

Carnegie Mellon student robbed, uses iPhone to track down culprits - aichcon
http://www.thetartan.org/2009/8/31/news/robbery

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cduruk
Hey. This is me.

Weird that this came up again; this happened in August and there was a really
crazy media frenzy at the time which mostly died down (although I do get a few
random emails time to time).

And yeah, I do work for The Tartan.

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cloudkj
Why are the culprits in the story referred to as "actors"?

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andrewljohnson
That's what we would often call them in crime stories, and it's a common word
in a lot of newspapers. It's nice because it doesn't imply guilt... it just
states who is involved.

I used to edit The Tartan.

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TheSOB88
How is not implying guilt nice? I've seen the same concept in calling
criminals 'suspects', but when you've just seen someone shoot someone else
(for example), not implying guilt shouldn't be taken into consideration.

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crux_
Then you say you saw A shoot B. What you _don't_ say is that A is a murderer.

(Note: I really despise the use of the word "actors" in the article, though.
It's less wordy than "alleged theives" or whatever, but it could also have
been omitted entirely. "The two actors" ---> "The two" etc.)

~~~
TheSOB88
_Why_? A _is_ a murderer.

~~~
crux_
How do you know? A could be mentally ill, and thus innocent. A could be an
undercover officer, or shooting in self defence against a threat you didn't
see. And so on.

You can say "in my opinion, A is a murderer" -- but the only time you should
be making a statement of fact on A's guilt is _after_ it has been proven
beyond a reasonable doubt.

To do otherwise is to dishonestly masquerade your opinion as fact and to
expose yourself to a nice fat libel lawsuit along the way.

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mrinterweb
<https://www.mobiledefense.com/> makes tracking a stolen Android phone
trivial. I installed it last night and it is pretty cool.

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anApple
A friend just told me today that he got his iphone stolen by a class mate. He
went to the police, gave them the UID of the phone, and he got it back 3 days
later.

Apperantly, as he told me, the police contacted apple which gave them the
exact position of the mobile phone through the build in gps device, so the
police could just pick it up.

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mhb
Is that a good trade? Potentially being able to recover a lost phone versus
Apple (and whomever can subpoena it) knowing where you are all the time?

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ilamont
Is there an app for easily tracking a lost or stolen iPhone?

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mikeryan
There's not an "app" per se.

If you use Mobile Me and register your iphone with it you can track your
iphone as well as make it play a noise for 2 minutes and show an alert.

As someone who recently had to replace an iPhone at full price (unwilling to
sign up for another two years on AT&T's horrible service in SF). I recommend
looking into using this _before_ you lose/have stolen your iPhone.

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jpwagner
a baby car seat?

~~~
mtomczak
For his baby-momma to keep the baby in, of course.

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TheSOB88
I use a tracking program like this for my laptop - it's called Adeona. But
apparently the network it uses got taken down. :\

It only worked when connected to an interweb, of course.

