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 Replies: 96 / Views: 14,505 |
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Valued Member
United States
425 Posts |
There has been a few "Home invasion- PM's taken" stories in the news the last few months. Anybody know the rest of the story? (Bad guys knew about the PM's how?).
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Pillar of the Community
United States
4008 Posts |
A decoy stash makes a lot of sense. Something that also makes sense is to include some cash and a few 1-oz. silver bars with serial numbers. The numbers on the bills and bars can be useful in tracking the perps as well as in convicting them if they get caught. Additionally, anything that you can ID by a specific number could be returned to you if the thieves are caught and the loot used as evidence in a trial.
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Pillar of the Community
United States
808 Posts |
@oden - I believe another forum member here posted a link to a recent story. That crime was actually solved and the ringleader turned out to be the guy who sold and installed a safe in the victim's home. Very much an inside job I'd say.
That's the other sad reality to all this: as much as possible, each of us must become the architects of our own security. You just can't trust outside professionals with the defense of your home and property.
Edited by coinwatch
07/14/2012 11:24 pm
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Pillar of the Community
United States
4008 Posts |
Exactly right, CW. Being as independent of others as possible is usually a really good thing... especially in a case such as this.
My parents, my son, and I all have safes that we bought and then installed ourselves. It helped that we did this in the middle of the day when no one was around and the safes came in plain cardboard boxes on pallets. As far as anyone who may have seen us knows, these boxes could have contained items of furniture or appliances. As usual, anonymity is a powerful security tool that we all need to use at every opportunity.
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New Member
United States
30 Posts |
Everyone has been talking about not sharing information and anonymity, but we often forget that the act of posting a photo online can share information. You shouldn't post photos online of your stack, new purchases, etc. unless you're sure that the photo doesn't contain any identifying data. Smartphones often include your GPS coordinates in the photo. This data (EXIF data) is hidden within the image file and and anyone who downloads the photo can find out exactly where you live. I've casually checked a few photos on this forum and it is shocking how many members have unknowingly posted the location of their house. Right now, I know where thousands of dollars of members' coins and silver are located - because it's in your photos! http://www.switched.com/2011/01/24/...g-data-safe/Edited by coin1024
07/16/2012 3:17 pm
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Pillar of the Community
United States
5838 Posts |
That's frightening coin1024,
I do not own a smartphone. I wonder if any digital camera have the same security flaws.
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New Member
United States
2 Posts |
...just as I was getting ready to take bullion photos tonight.
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Valued Member
Canada
178 Posts |
Sure enough, coin1024 is right. I've checked a few pics from this forum and some have the longitude and latitude coordinates on them!
One pic I checked had the degree, minute and second parts of the coordinates. I'm no expert, but I don't think that would get you a specific house, maybe a neighborhood (which I'm sure is too close for most CCF members!). But I'm sure some CCF members live in the country where they have the only house around. You might be able to zero in on those places! Scary stuff, besides members stripping this info out of their own pictures, I wonder if CCF can do a mass strip of all the pics on the site. Depends where they are hosted I guess.
Edited by thehulk
07/16/2012 3:54 pm
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New Member
United States
30 Posts |
thehulk: The standard degree, minute, second format (with 2 decimal places) is sufficient to get you accuracy to well within a house - within about 5 feet (though the smartphone is probably only accurate to 25 feet or so). The photos lead you directly to the member's house, even in urban areas. Very scary.
It's not a security "flaw" per se, as it has its uses (consider for example taking photos along a hike and then you easily know where each photo was taken), but it is definitely a security concern.
Technically, it's feasible for this site to strip all of such data out of any uploaded photos, and to also do it automatically for any uploaded photos in the future. That would be a very handy feature. Otherwise, you can remove it in Windows 7 at least (maybe earlier versions) - right click a photo, click Properties, click the Details tab, and click the link at the bottom that says to remove personal information.
Edited by coin1024
07/16/2012 4:09 pm
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Pillar of the Community
United States
1391 Posts |
Has anybody thought about adding misinformation into exif data? For all you know I really do live at that pay phone booth in Death Valley. :D
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New Member
United States
2 Posts |
allranger: Could this be the reason for all the botched SWAT team raids on the wrong houses lately? :D
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Pillar of the Community
United States
613 Posts |
An automated stripping of exif info from all photos on the site would be a great service if it could be done as well as some kind of stripping done automatically during upload.
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Pillar of the Community
United States
808 Posts |
@allranger - That could be fun. You could have your stack floating in the middle of Lake Superior, stashed at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, or hovering 1000 meters above Roswell, New Mexico. The choices are limitless.  |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
5838 Posts |
Hmmm,
I was looking at some of my pics using exif viewer, not much info can be found with parsing error at the end, while some of the other forum members pics I have more info regarding make of camera and what setting was used and GPS Timestamp, etc!
I don't know how accurate those information really is either, but figure if using app like Google Earth, how close can one pin point ones locale with just GPS Timestamp?
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Pillar of the Community
United States
808 Posts |
Most of the EXIF data recorded by your typical DSLR or compact digital camera does not seem to include anything too worrying. It's the location data included in your smart phone photos that's really the main worry.
There are several utilities for both Mac and PC users that will scrub this data from your photos. I just tested a very simple PC program called "JPEG & PNG Stripper" that is super easy to use and will scrub iPhone photos that the built-in Windows 7 tools may have problems removing.
Mac users can typically use any image viewer program that has a file conversion option to save JPEG files as PNG, and then save back to JPEG. This will usually remove the GPS lat and long numbers, but strangely enough NOT the altitude.
Photoshop and Aperture users could probably batch remove EXIF data from all of their photos...but that subject is beyond this discussion.
Edited by coinwatch
07/16/2012 5:10 pm
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Replies: 96 / Views: 14,505 |
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Posted 07/14/2012 10:33 pm
