500 EURO reward for finding car by finding laptop

Komawi writes "Greetings, On the night of march 11th my car was stolen (Mercedes Benz, I'm realy fond of that car!), but also my laptop with in it a wireless networkcard with the following MAC address: 00:30:BD:9C:BD:B2 Also a mobile phone was stolen, with IMEI number 351083531088913. If anyone has a way to locate these goods and by this I get back my car, a reward of 500 euros will be given! The goods were taken from Alkmaar, The Netherlands somewhere between 2004-03-11 23:00 and 2004-03-12 07:30. May the force be with you!"

Running distributed.net?

[Nugget]

Were you running dnetc [distributed.net] on the laptop? We've recovered a few pieces of stolen computer equipment over the years when the theives plugged the boxes back in to the net and the installed client software sent back completed work.

Sorry to hear about the theft. I can only imagine how awful it feels.

2004-03-11? He's going to need lots of luck.

[Liselle]

Unless I am reading the date format wrong, and the submitter's car was stolen in the future (November), this was three weeks ago. Over here in the States I hear numbers like around 2/3 of stolen cars are eventually recovered, but I'm not privy to stats in The Netherlands. You would think that the longer you wait, the less chance you have of getting your car back, no?

On top of that, it would hardly take long to sell a laptop off. What a bummer. :(

PHP Info

[codefungus]

You know, today is the day you get the funny picture with a phpinfo(); call.

Hmm...

[Sirch]

The thought that it's April Fool's Day immediately leads one to question the validity of any story on Slashdot or any other news outlet. Although I doubt this is an April Fool's Day joke, how do we know that it's real? How do we know that this person isn't actually looking for someone else by searching for their MAC address? OR something more sinister?

The other thing about April Fool's Day is that noone ever believes me when I say it's my birthday. Which is kind of depressing.

Re:2004-03-11? He's going to need lots of luck.

[ca23e]

April Fools aside, the date format is most likely YYYY-MM-DD making the car's time of theft between March 11, 2004 11pm and March 12, 2004 7:30am.

may be joke but..

[westcourt_monk]

How about a site that publishes MAC addresses of stolen laptops? Hmmm? Include 802.11 MAC as well and those centrino chips become useful ;) Migh tbe a nice feature on /.

Re:What?

[MyFourthAccount]

I can't believe all the people that don't catch april fools

Please enlighten us as to how this qualifies as an April Fools? I doubt that that's the intention, but even if it is, by definition it still is not an April Fools:
April Fools [reference.com]: April 1; celebrated by playing of practical jokes
Practical Joke [reference.com]: A mischievous trick played on a person, especially one that causes the victim to experience embarrassment, indignity, or discomfort.

And I second the parent post in that I certainly don't see why this is put on the front-page either. These are the type of things that you don't put on the front because it's stupid. It's stupid because there's many MANY more people that have stuff (laptops,cars,cell phones) stolen. Should they all get front-page attention? I don't think so.

What WOULD be front-page material is a link to a website where you can register stolen items, with information such as MAC addresses of the network interfaces. And the website has an 'API' so you can write software to automatically scan your network for those MACs, or a program that you can run before you buy it, to see if hardware is stolen.

That would be news for nerds.

But I'm sure Michael will soon enough find out about his mistake as the submission queue gets overladen with similar stories.

(don't get me wrong, I feel sorry for the person that got all that stuff stolen. But putting on the front page, [nl]daar kan je niet aan gaan beginnen...[/nl])

Re:What?

[malelder]

No doubt...we just had our house burglarized last week, and they got 5 laptops (then the neighbors came by to see why the dogs were barking and scared off the guys, or they would of had a lot more (: ). Would be nice to hear some stories of ways to "find" them in a /.'y way.

Personally, I've been watching for VPN connections at work that aren't the few usual people that use it...but I'm counting on thieves being smart enough to plug in a laptop and turn it on (;

On the note of the actual story...I had hoped it was real, and /. was trying to use its power for good (; Oh well...

Re:Did you try calling your own GSM?

[fuzzybunny]

Bummer, you're probably right about the Merc, and I'm sorry to hear about how the burglars/phone co./cops treated you.

However, a friend's GSM phone was stolen in Italy (out of her car, along with a lot of other stuff.) TIM [www.tim.it] helped them find it after they called the phone. The police located a bunch of Romanian illegals living in an apartment in Milan, showed up with a couple of burly cops, got most of the goods back, and beat the living unholy shit out of the guys, several times, threw them in a cell for a couple of days and deported them, with a very clear message that if they ever ran into them again in Italy, they'd wish they'd never laid eyes on the country.

So there is always the off chance...

Re:may be joke but..

[Albanach]

The IMEI number could be useful - here in the UK the mobile phone networks will block it to at least make the phone pretty much worthless.

As for the MAC address...

ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:11:22:33:44:55

should pretty much take care of it should they start to be used for tracking stolen laptops.

Re:Hmm that gives me an Idea.

[HeghmoH]

I have a cron job that runs every few hours and grabs a web page from my web server. This is already a good start, because my logs will show the IP that grabbed the page, and nothing else even knows the page exists. But I went one better, and wrote a small program to parse the page for commands. So for now, the page is blank, and nothing happens. If I should need to, I can change the contents of the page to have my computer e-mail me the output of 'ifconfig' (which would also give me juicy headers to look through), open an ssh connection to my web server with a tunnel allowing me to connect back the other way, or just run an arbitrary command on the shell. I have no idea how useful it might be, but it was a fun little project.

Is there a way to scan for MACs ?

[clarkie.mg]

This story brings the question : Is there a way to scan (the internet) for MACs addresses like scanning ip's. I mean is there a software that does it ?

Re:Oh crap!

[richie2000]

I mean, if you know the car's stolen, you can just go up to it and steal it again yourself.

That's actually illegal in Sweden. There are cases when someone who was trying to sell their car loans it to a prospective buyer for a test drive who then promply drives away with it (which technically isn't "theft" since he was given the keys, it's more or less a misdemeanor amounting to "borrowing with intent" (egenmaktigt forfarande, bork, bork, bork)). The rightful owner tracks the car down, takes it back, is caught by the police and prosecuted for the same crime as the "thief".

Re:2004-03-11? He's going to need lots of luck.

[squaretorus]

WE dont switch em around - its the damn US that gets it wrong.

The most annoying thing about September 11th is that even British newsreaders are using the hateful expression 'nine-eleven' which to every self respecting EU inhabitant used to mean either a sportscar from Porche or '11 minutes past 9' or, at a push, 'the ninth of November' although this would have to have been with a year attached to be appropriate 'nine-eleven-two thousand'.

Why you would reverse a perfectly logical ordering to put the month before the date I have no idea!

Re:Running distributed.net?

[RevAaron]

You could use something like BackOrifice 2k with ButtTrumpet installed. Sounds horrible, yes, but BO2k can at times really be a useful and legally useful tool. ButtTrumpet lets you - whwever you are- know the IP address of the box. Once the machine was plugged in, you could then connect to it VNC-ish style to watch what they were doing, cap keys, etc etc.

I remember a story like this that wasn't an April fool a few years back. The guy was a Mac user and found his computer by some PC Anywhere like tool. I can't recall what the package was called, but when connected, it contacted his computer to tell him it was online and available for admin'ing, and sure enough he reocvered it!

Ideas

[Experiment 626]

It's situations like this guy's that make me wish I had a mini-PCI GPS card inside my laptop, imagine the possibilities. Once an hour, it could report its exact coordinates to a hidden log on your web server.

Of course, just checking in periodically has its benefits, even without extra hardware. If the laptop sees some "stolen" flag on the server has been set, it turns on keylogging and sends you all the thief's keystrokes. The laptop could also turn on its microphone (yes, they have built in ones) and send a realtime audio stream of everything being said around it.

i guy rescued an iMac from theft this way....

[johnpaul191]

this is not an April fools joke...... but i'm on dialup so i can't go find the orig stories.

there was a story in the last year or so on MacSlash and other mac sites about a guy who's sister's iMac was stolenf rom her apartment. being the nerdier of the siblings he had installed (i think) Timbucktoo (sp?) on her machine. it's like Apple's remote desktop, before ARD existed. he just waited till the thief signed on again and till it looked like they left the machine idle and went in to change the isp dialup numbers to his house. he then logged their numbers on his callerID box and used whitepages.com to do a reverse lookup. i think the police were confused about his thing when he went to them but he went to the address and demanded back the machine explaining he knew the stolen merchandise was in the house. the person there claimed "they bought it from some guy" not knowing it was stolen... but as you know stolen merch is stolen merch. i don't think the person using the stolen iMac was charged, but the guy rescued the iMac for his sister.

the story may have been posted tot he apple news section here..... the guy behind it was posting info as it was going on to at least one site. no it wasnt on April fools day either...... makes you wonder if it's not a bad idea to put some remote desktop client app on your machine in case the thief is too stupid to format the machine.

Re:Running distributed.net?

[Shakrai]

Wow, you told us your cell's IMEI and your laptop's MAC. How about your car's numberplate?

He spent so much money on the car that he couldn't afford a laptop with a real NIC:

Here are the results of your search through the public section of the IEEE Standards OUI database report [ieee.org] for 0030BD:
00-30-BD (hex) BELKIN COMPONENTS
0030BD (base 16) BELKIN COMPONENTS
501 WEST WALNUT STREET
COMPTON CA 90220
UNITED STATES

Now, my fellow geeks, I ask you: Does this man really deserve our help? I mean seriously -- if he spends more money on his car then his laptop what does that say of his priorities? And what kind of Geek would leave his poor laptop in the car to be stolen?

A real geek would have been driving a Dodge Neon with a laptop that cost so much the value of the car increased by a factor of five when the laptop was being transported. Somehow I doubt his laptop with the cheap Belkin NIC or chipset cost anywhere near this much. Real geeks have Cisco chipsets soldered onto the motherboard of their laptops!

He deserves what he gets!