"The thief has since returned the laptop, in hopes of clemency in the form of the YouTube video being pulled. Bao has indicated, though, that he's not interested in cutting a deal. Instead, he's content using backup service Backblaze—which syncs changes made to the laptop in the cloud—to find access the guy's Facebook page, dig up PhotoBooth pictures he took, and generally let him stew in his internet humiliation for a while."
- http://gizmodo.com/#!5784633/laptop-thiefs-ridiculous-dance-...
Now he's just turned it into a plug for his startup. Smart guy.
Even if it was by the letter of the law, it wouldn't be by the application of the law. What's on the books is not what matters in practice. You need a prosecutor willing to press charges. Considering the circumstances, I doubt a prosecutor would press charges.
Of course, the thief could always sue, but even that's a hard sell.
Why would the thief suing be a hard sell? If it’s really becoming a problem for him paying a lawyer some money to file the necessary paperwork would be no problem.
It would be a hard sell to a judge or jury. A prospective lawyer will know this, and may not want to sink time (and/or money) into it. You can sue someone for just about anything, but that doesn't mean you'll win.
But why? That would never be the case in Germany. A personality rights violation is a personality rights violation. A thief doesn’t lose those rights just because he is a thief.
I cannot for the life of me imagine that the US judiciary is that unprofessional.
It's a privacy issue, which isn't expressly protected (by the Constitution, anyway). I doubt he (in the eyes of the law) has any reasonable expectation of privacy if he is placing his information (images, videos) on someone else's computer.
First, I don't think there was any violation of this person's rights by US law. Second, judges and juries are people, not automatons that blindly apply law. Considering the circumstances, I have a hard time believing a judge or a jury would think that the thief deserves a monetary reward.
That's the only tangible outcome that would come from suing the person who uploaded it. Getting money for "damages" is the only reason to sue the individual, in this case.
If you want the video taken down, it would be more direct to go after YouTube. In this case, the individual isn't really the "publisher," YouTube is. You probably wouldn't even need to sue YouTube, you could probably go through the "inappropriate content" channel.
He can probably just do a simple DMCA takedown. He made the video, so he owns the copyright. Even better -- just turn on monetization and buy a new laptop in a week.
He doesn't necessarily own a video he made using someone else's equipment, especially if he didn't compensate the owner of the equipment for its use. If you don't produce intellectual property on your own time and with your own equipment, your full ownership of what you produce is not a given.
German laws are much different than US laws, and even if they weren't, I don't think anyone cares about a thief's personality rights. It's not a violation because Mark owns that data and the thief willingly recorded it on the disk.
Suppose a 14year old girl stole some underwear - the store then videos her in her bedroom in the underwear and puts it on TV as an ad campaign. Still acceptable in the USA?
On the contrary, what people care about absolutely is the law in the Anglo-American setup. Laws are black and white (sort of), but the world is grey. We have juries not just to ascertain guilt, but to decide whether punishment should be brought forth.
No jury will ever side with the thief for what is essentially mischief.
I can't believe this thread got this big over something this simple.
Whether you think it's right or wrong, a jury isn't ever going to give the thief any leniency here. I believe in some European countries there are professional juries? Perhaps Germany?
We don't have that here. It's just people off the street and they have no legal training and they go with their gut feeling quite often and they DEFINITELY will in a case this simple.
If the thief's apartment was burned down or he was murdered or got beat up or something like that as a result of the notoriety, then there may be a case. But not because of some public humiliation or something related to privacy matters.
For better or worse, the US is not Germany. Comparing the two won't necessarily be that enlightening. Consider, for a moment, why the thief in this case is not being prosecuted at this very moment. I would consider that even more unprofessional.
So yes, abstractly, a thief should not have to give up their rights, but on the other hand, it's a thief -- and there's a particular concrete US ethos that influences mine and the jury's thinking about this. We wonder why we should care about the rights of this particular person who chose to steal other people's possessions.
No. What I think everyone is saying is that we find it surprising that the thief recording a video and putting it on the victims computer (essentially giving it to him) would have any rights to sue for at all in Germany or anywhere else for that matter.
The fact that the thief knows that the computer is stolen property and is not rightfully his makes a big difference. For example, if he bought the computer for $250 he might be suspicious that it was stolen (otherwise why such a good deal?), but it is theoretically possible in that situation to give him the benefit of the doubt. Of course, that's not the case here.
It's not in the "name" of anything. That is, it's not a principled stand. He is claiming that people's prejudices and biases will cause them to overlook it.
Jury nullification. US Juries can find in opposition to the facts, the evidence, the law, the judge's instructions, etc.
In short, if you put a case in front of a US jury, with a clearly documented violation of a clearly worded law, you may still find the jury returning a verdict of 'not guilty'. And that's just the way it is.
Eeehh, when you hear lawyers in the USA say that you better shoot to kill if your going to defend yourself from a home invasion robber, other wise case law will allow that robber to successfully sue you for personal injury and disability, I think something like that would actually work.
A guy in northwest Florida got his arm blown off in a mishap while stealing copper from a transformer. He successfully sued Gulf Power. The situation is analogous except for the fact that Mr. Bao's pockets are not as deep, and that's really the main thing a plaintiff's attorney is going to consider in a case like this.
As far as I can tell the guy recorded himself and the data was automatically uploaded from Mark's stolen laptop to his online backup, though Mark is indeed guilty of broadcasting it.
So generally you can plant a hidden camera operated remotely in some attractive item, like a laptop (hey! there's already one!), wait for the victim to take the bait ("steal" your laptop) and after that you can record whatever you wish without anyone pressing against you any wiretapping charges?
Even camera don't have to be started remotely. Hey, my camera is always rolling and sending stream to remote server. That's my laptop and that's how I'm using it.
Erm... You might have missed the part where the perp recorded himself.
There was no remote activation, there was no spying, there was no nothing. The perp recorded himself, and two month later as Mark was checking his backups he realized the stolen machine was still backuping itself.
That's not what happened in this case, of course. The laptop thief used the stolen laptop to film himself but was unaware that the video could be viewed by the laptop's owner. I'm having trouble coming up with an analogy for that one.
I wasn't drawing any analogy. I just wondered if this kind of invigilation is legal. I know thief started the camera and I'm not acusing Mark of planting laptop or wiretapping. I'm just curious if it's legal to spy on people using the scenario I described.
The recording was done by the thief himself. I guess distributing someones video could be a copyright violation, but wouldn't be criminal. However activating camera/microphone remotely might be considered a wiretap.
Another thought: suppose the thief sold the laptop immediately, and the person recorded is guilty of buying a used laptop.
Even if Mark had remotely turned on the camera of his own computer and started recording, I doubt wiretapping laws could come into play, because it's a) his property (see also: case law involving video recording of employees) and b) he's not law enforcement.
What it would come down to is reasonable expectation of privacy, but considering the admission that the laptop was stolen, most judges would throw this whole thing out if privacy was the legal argument. Any thief would know that a person whose property was stolen would probably go looking for it.
Mark's first amendment rights to publish data that is recorded on his property trumps the alleged thief's expectation of privacy.
The other issue that could come into play is copyright, but again, Mark is the owner of the property. Photographers who shoot photos on company equipment don't have the copyright of those photos; the publisher does, unless there is a specific contract between the author and the publisher granting the publisher (or the author) reproduction licenses.
Lastly, others have mentioned libel/slander. There's one flaw in this argument: Nowhere in the video description does it a) explicitly accuse the person of being the thief (so if he was found not guilty, the accused has no case there) and do so with malice or b) even make fun of the guy's dancing (which is a statement of opinion and wouldn't hold up in court).
Wasn't there a case in the US where schools loaned children laptops and the administrator secretly videotaped the children in their bedrooms and reported them fro some activity?
I assume that this was illegal even though the laptop was the school's property
Yeah, that was in Philly. There was a suit that <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20101012_Student_... in a settlement</a> and I think there were a few other suits that I didn't follow to the end. That case was hugely different than others, though.
First, the <em>school</em> district <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/17/school-used-student.htm... something like 50,000+ photos of minors</a> in their homes and then used what they found in those photos to accuse the minor who sued of doing drugs. The issue question in this case is about who was doing the recording. In this case, it was the school. In Mark's case, the accused knowingly recorded himself (though he didn't know he was also sending that data back to the Laptop's owner).
Secondly, the school's problem was with the scope of what they were recording and where. In your office, your employer can tape you without your knowledge while you're at your desk or at the water cooler, but they can't record you in the bathroom, where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy . You'd certainly have a somewhat subjective expectation in your home, too, even if you were using your work computer. (e.g. The courts would find it reasonable to monitor your Facebook usage on a work computer outside of work hours, but would not find it reasonable to photograph you inside your home from that same computer.)
Lastly, there's the human element of the courts. A judge and jury are almost always going to be less sympathetic toward a school district that should have known better than they would be toward a plaintiff who admittedly took someone's laptop and recorded themselves on it.
difficult question the guy is practically storing his data on Mark`s harddisk- I'm not actually sure that it would be illegal here in Germany to publish the stuff.
That’s irrelevant. The thief might well not be able to force the victim to delete all the things he stored on the victim’s drive but publishing it is something completely different.
Just as an example, if you take a photo of me with your camera and I explicitly tell you to not publish the photo you are not allowed to [0], even if the photo is stored on your own drive. I can’t force you to delete the photo, you are free to keep it and show it to your friends but you are definitely not allowed to publish it.
[0] There are certain narrow exceptions in the respective German law but they don’t apply in this case.
You're telling me that if you take my camera out of my back pocket while I'm not looking, take a picture of yourself with it, then give it back to me, I am not allowed to publish that picture? Under what law would you sue? In the US you may have a claim under a libel law or similar, but it would be hard to convince a jury or judge that I was libeling you with a picture you took with stolen property.
It would be illegal, yes. You are allowed to keep the photo but not to publish it.
Kunsturheberrechtsgesetzes (KunstUhrG) §22, first sentence: „Bildnisse dürfen nur mit Einwilligung des Abgebildeten verbreitet oder öffentlich zur Schau gestellt werden.“ (Rough translation: “Images can only be published with consent of the depicted.”)
In the US this is covered under the laws r.e. Personal release rights. So, yeh, you could be sued for doing such a thing. We have a reasonable amount of trouble with this on Wikipedia.
Personality rights. How the image was taken is not relevant to whether or not it can legally be published, especially if you do so for commercial purposes.
That's ridiculous. Unless we are in a private place (like your own home, a private club, etc..)
For example, if we are in a public park, and I take your picture even against your explicit wishes, as long as I do not make any commercial profit off of it, I am pretty much free to publish it in any way I want (flicr, etc.).
If I want to sell it or profit from it in some way, you certainly have some rights. But, basically, if you are in a public place you have no privacy rights against someone taking a picture of you and publishing it.
As someone who's had plenty of things stolen in the past, these stories make me happy.
The vengeful part of me hopes this jerk gets laughed out of every job interview he ever has for being the guy who stole the computer and had his dancing video put on youtube.
I didn't dig deep into the story, but I'm guessing that a guy who records himself dancing around like a jackass probably doesn't have too many job interviews - and the ones he does have are probably not with people who read about news items like this.
I can assure you I had no shortage of interviews when I was looking for work despite having over 1000 hits on Youtube for my terrible, terrible dancing. My current employer even found some of my more embarassing videos and brought it up in the interview!
as an update, he got his laptop back (thief turned it in, perhaps because he knew he was caught). because he now has 2 airs, he's going to auction off the original and donate proceeds to japan efforts.
I absolutely hate this sort of vigilantism. How does anybody know that the guy in the video is actually the guy that stole the laptop? How do we know that he isn't just some guy who bought it on craigslist?
I didn't want to accuse the wrong guy, but based on the file history, he created his new user account the same day it was stolen. That was hunch enough for me.
I filed a police report when it was first stolen, and likewise when I found out who it was. They couldn't really help with recovery so I helped myself :p
Shaming someone caught in the act is hardly vigilante justice. About a year ago, a local tavern was robbed of their cash register by a thief who neglected to hide from the security cameras and who dropped his mixtape on the way out the smashed door. The owner recorded the tape (a collection of Lionel Ritchie soft hits) and merged it with the security camera shots of the thief in action, then posted it to youtube. The crime was of course reported to the police first, but their response was one of filing the report so that insurance could take care of things - not one of finding and punishing the thief.
I don't think this will spawn a new generation of vigilante crime fighters. This is more akin to happening upon an old security tape which reveals the identity of a dumb criminal who robbed your home. Yeah, I'd probably want to gather some data and turn him into the police.
Crime (including theft of expensive equipment) should be prosecuted. It does more harm to society and the perpetrator if you let it go. If people start to think their are no consequences for stealing laptops, there will be more stolen, then more serious crime can follow.
One thing this guy has going for him is that he did return the laptop to you. I think he deserves a little credit for that.
In the sense that 'the police don't have the resources to track down small items lifted in public places by unknown persons, and there are victims of greater crimes to tend to' you are perhaps right, but I think that all changes when you actually supply the name and address of the offender and incontrovertible proof that he's guilty.
Although if you did give them that information and they still couldn't pursue it, there's not much else you can do (except, of course, bang your head against the wall in frustration).
Years ago we reported a stolen vehicle to the police. Not just a laptop, mind you... and ENTIRE CAR. About 2-3 weeks later, I found that car. One of the first things I did was call the number the police had given us.
The officer said, "If we followed every one of these calls, we'd never get any actual work done."
It isn't. Lost my laptop about 2 months ago and got really pissed. Screwed up my Apache config on my current computer and went into my cloud backup to find my old httpd.conf. Found old laptop was still backing up, story unravels from there.
His files were being backed up to Blackblaze, so he just accessed his backup files. I'm guessing the Photo Booth video was also backed up, and he just downloaded it from Backblaze.
I'm obviously biased by visiting HN, but buying any computer used that has not been wiped is a sure indication that it is stolen. I'd like to give the guy the benefit of the doubt as well, but there is ample indication in this article alone that he either has no clue about technology and the responsibility of buying one used or was the one that stole it.
If it turns out he bought it legitimately without knowledge of it being stolen that's fine, but he still should have been turned on to the fact it's filled with someone else's crap and the username is not his. Ignorance is no excuse, even though it may be commonplace.
I've sold two (broken) laptops and didn't wipe anything, and sold a working iPod Touch without deleting anything. Also, in most of my experience with non-technical friends, they usually don't wipe their computers. So no need to assume...
Personally I just don't sell hard drives. They get destroyed. I don't have anything illegal or immoral on there, I just figure, I've had financial info on there, pictures, etc, and who knows what somebody else might do with that.
Because the idiot returned the laptop and ask him to pull down the video. If he bought it, he would actually try to press charges against Mark. By returning it he somewhat said "guilty".
Yes, what a cosmic coincidence that this guy, who lives in the same building as Mark Bao, happened to purchase what he thought was a legitimate laptop on Craigslist!
Or some guy who lives in the same building as Bao (his friend) was used as an actor in a viral promotional video for Backblaze. Mark Bao goes to Bentley College, chances are most of the residents of his building do to, probably even the "thief". Waltham Mass isn't exactly Compton.
We also don't know the circumstances of the "theft", very possible he left it unattended in a public space, and it was more or less found. Plus how was the guy powering it, did he get the charger too? If he happened to have a charger already (highly unlikely) I doubt he would be making films in photobooth, on something he stole when he has a similar if not identical device... Personally I would peg Bao as a guy to have a password on his device too. Obviously the HD wasn't purged if Backblaze was still running.
This whole story screams promotion for Backblaze, it is also the first tag of the article.
It'd just be better if he turned the guy in to the police and let them deal with it. The article and some comments make it sound like he's toying with the guy a bit, which just doesn't seem right. If the guy is indeed the thief, as it seems, he should get punished by the law.
On the stolen laptop theme, I recently saw a youtube video by an Australian chap which went like this:
Tenant/house-guest (who is wanted for fraud in several states) ran off, leaving several thousand dollars in rent in arrears and in the process stealing three laptops.
FAB (the victim) gets some reports from friends a couple of weeks later that the perp is staying in a nearby motel. FAB goes around early-ish in the morning, knocks of the perps door, and the perp opens the door and the discussion gets heated. FAB is 'forced to defend himself' cough and after he finishes bouncing the perps head off the walls and is waiting for the police and ambulance to arrive (perp is un/semi-conscious), eh enters the motel room, recognises the three laptops, and puts them in the boot of his car.
Police arrive. Ambo turns up and hauls perp off to hospital. Police insist that FAB give the laptops to the motel manager, and they tell the motel manager to await further instructions.
Later that day perp checks himself out of hospital, goes back to motel, asks for laptops, manager gives them to him, and then high-tails it off to Victoria (the other end of Australia).
Moral of the story: police are useless no matter what country you are in.
Mark should try to hack it so it broadcasts live without the thief's knowledge. It could be a huge inside joke where nobody tells him, kind of like The Truman Show.
I think it also only pertains to conversations, right? Even in a single-party consent state, you can't just record someone without their knowledge when they're just gettin' their dance on to some shitty music alone in their room.
Ultimately, the same sort of self-help Mark has used for recovery could be used by criminals for identity-theft against others.
How? Preload a cheap laptop with software to let you monitor it. (This could be made way more sophisticated, and hard to eradicate, than a online backup subscription.) Leave it somewhere to be stolen. Monitor its later use for information that could allow stealing many times the initial laptop value from its later users. (Those later users may in some instances be the laptop thief, but could more often be others who thought they were buying a cheap used laptop.)
This is a good reason to beware deals that seem too good to be true, when purchasing used computer goods.
If you sold a bunch of laptops like this, and every buyer gets their bank/credit compromised, you'd be found.
Allowing them to distribute via theft gives superior untraceability at scale, though it means the people receiving the laptops might not be as 'fat' targets as people who buy laptops through traceable transactions.
Actually, I think this describes the business model behind many of the software products that are pre-loaded onto laptops before they're sold. I.e. bloatware.
Unfortunately, that story has a rather bad ending[1], but I guess most people don't read that far.
"Finally, and most disturbingly, Jeff was not heard from again. I personally e-mailed him for permission to run his story on ZUG, but after an initial response, I never heard from him again. All of his Web sites have come down, and he is nowhere to be found."
I tracked down a stolen laptop using Prey (http://preyproject.com/) and Live Mesh's remote desktop. Upon having the laptop stolen, Prey notified my it was online. I remote connected, installed a keylogger and used that along with Prey's camera images to identify the thief and have the person arrested.
As I said above, I can absolutely vouch for the veracity of this story. I talked to Mark the day he got his laptop stolen, and I was talking to him when he realized that it was still backing up to Backblaze.
The Presentation is really funny, but some may find the "invasion of privacy" a little disturbing. Its kinda on the extreme side ( warned! ) but is very informative and funny nonetheless.
I'm not sure Mark is the smarter one in this one. If the thief has been able to auto log-in as him and fill his browser history, this probably means that he can also read Mark's history and the rest of his home directory is lying there unencrypted, with his identity wide exposed.
Thanks for letting us know. I'm going to delete the parent comment if I can. It's more snarky in tone than I like to be and based on your comments in the this thread I believe the story now :)
"The best part is that the person currently in possession of Bao's machine has no idea that the victim has access. For now, Bao's just having his "lulz," and doesn't seem terribly concerned with reclaiming his property."
Yeah, after you posted a video of the guy on YouTube, you're the one who's embarrassed. You hate publicity that much, huh? Does anyone else not buy this?
I'm embarrassed because this is the second time that I did something that, to me, was trivial, and it gets a bunch of press and hits Hacker News.
I'm embarrassed because there is a disproportionality between {interesting things that I do} and {dumb things that I do that somehow get a ton of press} and I feel like doing the stuff in the latter category (and getting publicized about it on HN) bins me in a category of people who do trivial and noninteresting things.
And I'm embarrassed because an article about PG is currently second to this one.
I don't hate publicity. I only do when it's for stuff like this and it's on HN, which I think should be for more intelligent news than this.
It's a funny hacking story and perfect for HN. Plus, as you can see with that your name is written out -- it's about someone most of us here know, or at least know of.
Mark, you've got a star over your head. That's a great thing to have and this kind of thing is something that comes with it, so start learning not to sweat it.
yes, but look at how many people on this thread have accused Mark of being a fame-whore and maybe even faking this whole incident just for publicity. I can't speak for Mark, but I doubt that this is the kind of publicity that he's looking for.
Don't fret. I can't see why people are getting so upset about this. Seems they are more in defense of the "suspects" rights then the fact that he blatantly stole your laptop in the first place.
Personally I found what you did to be hilarious and a perfect example of justice and (quite possibly) the best deterrent for this criminal to change his ways.
Criminals aren't usually known for their intelligence and foresight and by definition they don't operate under the same code of ethics as most people. I imagine also in some circles your first trip to the joint is a rite of passage. So unless you know who you are dealing with it makes sense to take a cautious approach to any response to criminal behavior you make on your own.
Now he's just turned it into a plug for his startup. Smart guy.