I hate hearing stories of people coming home to find they've been burgled of their cherished possessions - especially gadgets like laptops, which are often loaded with your private data.
That's why I took such delight in that Close Up item last month about the clever Waikato University employees who
managed to track down a stolen iMac.
They hunted it down by tracing it via the internet, finding its approximate physical location, activating the iMac's web camera remotely and taking photos of the alleged thief who was blissfully unaware he was being snapped every couple of minutes tapping away on his ripped-off computer.
The upshot of that story was that the software designed at Waikato University and used to track the stolen iMac is being given away freely to other educational institutions around the country so they too can track their Apple computers if they disappear and pop up back on the internet somewhere.
Now we have another impressive tale of the internet being used to turn the tables on a thief.
This one is from Philadelphia, where 26 year-old Jesse McPherson came home to find his TV, Xbox and Apple PowerBook had been stolen. He decided to post the details of the theft on his blog, which was then linked to on Digg.com, the popular news aggregation website.
Before McPherson knew it he had a band of tech-savvy amateur sleuths on his side. They even started this wiki compiling information on the case which eventually led them to the person who allegedly received the stolen Xbox and demanded money for its return via messages left for McPherson on the Xbox Live gaming platform.
The story is worth reading in full, but it has a happy ending for McPherson - he got his gear back and the poor guy who tried to screw US$200 out of McPherson just so he could have his own property back is now paying the price for leaving a trail of digital breadcrumbs across the internet that led to him being tracked down in the real world.
Now that's justice for you - tech savvy justice.
