hypothetical theft

[SavannahLion]

I hate it when I hit the backspace key and FF goes back a damn page instead of deleting what I typed. AAGH! Why doesn't FF buffer what I type and hold it?

Ok, here goes again.

I was working on my website(s) and just took down the temporary block today when an interesting thought occured to me.

Has anyone ever had a theft occur because they wrote about the items on a forum, blog, website, whatever?

I decided to dig through my memory banks for reported thefts. I recall one instance of a theft on the Gamespy (Classic Gaming) forums where someone had a theft, but there was no corollary between posted forum information and theft. I also recall two threads here reporting a theft, one when someone was doing a cab run and had a box of PCBs stolen out of the trailer during a refuel and another instance of someone out in the country experiencing a BaE. No correlation between theft and net presence.

A Google doesn't turn up much either. Theft reports are as common as M/F Craiglist ads and about as useful.

The news makes a big stink about thefts occuring when people post things to sell on Craigslist and personal information mined from sites like MySpace and Facebook. But I still have not personally encountered anyone who experienced such a theft. So no idea if the news is blowing it out of proportion. Likely they are, like everything else the news reports.

So does anyone know of a correlation between what a person posts on the net and someone using that information to commit a theft?

[drventure]

From what I've read on it (which isn't much), there hasn't been a lot on incidents up to this point.

But, with what people are posting to FB and twitter, I'd imagine it's only a matter of time before that kind of thing becomes far more prevalent.

I can easily see a particular kind of hacker putting together a twitter mashup of some sort that looks for specific phases in tweets, then uses other info to match the tweeter to a person or address. They they turn around and sell the app or post the info live to some black hat site for people to do with what they wish.

It would be interesting to hear if there are stats on that kind of thing as of now though.

[SavannahLion]

It would be interesting to hear if there are stats on that kind of thing as of now though.

Yeah, that's what I want to know.

[AtomSmasher]

Why doesn't FF buffer what I type and hold it?

Opera does that    I often page back in the middle of a post, then page forward to go back to my half completed post.

[hypernova]

So you're asking if your disclosure of owning certain items has led to the theft of certain items?

I'm sure it's happened on occasion somewhere in this country, but just like regular theft, it's hard enough to find the culprits, and even if you do, is everyone going to make the connections necessary to figure out it was the posting of information that led to it?

Regarding social sites, I still wouldn't advertise, even with private/friends only settings, when you plan on going on vacation.  Harmless conversations by friends and family to their own friends and family (and so on) can lead to the wrong people being informed about your absence.

Why doesn't FF buffer what I type and hold it?

Opera does that    I often page back in the middle of a post, then page forward to go back to my half completed post.

Opera does that, huh?  I've been using FF lately, and the one major gripe I have about it is when I first load it up, and want to immediately type to navigate to something other than my homepage, I have to wait until it loads.  Otherwise, the cursor keeps defaulting to a search field within the page, and halfway through typing my url in the address bar, the second half ends up in the search field.  Extremely annoying.

Edit:  Just got Opera.  I'm liking it more.  Initially was annoyed by the panels section, as it stayed whenever you wanted to recall history or bookmarks, but F4 toggles it all back off.  Only thing it seems to be missing is the option to remove individual autocomplete entries in the url like FF had, which was a nice frill anyway.

[RayB]

The media, blowing things out of proportion??  NO WAYYYY!

The issue is cautionary. More of a "it could happen", so why not be safer type of thing. For example, you could never lock your doors, and chances are you'll be fine. Post publicly that you don't lock your doors, and chances are you still won't be hit, but depending on circumstances you're kind of inviting trouble, no?

I think the bigger privacy issue isnt really talking about what you have, but announcing when you're not at home.

[Benevolance]

I think the bigger privacy issue is...announcing when you're not at home.

There was a website that someone developed to point out the privacy issues of that last bit. It was called Please Rob Me. It was basically just a twitter search page, but thanks to a few different applications like Fourscore that pushed data to twitter, the website was generally able to pull info about when a person was not at home. The authors took it offline, because they'd made their point.

[SavannahLion]

Why doesn't FF buffer what I type and hold it?

Opera does that    I often page back in the middle of a post, then page forward to go back to my half completed post.

Slightly OT. I used to use Opera almost religiously back in the '98 days. But I ran into a curious problem. Opera had/has a slow memory leak. The longer I left the PC running and the more time I let Opera used during that time, it would eventually mangle the video buffer in some manner. The problem exhibited itself regardless of video card, whether Opera was running (it was cumulative), and didn't seem to affect the operation any other programs except the video portion. Given a configuration with a color depth of say 32bit, Opera would eventually cause the video card to run in 24bit (if supported), then down to 16, 8, 4(?) and eventually straight 2 bit color depth. IIRC It would be about 12 hours worth of Opera time before the problems became noticeable. Anywhere from 24 to 36 before it was all black and white. I chased this problem for months before I figured out it was Opera. Spoke with some coworkers at work who confirmed and verified my findings, all on completely different hardware. Some on some high end gaming rigs, some on off the shelf junk.

I went through the trouble of opening a trouble ticket with the Opera Devs with a complete report of my findings. They wouldn't even give me the time of day. I believe it's because of the amount of time involved to replicate the problem. At the time I thought it was a memory management issue. Now, I'm not so sure. I discovered later that using the zoom feature seemed to exasperate the problem. I was able to reproduce the problem within a couple of hours, instead of days. I discovered that after I opened the trouble ticket.

In any case, I decided I didn't want anything to do with a project that can't get their memory management issues under control. So I jumped ship, floated around a bit until I dropped 98 entirely and went to Linux and started using Konqueror then FF on XP.

Back on topic.

I'm sure it's happened on occasion somewhere in this country, but just like regular theft, it's hard enough to find the culprits, and even if you do, is everyone going to make the connections necessary to figure out it was the posting of information that led to it?

Yeah. I think that's interesting. There is so much talk about preventing crime and all these studies that try to place the blame on outside influences. Things like economic status, social structure, etc. But I've never seen any study on what exactly led a person to choose victim X over non-victim Y. Oh wait... I have seen some studies. Things like having a dog in a house makes a person less likely to be a target. Thieves generally hit houses without dogs. What I mean are studies regarding the sequence of events that lead up to the actual robbery.

[AtomSmasher]

Why doesn't FF buffer what I type and hold it?

Opera does that    I often page back in the middle of a post, then page forward to go back to my half completed post.

Slightly OT.

Could be that used to be a problem since I used to never leave it open for more then a few hours, but lately I actually have been leaving it open for a few days and have never had an issue.  Besides, I have it set up to open with any pages that were open when it closed, so even if it was still an issue (which I'm pretty sure it isn't since I've never seen anything remotely like that), it's not like it's difficult to quickly close and reopen it.

[SavannahLion]

Why doesn't FF buffer what I type and hold it?

Opera does that    I often page back in the middle of a post, then page forward to go back to my half completed post.

Slightly OT.

Could be that used to be a problem since I used to never leave it open for more then a few hours, but lately I actually have been leaving it open for a few days and have never had an issue.  Besides, I have it set up to open with any pages that were open when it closed, so even if it was still an issue (which I'm pretty sure it isn't since I've never seen anything remotely like that), it's not like it's difficult to quickly close and reopen it.

Back then, the problem was cumulative. So even if you closed and opened Opera, it merely delayed the inevitable. I also suspect usage had a lot to do with it. Simply just leaving Opera running wouldn't trigger the problem (I think) it was actual usage. Actually browsing pages.

Opera has probably gone through a total rewrite at least once since then so the problem might not exist anymore. Still doesn't make me want to go back to Opera.

My browsing back then was probably excessive anyways. Moderating a forum with one tab, using several tabs for code references, and just doing endless hours of writing code and porn browsing.