Tag Archives: thief

Laptop Thief’s Penalty: Public Humiliation

The kid who stole Mark Bao’s laptop made two mistakes beyond “Mac-larceny.” He recorded himself dancing on the stolen laptop’s webcam, and failed to realize that the victim, Mark, had installed recovery software on the machine.

So Mark, an 18-year-old student at the University of Massachusetts, connected remotely to his Macbook Air laptop, retrieved this video, and shared it with the word via YouTube. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, about 85% of readers think he should leave the clip online. A perpetual sentence of the crook’s poor judgement. We agree.

The thief returned the laptop to university security and apologized. But we think he should dance, dance, dance in shame for eternity.

Then there’s the burning question. Is this a viral stunt by a software-security service? One can’t discount that theory in the “age of viral.”

Says CBS News: “He had taken the precaution of installing online backup software (called BackBlaze) on the computer and that now allowed him to gain entry into the purloined machine’s browser history as well as to view its hard drive where he could track any updates.”