Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 30 July 2004, 5:50 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Wednesday 28/7/2004 I've previously bemoaned the low quality of criminal intellect in London. I'm glad to report that things are looking up a little -- although there's still a long way to go. A gang of car thieves have been nabbed: their speciality was nicking expensive motors and flogging them off as apparently kosher. Cleverly, they managed to forge large numbers of documents that persuaded various agencies of the cars' legitimacy -- and even more cleverly, decided to store all the information on an iPod.
Now, I know that the RIAA and its pals have been banging on about iPods encouraging criminality: little did I know that the lilywhite case of the Apple desirable could harbour such dark secrets. It really is quite clever: tons of room for detailed bitmaps of dodgy docs, FireWire interface to get them swiftly onto and off a computer while leaving no evidence, and of course the device looks like the innocent music playing accessory of choice that it mostly is.
Having had an idea of such evil genius, inspiration then left our South London gang. Although they proved successful at nicking the cars, defrauding the credit agencies and then selling them on, they were less successful at not being seen. In fact, so delighted were they at having possession of all these gleaming BMWs, Porsches, Lexuses and so on, that they drove them around the streets of their locale for weeks on end. And when they weren't driving them, they parked them outside their gaffs.
Unfortunately for them, they lived in some of South London's most unsavoury estates -- and leaving a fleet of £70,000 Beemers parked up outside a flat more suited to Fiestas with the wheels off was a clue so unsubtle that even the Metropolitan Police eventually noticed. The plod went in, searched the place and found the iPod, which was only too happy to divulge its secrets to the PCs', er, PCs. The rest is history -- well, two and a half years in Pentonville at any rate.
There is no truth in the rumour that the next iPod Mini will come in grass green.
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