O'Reilly Author's Laptop Rescued By 'Twitter Posse' and Prey 123
An anonymous reader writes "Bad news: a Canadian who visited New York had his laptop stolen. Good news: it was outfitted with Prey, the open-source computer tracking application. Better news: a group in NYC made a 'geek squad intervention,' faced the culprit and retrieved the laptop safely. This case naturally raises the usual sorts of questions about the 'Twitter posse' culture." The victim-turned-victor is author and consultant Sean Power.
Re:If you steal a laptop (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't care about the data on my laptop. However I do care about my laptop.
Solution? I don't put any password or encryption on it, and any thief can instantly use it. They think "allright won't have to format it", and then Prey kicks them in the nuts.
Story or SEO Brainstorm? (Score:5, Interesting)
The author happens to be a Canadian SEO marketing person who published a few books on SEO techniques with O'Reilly
The author's completely random twitter contact,Nick Reese, who helped him turns out to be also an SEO marketing person. Interesting coincidence there.
The author claims to have lost his Canadian health card, his birth certificate and a significant sum of money along with the laptop that were all in his laptop bag yet he never reports this to the police at the time of the theft. Only several days afterwards in a twitter post does he claim to have contacted the police. Does this make sense?
A young woman that the author describes as "Purple Sarong Girl" was the one who actually recovered the laptop as twittered by Nick Reese. Yet both Power and Reese refuse to release Sarong Lady's name even though she was the one who actually recovered the laptop. Sarong Lady remains an unsolved mystery.
The author says he installed Prey but "completely forgot about it" untill several days after the "theft" after which he twitters about the Prey screen shots that re remembered to look at. If you installed Prey and your laptop was stolen do you think you would have forgotten about your primary recovery system for 3 days after the theft?
So a LOT of questions remain here as this story continues to be pushed out to all major tech sites around the world. Really good SEO technique wouldn't you say. In my mind the question remains whether Sean Power really had a theft here or is just demonstrating his use of marketing technique ("hey - look what we did for Prey in just a week !" ). It is probably very hard to determine one way or another but this story fails the "Does this make sense" test in so many ways that I have to question it's legitimacy.