Twitter helps free kidnapped South African from trunk of his car

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/twitter-helps-free-kidnapped-south-african-from-trunk-of-his-car.ars

by curthopkins • 14 years ago

28 15 14 years ago

arstechnica.com

koenigdavidmj• 14 years ago

Warn: the page got hacked and will redirect you to a porn site.

mike-cardwell• 14 years ago

Didn't for me.

nik_0_0• 14 years ago

My work AV blocked a malicious site and I was redirected to some spammy looking ad site.

Edit: Looks ok now.

instakill2• 14 years ago

Why not just phone the cops if he had his phone with him?

_djo_• 14 years ago

Possibly afraid of being heard by the hijackers in the car?

mr1976• 14 years ago

ZA/Joburg resident here - he was actually located after he SMS'd his girlfriend, and the cops used his mobile phone signal to locate him. It was widely tweeted, but from what I gather it had very little to do with the actual recovery of the gent in question.

Havoc• 14 years ago

He'd be dead before he gets to a 112 operator. The local crooks have a very low tolerance for bold heroic stuff like that.

Also, the local 911 equivalent is sometimes simply swamped with calls so its better to get the message out there & have someone else phone it in.

Sadly more & more reliance is being placed on stuff like this (community patrols, private security, gated communities etc) because the police simply isn't coping.

Glad that it worked out fine in this case.

instakill2• 14 years ago

The flying squad is usually really quick to respond, but it worked out in the end...

StavrosK• 14 years ago

Did anyone else's Chrome throw a malware warning for arstechnica.com?

ebtalley• 14 years ago

same here, pretty odd. I view arstechnica directly on a regular basis.

adsr• 14 years ago

I get a "Warning: Suspected phishing site" alert in Safari.

Edit: I just checked Google's Safe Browsing diagnostics page and it's also flagging arstechnica.com http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=arstechni...

corford• 14 years ago

I just got it on FF... weird.

gee_totes• 14 years ago

I'm seeing the same thing, and now I'm excited about the upcoming ars article about how Chrome and Safari mistakenly identified their site as malicious.

cafard• 14 years ago

FF did for me.

buyx• 14 years ago

The article gets carried away: @pigspotter is largly used to locate speed traps, the graft and violence are relatively uncommon. Bribes are usually paid by offenders to be let off the hook, and the average law abiding driver (unfortunately an increasingly rare breed) is unlikely to be hassled unduly at a roadblock.

Also Pigspotter doesn't Tweet past 10 PM or so, presumably not to aid to drunk drivers. If it was to avoid roadblocks because of the risk posed by rogue cops, he wouldn't suspend Tweeting at that time.

Twitter helps free kidnapped South African from trunk of his car

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