> they would have to do it at a station, where they could immediately get off the train. I think, though, that this would be risky, given that subway stops generally have a lot of people getting on/off the train in the first place.
I've seen a phone jacking in this exact scenario and nobody moved to stop the guy running. Nobody on the train can help cause the doors have closed, and nobody on the platform has any idea anything just happened, or if they do the guy is well gone before they can put two and two together.
For me I always pocket my phone or e-reader at each stop, unless I'm in Japan or Taiwan.
Here's my experience with (attempted) theft on a train:
I once was on a MARC train at DC Union Station. Some train cars have electrical sockets, so I plugged in a bike light I had since I'd be taking a bike for the last part of the trip. The train hadn't left the station yet. I was standing near the seat with the socket. Some unassuming looking guy was walking through the train car, like probably 100 did before him, when he grabbed the light, unplugged it, and kept walking. I immediately confronted him (I was in his path) saying something like "What are you doing?" Without a word, he handed me the light and walked off the train. I found a conductor like 15 seconds later and they called security, who apparently detained the guy.
This guy was way more brazen about stealing something of little value than I had expected. I was standing near the seat and watching it! I guess he didn't expect me to be the owner.
I'm a Japan resident... whenever I'm outside of Japan, friends have to remind me to not "leave my laptop out like that" nor hold wads of visible cash or keep my smartphone on the table.
Cafes... I'll go to the bathroom or whatever and just leave my stuff all out on the table, meanwhile with my high-end bicycle parked unlocked and out-of-view outside.
It, of course, isn't like this EVERYWHERE in Japan, but many many places.
I'm not worried about the laptop. Pretty much everyone knows that any valuable laptop is a tracking device anyway.
You should be worried about getting actually robbed, or even being attacked for no reason, while you're not paying attention.
Also, yes, nobody's going to help you. Some of it is because of general unawareness, as you point out. Then, it's difficult to know who's the aggressor. Even if that's all crystal clear, you're almost certainly going to deal with months or years of legal hell if you intervene. Successful interventions often lead to prosecutions.
You say this but I've seen countless videos of Apple stores getting raided by thugs who steal all the devices. We all know those devices will shut down and be inoperable but they don't know and/or care.
Are you aware of any law enforcement agencies that would risk loss of life for material objects? Even in the case of harm prevention, it's a failure if the perp dies. That's still seen as a policy or op failure.
Random passerby are not law enforcement professionals, they're untrained and therefore can't be held to such standards.
The case of Daniel Penny cited above is straightforward: "Neely boarded the car Penny was riding and reportedly began threatening passengers. After the train had left the station, Penny approached Neely from behind to apply the chokehold, and maintained it in a sitting position until Neely went limp a few minutes after the train had reached the next stop."
That's exactly what a successfully stopped threat looks like. That the threatening person ended up dying is unfortunate, but they did ultimately bring that upon themselves. They were free to stop being a threat to others at any time.
But then I don't know what you're trying to imply with the loss of life to protect material objects comment. Seems like an attempt to troll, because nobody is talking about that.
> But then I don't know what you're trying to imply with the loss of life to protect material objects comment. Seems like an attempt to troll, because nobody is talking about that.
From the thread (edited for clarity):
-> I've seen a phone jacking in this exact scenario and nobody moved to stop the guy running. Nobody on the train can help cause the doors have closed, and nobody on the platform has any idea anything just happened, or if they do the guy is well gone before they can put two and two together.
-> I'm not worried about the laptop. Pretty much everyone knows that any valuable laptop is a tracking device anyway. You should be worried about getting actually robbed, or even being attacked for no reason, while you're not paying attention.
-> Are you looking for examples? Off the cuff, in the past 2 years we've had 2 high-profile incidents: Jordan Williams and Daniel Penny.
Theft -> examples of loss of life during "successful interventions".
> That's exactly what a successfully stopped threat looks like.
We might be getting caught up on how to define successful here. If by successful you mean that the outcome was legal then I agree, and would say the outcomes of these trials were likely the appropriate outcome.
But if by successful you mean the best outcome, which is what I take it to mean, then I disagree. A successful intervention would be one where no-one was injured. I've spent years riding trains in Chicago where there's a pretty regular cohort of individuals suffering from various mental illness. I even lived in a building that partially served as a half-way house for such individuals. I've seen people do what Jordan Neely was claimed to do a couple dozen times without altercation. I've also seen people assaulted and knifes get pulled. There are ways to de-escalate a situation that doesn't result in a lethal outcome. That should be the definition of successful here.
> Random passerby are not law enforcement professionals, they're untrained and therefore can't be held to such standards.
The standard is the law. Vigilantism doesn't get a pass on the law just because it was good natured. Perhaps the law gives good natured people caution, but the alternative is much worse. "Legal hell" as it was put, is appropriate when involved in the death of an individual. That's just a consequence of living in a society that values human life.
I also code on the subway from time to time and this does occur to me. But there are locations in an NYC subway car you can sit that would make it very difficult for someone to grab your laptop and exit the train before the doors close. It's still a risk but it's not uncommon to see people with all kinds of valuable items (e.g. shopping bags from premium fashion stores) out in the open on the subway.
Crazy to think back to 2007 when iPhone users were advised to buy black earphones so the white ones wouldn't give them away as targets for theft. How far we've come/how commoditized our electronics have become.
I wonder what you could usefully do with a Kensington lock on the train. I bought one for use in cafés although I haven't used it most of the time.
You could attach it to something bulkier or something that you could put under the seat, maybe. I don't remember if New York subway seats have an exposed bar underneath that you could lock it to. I'm sure locking it to the vertical poles in the center of the car would be extremely antisocial.
Wear it like a belt while attaching it to the laptop (If you don't mind looking a bit ridiculous).
Although I'd highly recommend putting some cloth around it, or fitting it through the belt loops of jeans/trousers to soften the inevitable 'yank' when it comes.
Just my opinion, but I feel Kensington locks have little value.
Sure, maybe it will deface the stolen item when it gets ripped off, but for a thief, the device is still usable, and it can be sold for parts or at a discount. We are talking about the sorts of people that steal bicycle wheels and seats.
Their utility is in keeping honest people honest. For example, keeping office workers or customers from just walking off with or moving assets.
Here we're literally talking about protecting the device while the user is actively using it! Just preventing someone from grabbing it by hand for 5 seconds is a huge win.
The lock and lock attachment are supposedly rated for several hundred pounds of force. There are probably people who can break it by hand (especially if they practice applying the force at just the right angle or something) but a casual "grab and run" is not going to do it.
This is why I always used a clunker on the tube - early 2000s, you’d find me with a mid 90s monochrome Toshiba 386 laptop, cranking out code in vim - one handed, because the other hand supported the laptop - there are rarely seats on the tube.
Anyway. A) it was ancient and worthless and B) if anyone tried anything it was heavy enough it could do serious damage.
On my phone, I have a faceid requirement on basically any app, so getting it ripped off my hands would be just a minor inconvenience.
Laptop on the other hand...
Many times working on the train i've been thinking about some accelerometer based emergency lockdown. Can't be that hard to do.
True, but a laptop is much more of a hassle to quickly grab and run with than a phone.
What also helps is having one that's full of stickers or overall looks fairly (ab)used. A pristine MacBook is going to be much more of a target than a random ThinkPad with a sticker, greasy keyboard and 20 scratches.
Depends on where and when you are. Some hyped up dude is fixated on the next fix and lacks the executive function to discriminate. The more professional thieves are more discriminating.
There’s probably no market for it, but it might be interesting to make a MacBook case/cover and/or stickers that make it look old, cracked, scratched, and dirty.
It would be interesting to see if that would deter a thief.
> Basically, if you're ever "newspaper famous", there will be completely unhinged people convinced that you're the one talking to them through their microwave
I was interviewed by a semi-famous YouTuber in Taiwan (~100k subs) and reaped a ton of benefits. Had one bad encounter though: one of the viewers came into my restaurant and had a super bizarre interaction with me about it, standing next to me and talking well after close while I washed dishes, repeating talking points from the video and not getting increasingly strong hints to leave. Had to straight up throw him out in the end.
Never really felt unsafe, but it was bizarre to have such an uncomfortable interaction with someone fawning over me like that, all because they saw me in a video with only 150k videos!
> Why would you want to destroy your enemies' industries, is what you're asking?
Do you have any evidence that pirating is destroying industries? My guess is I can find the majority of this release by anna's archive on some combination of the pirate bay and the soulseek, or private music trackers. And yet, Spotify is still a thriving company, as is the entire music industry as a whole. There's even room for competing streaming services like Tidal and Youtube Music.
When I left my apartment back in 2018, I was switching the Comcast account over to my housemate who was staying on there. In doing so I discovered I had a myname2342@comcast.com email account. The UI showed something like 8,000 unread emails. Bemused, I opened it to see what kind of spam it had accumulated. None at all! It was just under 8,000 DMCA / torrent warning emails from Comcast itself. "We know you torrented The.Pokemon.Movie.2001.h264.mkv, you better stop that!"
A full year of these emails and nothing more than that ever happened.
(if you're wondering how I hit 8000 torrents, the answer is individual album torrents)
This is called Speculative Invoicing, some law farm submitted a c&d and requested your subscriber information, Comcast hopefully threw the request in the trash but forwarded the complaint to you.
You might find it interesting that there's an entire genre of youtube video that's designed to just be chucked one by one into slideshows for elementary school teachers to use as their lesson plan. Including videos that are just "2 minute timer for kids!"
> Opera I thought was a very strict discipline, needing rigorous somewhat esoteric training in order to produce the right sounds. How could there be so many opera artists?
My guess is just the same opera performed by a ton of different orchestras, and perhaps the same orchestra for different recordings, times however many operas there are.
I had to chuck Youtube Music away when it was polluting my youtube playlists with stuff I was liking on youtube music. Me as a video viewer and me as a music listener are two completely different people.
> Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations
I always assumed the "Anna" in the name was for "Anarchist." My assumption about the archive is that they don't believe there's an ethical solution to the restriction of access to data that involves a capitalist market.
I get your point but then let's not complains if creativity dies and things all look the same. Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.
This doesn't do much for the argument that artists only do art for money. Everyone knows what happens to free use art, same as what happens to FOSS: corpos bundle it up and sell it back to people.
By the way, I do know a lot of artists that just give their work away for free. Hell, any Burn is just a bunch of free art that usually gets lit on fire or destroyed after a week. There's also graffiti art which is uncompensated and usually painted over within a month.
fwiw, the vast majority of my working musician friends (who do also hold day jobs) would rather you pirate their music than stream it on spotify. they make basically all of their income from music via touring, streaming income might pay for a coffee or two a month.
> Would they do what they do if they had zero dollars?
No, probably not. Isn't it a shame we live in a world where we have the technology to automate all meaningful production, but people still need to justify their existence through often meaningless labor?
That said, I know artists that make the bare minimum to survive, on purpose, so they have more time to focus on art.
Yes, as long as they have enough to survive, people generally have some free time. I know someone who's living paycheck to paycheck and they make music as a hobby. Obviously, if you have to work 16 hours a day to survive they wouldn't do it – or at least they wouldn't have the capacity to share it.
"I'm not a capitalist, I am a creativist... Capitalists make things to make money, I like to make money to make things." - Eddie Izzard
It's more about the viability of making any kind of living from one's creative work, not motivation to create. (Though for creative works with large upfront costs, eg films, ROI motivation is relevant for backers.)
I've seen a phone jacking in this exact scenario and nobody moved to stop the guy running. Nobody on the train can help cause the doors have closed, and nobody on the platform has any idea anything just happened, or if they do the guy is well gone before they can put two and two together.
For me I always pocket my phone or e-reader at each stop, unless I'm in Japan or Taiwan.
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