Stolen laptop recovered with Back To My Mac
By Joshua Fruhlinger 
posted May 11th 2008 10:53AM
posted May 11th 2008 10:53AM
Here's a little story for you: An Apple Store employee had a party in her apartment. A couple weeks later her place was cleared out to the tune of about $5,000 worth of electronics, including her new Mac. Days later, a friend sees that she's online and alerts the Mac's rightful owner. Since she was running Leopard with Back to My Mac, owner-girl logged in remotely and activated Photo Booth via the screen-share function. And what do you know, it turned out that the thieves were some "friends" who were at the party a few weeks back. She took the photos to the cops and -- voila -- busted! The thieves, Edmon Shahikian, 23, and Ian Frias, 20, both of the Bronx, have been charged with second-degree burglary and fourth-degree criminal possession of stolen property. Go go crafty nerdy girl![Via TUAW]
Im from the bronx so I guess I wont be invited to any Itunes parties anymore... =(
On Juy 24, 2007 at 22:44 hours First Precinct Anti-Crime Police Officers Cromwell and Gratzon assisted by Second Precinct Anti-Crime Police Officers Grossman and Tobacco arrested 3 people in the rear parking lot of 605 Mc Lean Ave. The three people were in possession of approximately three pounds of marijuana.
Arrested persons:
* Ian Frias age 20 Bronx, NY
* Edmon Shahikian age 22 Bronx, NY
* Julio Matos age 16 Orange City, Florida
All three were charged with criminal possession of marijuana in the 2nd degree. A class D felony and were held overnight in the city jail to be arraigned this morning.
http://www.yonkersny.gov/Index.aspx?page=1712
Obviously, the girl doesn't know how to make the right friends either.....
"Go go crafty nerdy girl!" What? A GIRL could be that smart?
How utterly condescending!!
Women's brains are half the size of men's, it's science!
Wasn't meant that way at all, Ray1. Quite the opposite: in adoration of her craftiness.
shut your goddamn vagina
*slaps the meter* My tongue in cheek meter is on the fritz again. I can’t tell if this post was joking or not.
Nerd girls are VERY few and far between and what were they suppose to say....nerd carbon based lifeform? Nerd person. Whatever.
.Mac.. Really? just get yourself with a cheap host for like 70 bucks a year and most give ya like a terabyte at this point.
Another vote for Hamachi + VNC; It's solid.
Looks like these two have been arrested before.
http://www.yonkersny.gov/Index.aspx?page=1712
*Clap, clap*
Go go gadget crafty nerdy girl!
They should be in a TV show called "Dumb ass amateur criminals gone wild"
you never heard of "Cops"?
Heh there is (was?) a show on Fox or something called stupid criminal acts. Also sometimes they showed clipped on various blab-shows (aka Maury), but those normally showed a guy pissing into the office's public coffee pot.
I have to admit though since that almost happened at my ex-internship job, I always bring my own coffee to work made myself from beans I grind myself (w00t to USB coffee warmer and no urine!).
That goes to show that Macs are the best computers ever, and Steve Jobs is a freaking GOD.
*ducks to avoid sniper bullets*
Heh oh man, I wish the snapshots get posted online. Also I wish Apple would release OSX as a standalone operating system (or rather, one without built in protection and open up driver development) so you don't have to have a half working hackintosh just to enjoy this excellent OS on the hardware of your choice.
I think Mac is a pretty cool guy, eh jails thieves and doesn't afraid of anything
not to be a devil's advocate or something but as awesome as this sounds, how do we know that the owner is the only one that's acceptable to do this and not let some random person be taking people's picture while being used?
I too would like to have this function as a security device on every type of laptop.
I thought there was once when someone sent their MacBook for servicing and forgot(!) to disable his script that captures photos with the built-in camera periodically and upload the photos via FTP such that he managed to get pictures of the Apple service center.
And yes, logmein does the same thing. In fact logmein is able to tunnel over HTTP even with restrictive firewalls, routers and proxy servers it should still work (unless the logmein website is blocked...).
And if the burglars were a bit smarter they'd simply reformat and reinstall the OS (as had been mentioned)...
What fuckups. I hope they goto a "federal POUND ME IN THE ASS prison."
I thought i was the only girl in the bronx with a Mac ;) Im glad she got her Macbook, I would die if it had been me. Smart girl.
Yes, she is an apple employee, thats why she had .Mac . . I would not get a .Mac account, unless I had a lot of money.
Once again Mac users are being impressed by shit that has been on the PC for....well at least 7 years if not more. There are countless companies that allow you to install software in a hidden partition on your computer and when it gets booted up it calls home to mama. Not only that but many of the companies will work with the police to get this info to them and determine who to contact and what to do next.
But of course this has never been available on a Mac, well at least nto until recently, so it doesn't exist.
That said the girl gets props for ingenuity. Why this is on Engadget though is beyond me. Oh its Apple....so anything goes now a days. Next up....someone took an iSight video of their hamster and edited it in FCE....quick! Post it on Engadget!
this has been available for quite some time on a mac. This just happened to be from a service that has a unique connection to your computer as a feature. Most people talk here and just plain guess at all the answers. Not referring to you in that respect. I am privy to info about the incident and the company.
Silly girl 1 Stupid thieves 0
What about Drop Box. Setup a script so that if a certain key combo wasn't typed then it will take snapshots dropped into a special Drop Box folder which would be synced up with every other PC so you would find out immediately.