Calling apple won't do anything for you. It will be a waist of time. I would call the police, then take the serial number around to local pawn shops. Unless it was stolen by someone that wanted a powerbook its most likely going to end up being sold. Likely to a pawn shop or something.
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pls HELP 12 inch PB Stolen from my trunk
- Thread starter DieselClown
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How about this?
Post a wanted ad on craigslist and see if anyone near you contacts you with a laptop for sale. Check the serial and if you find its yours, tell him you got to go get the money and return with Mr. 5-0 and arrest his ass!
Just a thought.
Post a wanted ad on craigslist and see if anyone near you contacts you with a laptop for sale. Check the serial and if you find its yours, tell him you got to go get the money and return with Mr. 5-0 and arrest his ass!
Just a thought.
sgarringer said:
I think you didnt understand what I said. I talked about using a normal 'old school' modem. For the MAC adress, you confirm my thought that it stops at the router, BUT they have the serial number fo your router so its about the same. For locating people, but not computer.
sgarringer said:
They dont follow EVERY person, but if the police ask for one particular individual, they will be able to locate him. Pin point isnt the right term, they can only say in which area he is. But once they know that, the police can use a tracker to find him, it generaly take less than 30mins. Dont beleive me? www.boomerangtracking.com use a similar technology to locate stolen cars. And yes, the celphone company can locate ALL of its customer base each day, they can give your phone a call (which doesnt make it ring) to find it.
Ehh.. they dont triangulate to find people, this is a common misconception, they just have to know the area then use a 'tracker', cant talk much about these because I have a non disclosure agrement related to that. But its nothing scifi, and its mostly hardware.sgarringer said:
lets jsut put it this way, a while bakc my mom (who codes medical records and is allowed to code them at home) had her computer hacked and several copies of innocent people's records were stolen. So she asked me to look around in norton (which is byfar the worse firewall you can use...but its a great tool to log idiot's ips) and such for a possible IP address so I did and got it. Contacted the police and her lawyer as well as her employeers lawyer to find that they would need to go through the hassel of getting a court order in order to do a trace and arrest the person. So thus you are the one misinformed, i really dont think 2 lawyers and a police station would lie about a law.
Mantat said:
PPP doesnt send any information regarding the serial number of the computer connecting. I recommend you read up on the documentation of the PPP protocol, this provision is definatly not part of it. The series of events that happen when you dial your isp are as follows:
1] ISP prompts for username
1a] your PC sends username
2] ISP prompts for password
2a] Your PC sends password (often in plaintext)
3] ISP sends PPP request, which contains their default IP header options, compression settings, and the IP address of their server and the IP address they are offering to you
3a] Your PC accepts and responds to this request, at which point your computer is connected to the internet.
Mantat said:
When your car is stolen, the Network Operations Center calls a phone number for a cellular phone which is installed in the car, which answers and responds with the GPS location. Its an analog cellphone which works in 99% of the country, and the phone number is only known by the network. This is how OnStar and other similar systems work, and I assume thats how this boomerangtracking thingworks.
Mantat said:
Yeah, its called GPS. Cellphone headsets have GPS recievers built in which send your location to E911 services. If it doesnt have a GPS lock it sends the coordinates of the nearest tower you are to. That is all.
NusuniAdmin said:
Here in Canada the RCMP has a special IS fraud task force that will do all of this for you. Maybe they have more authority than your simple police station to do this kind of work.
Mantat said:jane doe said:Calling apple won't do anything for you. It will be a waist of time.
Or in the case of the overly computer controlling windows a comptuer company would contact microsoft and have the blow up your computer remotely
sgarringer said:
The information that would help track isn't going to located in PPP exchange, it will be in certain HTTP requests the machine is issuing. For example, if Diesel had authorized his computer and bought a song using iTunes, certain credentials are going to be stored on his machine for the next time he hits the store. Now, if the thief hits iTunes Music Store and tries to buy something or yet tries to play a DRM protected song, Apple would be able to identify the machine using those credentials as part of the HTTP exchange. How else would apple know if you have authorized a machine in iTunes, if you don't send some information (beyond an IP address) to them? Continuing, if Apple has the machine on file as stolen (yes most definitely call them) and they say hey Diesel Geek is trying to buy something or is browsing the music store, they could record the IP address, determine if its Diesel or the bad guy, then pursue that person as needed.
I still like my craigslist idea! sneaky vigilante redemption.
sgarringer said:
I hope that you know that OnStar doesnt protect you againts car theft. All OnStar system are located at the same spot on a car and it take less than 5 second to remove and it doesnt work if you dont have a straight line to a satelite which happen most of the time in big cities. This is why GPS protection system sucks.
And no, Boomerang doesnt use GPS, they use the cel signal but on a low frequency if I remember right which allow it to be heard underground and in train containers. The tracker can locate the car with a 1-2m accuracy when he is close to it, else it give him a general indication of the direction.
Trust me, I know more about car theft than you do, Montreal is the world capital of car theft in absolute and % numbers. This is ridiculous how serious the problem was a few years ago, hence the reason of our expertise in the field of vehicule recovery. You wouldnt believe all the tricks robber can do to steal a car. A good thef can take your car in less than 15 sec and 30mins later it will be cut in part and quickly sold.
As for the modem serial number. I can insure you that somehow the serial number is stored on the server because thats how a guy who was accused of child pornography was let free recently. He managed to prove that his internet account had been stolen and the ISP proved him right but showing that the serial number didnt correspond with the one on his modem.
JLS said:
Umm no. How do you think those laptop recovery services work? ISP's sure as hell can hand out your personal information. There is no law keeping them from doing so. The question is would they? When the RIAA when after the names associated with the IP addresses of people who are P2Ping songs and such Verizon (I think) threw up a stink. But on a stolen laptop basis if the local police asks for the info I'm betting they would turn it over. The only thing keeping them from doing so is the possibility of getting a bad rep for revealing their clients identity.
Mantat said:
so very true, my dads work is getting in more and more onstar crap that have been ripped off of the cars. You can definitly tell how the theif removed the things too.
Mantat said:
Yes they can. Its a serious PITA to do it though. It's a matter of tracking which towers the user in question uses. The carrier can get a rough ballpark figure as to where the phone is. They have used such techniques in a couple missing person's cases over the years. I know they used it for one up here in MN a year or so ago. The thing is its not like the movies. They aren't going to know exactly where you are. Its more of a general locator then anything else.
The new E911 service that encompasses the use of GPS is relatively new and most phones don't have the capability built in yet.
The ignorance in this forum is amaizing.
The only way this would work is if every police car had a reciever that could determine the strength of a signal so they could tell how close to a transmitter they were. And this wouldnt use the cell network at all, it would be like the recovery beacon on military aircraft. Its a one-way transmission. So get your facts straight, either its on the cell network and tracked by the cell (which uses GPS), or its not on the cell network, and its tracked by the police via a seperate frequency. If its the latter, how could this be used to track regular cellphone calls (our original arguement) as if its the latter you admit that its a sepcialized transmitter, which is simply activated by a call to a cellphone.
That guy got off by showing logs from his telephone company proving he wasnt online when they said the porn was downloaded. Some ISPs also save CallerID data, and I'm sure this went into play. Point is, he had to prove it, if the ISP had the data (as you claim they would) then he wouldnt have had to prove ANYTHING.
The only way this would work is if every police car had a reciever that could determine the strength of a signal so they could tell how close to a transmitter they were. And this wouldnt use the cell network at all, it would be like the recovery beacon on military aircraft. Its a one-way transmission. So get your facts straight, either its on the cell network and tracked by the cell (which uses GPS), or its not on the cell network, and its tracked by the police via a seperate frequency. If its the latter, how could this be used to track regular cellphone calls (our original arguement) as if its the latter you admit that its a sepcialized transmitter, which is simply activated by a call to a cellphone.
That guy got off by showing logs from his telephone company proving he wasnt online when they said the porn was downloaded. Some ISPs also save CallerID data, and I'm sure this went into play. Point is, he had to prove it, if the ISP had the data (as you claim they would) then he wouldnt have had to prove ANYTHING.
Mantat said:
dotnina said:
And see if you have an Apple user group in your area. I can't imagine what would happen to that poor SOB after a bunch of Mac user got done with him.
this is completely beyond the scope of what were talking about -- snagging a stolen laptop simply when someone connects to the internet.
yeah, if they're stupid enough to use a stolen machine (without wiping it) to buy an ITMS then the IP address wont matter, Apple will have their Credit Card info to use against them.
If **I** stole a Powerbook first thing I'd do is wipe it and reload OS X, which would generate a new Machine ID, and then Apples ITMS wouldnt have any way of knowing what machine it was. So, back to the original arguement.
(If they logged it when I doubt they really do).
yeah, if they're stupid enough to use a stolen machine (without wiping it) to buy an ITMS then the IP address wont matter, Apple will have their Credit Card info to use against them.
If **I** stole a Powerbook first thing I'd do is wipe it and reload OS X, which would generate a new Machine ID, and then Apples ITMS wouldnt have any way of knowing what machine it was. So, back to the original arguement.
(If they logged it when I doubt they really do).
kingjr3 said:
sgarringer said:
actually the MAC addresses are hard coded onto the machine chips, reinstalling os x would not generate a new one.
NusuniAdmin said:
the MachineID sent to Apple when you buy ITMS music is based on many things, the MAC address being one, but not the exclusive thing. It has a random element, so if you reinstall OS X it does generate a new MachineID, which is why you need to deauthorize a PC or Mac before reformatting and reinstalling.
the only thing sent to ITMS is the MachineID (and username/password if the machine isnt authorized) not the MAC address of the computer.
sgarringer said:
The stolen cars arent located by the police. Boomerang has its own recovery agents. Once they are near the car, they call the police.
Now I will clarify my point: when the police ask for the location of a suspect, the celphone company can tell them the area where he is. They do so by asking the cel which cel tower is the nearest. These area can be quite big once you are out of a city.
To pin point a car, they use a special portable tracker. The target cel in the car has been modified to work with special frequencies that are less susceptible to be stoped by wall/concrete.
As for pin pointing a cel phone on a person, I guess they can locate it, but I dont know how. Probably with something similar to the tracker used for the cars.
Mantat said:
so like i orginally said. its not the cellphone they're pinpointing but a seperate transmitter. so, how does this help your arguement that they can pinpoint cellphones, when they're not installed in a car with a specialized tracking transmitter.
sgarringer said:
ah I thought you were talking about the computers MAC address, my bad (macrumors needs an animated smiley doing the thing johnny depp (spelling?) did on pirate of the carribean, with the palms together and slight bow thing)
sgarringer said:
Another question. What about Apple's update software? I know at least for Windows it sends a crap load of specs back to MS when you run Windows Update. Also as someone stated if someone ever calls Apple for repair work they are prob going to ask for the S/N on the laptop. And to be frank comparing the reliability of a couple friend's iBooks lately its a good possibility that at some point in this laptop's life that may very well happen.
Mantat said:
You find that out by looking at your firewalls logs, not by calling the cops, and again this has nothing to do with identifying which hardware they are using.
SiliconAddict said:
Laptop recovery works be pre-installing broadcasting software on the machine.
I still can't believe that anyone here actually thinks they would get a stolen computer back from it being tracked down over the internet.. its insane to think that they would spend such huge amounts of time even trying to locate the computer.. its not cost effective for them. If it costs $5000 (just a guess.. its certainly not free) to apply for court orders and ISP contact, and various other expenses, for a $1000 computer - its not going to happen unless its involved in a more serious damaging crime.