
Please Rob Me - danw
http://pleaserobme.com/
======
edw519
1\. Programmers write apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use.

2\. Widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to
use.

3\. Holy shit, what have we done to ourselves?

4\. Programmers write apps to minimize the consequences of widespread adoption
of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use.

5\. Widespread adoption of apps to minimize the consequences of widespread
adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use.

What a great time to be a programmer.

~~~
barredo
You're talking about Google Buzz, right?

~~~
marcusestes
Zing!

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jrockway
To be fair, pretty much every single person with a job leaves their home empty
all day. Everyone already knows this.

I can't wait until I get to read about someone who decided to rob one of these
people, but then gets shot to death by the spring gun they set up. Bonus if
the spring gun auto-uploads to YouTube.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Regarding spring guns, fun fact: it is illegal for you to make your home
unsafe for burglars and other lawbreakers in most US states.

~~~
cschneid
More generally, boobytrapping stuff has lots of potential harm to lots of
potential people. (gas company employees, police, etc). The fact that it's
also harmful to thiefs is tangential.

~~~
Periodic
My middle school got bitten by this. The roof collapsed on a burglar and he
successfully sued the school. At the time he was not doing anything illegal
(as he was outside a public school). The roof was unsafe and we have laws
against that to protect HVAC technicians and the like.

That he was up to no good was irrelevant.

~~~
jjs
Why bother robbing anyone when you can just trespass on unsafe-looking
property and sue?

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mquander
I don't know. Are you volunteering to have a roof collapse on top of you in
the hope of successfully suing the property owner? I'm not.

~~~
jjs
No, I think that would still be ethically a form of robbery, even if legally
it's not.

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ajvargo
That's why I always tweet 'In closet, with gun' before I leave the house.

~~~
jsm386
Are you sure you're not R. Kelly?

~~~
pistoriusp
For those of you, including myself, that didn't know what this was a reference
to:

"Trapped in the Closet" is an urban opera, R&B opera, or hip-hopera released
by contemporary R&B singer R. Kelly in 2005.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapped_in_the_Closet>

~~~
jseifer
It's also a South Park Episode.

<http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/912>

~~~
rbxbx
which is based on... ?

Oh, right.

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yaacovtp
This is the ultimate free source of leads for home security and alarm
businesses.

Edit: They could drive around the neighborhood dropping off flyers saying,
"While you were out at "place homeowner checked into" someone could have been
robbing you blind.

~~~
prbuckley
There is a lot of money to be made in the lead generation business. I actually
heard of an auto repair lead generation company that went around to parking
lots and took pictures of cars with damage. They uploaded these photos to
their service and then put a flyer on the car with a web address where the
person could retrieve the quotes for repairs.

~~~
gridspy
That is a really nice service. Most people dread getting quotes, it would
remove a lot of the friction required to aquire a customer.

I imagine they received a few complaints though.

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KB
Having worked for a Defense Contractor and been forced to go through social
engineering training in the past, the idea of gathering information like this
is very real and happens everyday. Hopefully this makes people think twice
before exposing certain personal information online for all to see.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
>social engineering training

Was the class actually worthwhile, or was it just CYA? Some sort of
taxonomy/formalisms for thinking about social engineering would be cool. I
have no structured mental model now.

~~~
RK
It's probably more like social engineering defense training. The usual
scenario being: You're at a conference and a hooker type shows up at your
hotel room out of the blue, do you a) invite them in and have a good time,
especially leaving your laptop/files/etc alone with them while you sleep/clean
up/get some liquor, b) not do that.

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peterwwillis
c) hide everything in the ventilation system and leave false laptop/files out
as decoy

~~~
Semiapies
What, and be _obvious?_

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mortenjorck
Most of this data is completely useless, because there's no way to tell where
these users live, at least without a serious amount of stalking and sleuthing.

 _Unless_ , of course, they've been geotagging their tweets from a mobile
device. In which case it would then be trivial to look at their most frequent
location, determine it's a residential one, wait until they're out, and head
on over.

Which is why I will _never_ enable Twitter geotagging.

~~~
ojbyrne
Even if their location is available, there's no way to tell if they live
_alone_.

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mrcharles
Twenty minutes to make sure no one is in the house followed by a quick peek
through the mail box (or windows) will give you a pretty solid idea if they
do, though.

~~~
lftl
Which also largely obviates the need of relying on Twitter to gather any
information in the first place.

~~~
mrcharles
Sure, for added risk.

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jasonlbaptiste
__Feature Request __: can you setup an affiliate program that gives me a cut
of the "take" when a thuggishly inclined friend uses this to rob someone? thx!

-jlb

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ericb
Interesting to see an elegant, functional, web app that is essentially an
artistic statement.

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danskil
This is an awesome display of the info we freely give out. If this app was
fully functional it would also list the nearest pawn shop and crack dealer.

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code_duck
I love it. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but this is exactly the problem I see with
continually updating the public about your daily activities and whereabouts.

I learned a long time ago that you DON'T tell people you don't trust whether
you'll be away from your house and when, but indeed, thousands of people are
posting about that on blogs, Twitter or facebook all the time.

Time to relearn old lessons - in the 80s there were warnings about answering
messages that said "We're out of town, be back next week!". Then, in the 90s
there were warnings about email auto-responders that said "I'm travelling for
business, be back next week!". Now the opportunity to tell the public your
house is unoccupied has moved to the next technology.

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tiffani
Sure, they got us all to talk about the lovely site they've built, but I'm not
entirely convinced of the premise. Indeed, there are criminals that would take
the time to stake out someone's house just by checking up on their Foursquare
check-ins, but for the vast majority of folks, I'm not buying it.

We had our car stolen out of the driveway one day after my mom was warming it
up in the morning (I'm hearing this is illegal in places like Maryland). She
doesn't do this every morning, BTW. What was interesting, though, is that the
criminals weren't even smart enough to steal a car that had a full tank of
gas. My parents later ran into them (fate is awesome) pushing that car into a
gas station not too far from our house after it ran out of gas. I doubt these
guys would have been smart enough to case our house based on my Foursquare
check-ins. That morning, they were just walking through the neighborhood and
saw an opp.

Furthermore, I think the site is also rather silly because it presupposes that
_everyone_ knows what Foursquare (or any of the other location-based check-in
sites) is enough to make check-in data particularly useful. Contrary to
popular belief, there is a whole contingent of people out there who have no
clue about Twitter, Foursquare, TechCrunch or anything else we hold dear. :)

Finally, I have a tendency to check in on FS as I'm _leaving_ a location, so I
get the points, but I'm already rolling out of the parking lot and back to my
house by the time the world knows where I've _been_.

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eogas
I love how they are referred to as "opportunities".

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gchucky
I think this falls into the same jurisdiction as Wappr does
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1123173> if you missed that
conversation), where you're aggregating info from people that may not want it
used as such. I know that this is trying to prove a point, and yes, the
Twitter account for pleaserobme sends tweets to people who get listed on the
site, but it's still a little heavy handed.

~~~
gruseom
Yes, and it's reminiscent of the Buzz launch as well. People seem to think
that "publicly available" is a binary state, i.e. either X is public (1) or
it's not (0). By that logic, if X is already public then
aggregating/broadcasting it is fair game: you're not putting it through a
state change, only going from 1 to 1. I think this is a mistake. There are
clearly degrees here.

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mrcharles
This is pretty awesome. I've never twittered when I'm away from my place for a
long period of time. I don't post about it to facebook. And I don't set email
auto-responders. I guess my inner criminal automatically notified me that were
I actually in the job of stealing, I would definitely use social media to pick
likely targets.

In fact, generally no one knows I was away until I get back, short of close
friends and family.

~~~
mrcharles
In fact, given how many people on that list have their twitters set up with
their own names, I'd say it's probably easy to grab a name from a location,
look them up in the phone book (first stop for addresses, or at least it was a
long time ago). From there it's just a matter of making sure no one else is at
the house.

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lawrence
Awesome linkbait / PR execution by these guys. This has mainstream media
potential - it's easy to imagine a hysterical CNN headline.

I hope they have a plan for how to put all this great buzz and inbound links
to work on a real business.

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mrcharles
Now that I think about it, I could make a pretty neat little social
engineering mobile game out of this. With the back end tied in to this, you
could make a geo-aware app that lets you "tag" people as robbed or whatnot.

Of course, that's more than a little evil, as I'd probably map it, and then
you would have a site for sharing all the information associated with
opportunities, and I have no doubt that some entrepreneurial spirit would take
that information and use it to actually start robbing houses.

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axod
"burglarized" still makes me chuckle when I see it written.

(It is not a valid word in English).

edit: Yes, I know it's valid in _American_.

Burgled (English), Burglarized (American English).

~~~
PostOnce
dictionary.reference.com: Origin: 1870–75, Americanism; burglar + -ize

It's old, it's popular, and it's well understood. It is _certainly_ a valid
word.

Saying you were burgled has a Mr. Burns feel to it. It's almost always
_burglarized_ or _robbed_ in the United States.

~~~
SquidLord
It has to be phrased "wuz robbed," ie. "Damn, man, they stole yo' DVD player!
You wuz robbed!"

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armandososa
I've thought of something like this for Mexico (later expanding to other
latinamerican countries) : A mashup of foursquare, gowalla and blippy (the
blippy part is important, we won't target poor people) and I would call it
'secuestra.me' (kidnap.me).

Huge potential, big market worth several billions.

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tbgvi
Something tells me that heavy users of foursquare have already considered the
implications of letting people know where they are at all times. I don't think
this site will deter these people from checking in somewhere.

~~~
josefresco
What about light users? Or users who give it a try, but then forget about it?
I don't think we should protect people from themselves by banning it but there
should be some warnings attached.

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Semiapies
"Going on trip. Please break into my house - my St. Bernard needs feeding."

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Tichy
Makes me think a twitter bot might be useful, that takes over the account and
twitters mundane activities (cooking, watching TV,...). If you leave the
house, you can switch on the twitter bot.

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maurycy
Makes me think whether using Twitter is worth it.

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Tichy
It's useful for other things. I was only joking about the "I am at home" bot.
But I think such things exist, that create shadows of moving people if you are
not at home.

Makes me wonder if having a home is worth it.

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keefe
<http://www.torproject.org/> make sure you put on your rubber before trolling
for your next "project"

~~~
jrockway
Tor is nice, but what anonymity is required for this?

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keefe
lol well when I'm out committing felonies I prefer not to leave tracks like my
IP address visiting pleaserobme.com?

~~~
jrockway
So someone gets robbed, then they subpoena the web logs for pleaserobme.com,
and then they arrest everyone who visited the site? That doesn't really scale.

~~~
demallien
Not for finding the robber in the first place, but it's going to look _very_
bad if the police think it's you and then confirm that you visited the site
just before the burglary.

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jrockway
Sure, but your fingerprints at the scene of the crime and the stolen stuff
piled in your closet is going to look a little worse.

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maukdaddy
This is an absolutely brilliant use of data aggregation.

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akadien
It might make for an interesting honeypot to catch thieves in the act. Where'
Chris Hansen? (Oh, over on chatroulette.)

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petercooper
Ah yes, because none of us have wives or kids who are still at home :-) (or in
our case, the other way around..)

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fseek
Funny app and a good way to show the dangers of posting everything online...

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tyohn
I might tweet that I left the house - but my rather large dog stays home :)

~~~
timdorr
Same here. Not everyone lives alone. Many people have spouses,
girlfriends/boyfriends, roommates, and/or pets around after they leave. And
this site doesn't give you their home address, it just says that user's house
_might_ be empty right now. Still gotta go look, I suppose.

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jsz0
Easy solution: Tweet about your vicious (possibly imaginary) dogs.

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maurycy
It made me wonder what are else things we leak, using Twitter.

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nextpulse
Genius!!!

