. But you also control the risk in the situation described, where you choose to meet the thief and take your laptop back. You both had an opportunity to make other choices.
My instinct is that if someone does a self-motivated major immoral harm to you, are in a position to relieve or remove that harm and chooses not to then you're pretty much justified in carrying out any pre-warned harm against them.
So for instance, if a thief is running away from me carrying my laptop, may I tell them to "Stop or I'll shoot?"
This is one of those things where different cultures take different positions. I don't want people doing things like that in Toronto, and the fact that people do things like that in other places is one of the reasons I do not wish to raise a family there.
I suppose my original post was incorrect. The thief's life is never worth less than my laptop. But the thief's life, to me, is worth less than my own life. Society would most likely agree with my assessment of value. A productive, peaceful citizen is better than a harmful citizen, which is why we have self defense laws, for those specific situations where I am forced to choose between my life and his life (although I don't know how I would make such a choice, I'm certainly not qualified to defend against a criminal who is armed with a knife...)
I don't believe that I should ever have to be responsible for another person's tendency towards violence. It may be unwise to fail to account for such tendencies, but to be legally responsible for them is wrong. Had this situation turned violent, the woman and her neighbor would be no more responsible for that unfortunate outcome than a rape victim is to be blamed for wearing revealing clothes (again, perhaps an unwise decision, but certainly a legal and moral one).
They then have the power to avoid all harm (in both directions), they can even stop and tell you how their family is starving, etc., so you can give them a bag of food and they can return your laptop.
Moreover if they pulled a weapon on you in return I think you'd be warranted in killing them.
>I don't want people doing things like that in Toronto
You want to protect thieves so that they can continue to steal without any risk?
I supposed getting your throat slashed is always a possibility in situations like this. But, then again, this is probably a comforting story for the criminals when you consider that the police officer was given "the names, phone numbers, and locations of the suspects", and yet decided to go away on vacation for a week before going to arrest them.
If the criminals had murdered the neighbor, the police might be more inclined to go after them right away, and the criminals would have been worse off.
Of course, it would take logical criminals to realize that murder would get them into more trouble than (unarmed) robbery.
Probably not such a likely outcome since the encounter took place at a very busy cafe in a busy big box shopping centre. Still, I would have wanted a couple of extra friends on hand for intimidation and maybe someone with a video camera with a really bright light.
Here in safe, polite Toronto, there was an altercation a few years past on a street crowded with shoppers seeking Boxing Day deals. It ended in a running gun battle and a passerby was killed.
I agree that death is an unlikely outcome, but i beg of you, never bet your life on the rationality of petty criminals who engage their "fight or flight" reflex.
> I agree that death is an unlikely outcome, but i beg of you, never bet your life on the rationality of petty criminals who engage their "fight or flight" reflex.
This seems a pretty unhealthy attitude. Basically you're saying to never, ever attempt to protect your belongings from a petty criminal.
If you have reason to believe that your life is truly at risk (e.g. you're in a dark alley, criminal has a gun), sure. You should probably surrender your property. If you do not believe that you are in danger, there's no reason to give up your property. You're just sacrificing your property for nothing, and emboldening those same criminals. Sitting in a crowded Starbucks with a couple of guys who are not visibly-armed is not a high-risk situation.
There's always some danger to your life. A random person on the street could snap and kill you for no reason. You can't dedicate your life to avoiding it. Don't make yourself powerless.
This seems a pretty unhealthy attitude. Basically you're saying to never, ever attempt to protect your belongings from a petty criminal.
Well now, we are going in an interesting direction. I live in Toronto. I am happy that we do not have as many firearms as you might find in Texas. There is a massive and somewhat difficult chasm to cross between the two cultures around the question of "Protecting your belongings from petty criminals."
I'm willing to engage you on this question, but I fear that the HN server will run out of disk space before we can find a common ground.
Whether you're in Texas or Toronto, the situation described in the article is unlikely to result in death or injury. Even in a situation where the criminals have guns, they are extremely unlikely to shoot you in the middle of a Starbucks for no reason.
And yes, I do mean "no reason". There is literally nothing for the criminals to gain by shooting you. They would change from petty thieves who simply lose the laptop and may yet go unpunished to murderers with many witnesses to the crime. This is a major loss, with no upside. Being a petty criminal indicates that they aren't the smartest, but it doesn't indicate that they are completely insane.
I feel that you must be drastically overestimating the danger in this situation to justify simply surrendering the laptop. There's not even a threat of violence here. You're making a chain of assumptions that takes you from "petty thieves" to "willing murderers". That's a hell of a leap.
Life carries risk. Sooner or later you're going to die. But if you spend your entire life trying to avoid any possibility of death, not only will you die, but you will die never having lived.
Toronto is an enormous city. Even incredibly rare risks will show up on the evening news there once a month. Don't organize your life around the bullshit that shows up on the news. If you want to reduce risks, start with some statistics.
I agree with the sentiment, but nobody is talking about organizing life around not risking death, we are talking about whether to go out of our way to confront people we assume are criminals.
"Criminal" doesn't mean much these days. You're probably a criminal yourself if you've driven a car in the US or if you lived in the US after 1980 between the ages of 18 and 21. (I don't remember if Canadian law is as absurd.) The question is whether a petty thief is gonna cap you because you caught him stealing your laptop, and the answer is that it's very unlikely. The statistics khafra posted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2743973 suggest that, on average, you'd have to confront thieves between hundreds of times and tens of thousands of times before getting killed.
"Small agile group of clever people produces results far superior to large, calcified, bureaucratic organization that ostensibly should be performing the task."
That narrative is usually an easy ticket to the front page of HN.
Oddly, such stories are often held up as examples of why we should have less government and pay lower taxes, instead of suggesting that perhaps budget cutbacks are the reason the police have to prioritize and can't send investigators out to recover every laptop stolen from a car.
I'm not arguing the case either way, just suggesting that such stories are often interpreted through the filter of our existing bias.
The State, like Twitter, is good at some things, and not at others. People insist on using it for things in both categories. So 'give the police more money' is not always a great idea for reducing crime - I'm from an area where the police have enough money to buy very nice toys indeed, but that strangely hasn't accompanied a drop in abuse of police power, police racism, or prosecution of the abominable War On Drugs.
As for filters - I admire the woman in the story, because she is a great example of the entrepreneurial mindset.
1: Attempt to achieve your goal by conventional means (call police).
2: Actually notice that conventional means will not get you what you want.
3: Come up with an alternate plan (DIY sting operation).
4: Execute fearlessly.
I argue that those four steps, broadly, are what a good startup founder does.
I agree with all of those points, however that while she has things in common with great startup entrepreneurs, here on Hacker News we usually contemplate ventures that offer more upside than the return of a laptop and less downside than death :-)
That is a good value of 'usual,' and I agree with it - but I think it's also, sometimes, valuable to consider those characteristics in the small. I actually have a specific person in my life to whom I'm going to repeat this story, with the four-points explanation, to encourage them on the path to starting their own company.
She probably risked her life more by driving to the Starbucks than she did confronting the thief in a busy public location in one of the safest cities in the world. Turn off your TV and get outside.
I wonder how the people suggesting less government and lower taxes would advise you to deal with a crime that was more serious - for instance, what if instead of her laptop being stolen, someone torched her house.
I think the best bit of the story is when she goes back to the police a second time, and _they_ try to keep the laptop:
> After filing the second police report, an officer told her he would have to keep the computer as
> evidence, and take prints that Nahwegahbow worried would wipe the computer contents. She
> grabbed the computer from his arms and told him "You can't have it. It's mine. I just got it
> back!" She got to keep it.
At least they saw reason and let her hold on to it!
Who says they saw reason? They may not have had any legal alternative. Or perhaps they just didn't want to deal with it right before going on vacation.
Call me cynical, but I would bet they didn't want to deal with the possibility of a publicity fallout, regardless of whether they had any legal alternative or not. Of course, that could be called "seeing reason", for a very specific value of "reason" ;)
It's quite interesting how if you looked at this bureaucratic system from the perspective of a program or a website, you can't help but think of ways to solve the problem in the way any new start-up would; the system is outdated for today's world--and despite that no one dares tackle any of these issues as to not rock the boat or create a system without ample time off for some sweet vacations.
My friend Peter set up a remote login to his laptop from his phone. When he accidentally left his laptop in a cab in Manhattan, he was able to track it down and get it back from the cab driver after about three weeks. He also was able to monitor the cab driver's use of the laptop with his phone -- apparently the guy spent a lot of time on adultfriendfinder.
Forget having your computer stolen, what if your hard drive dies?
If you aren't backing up your critical files, there are a myriad of cheap cloud-based options: http://tarsnap.com for geeks or the paranoid, Backblaze/Mozy/Carbonite/Dropbox/Arq/etc. for others.