I'd actually like to know what the process was like after the assault. If you unlocked your phone and 'other accounts' what'd you have to go through to sort it out?
Presumably that included a bank acc app on your phone, can you get that cash back, etc?
I've only had bank apps in the UK(Barclays, Lloyds and Santander) but the app on the phone only allows you to send money to known recipients, to send money to a new account you have to log in from a normal browser and use your RSA-signer(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Barclays...) to authenticate it, and no one I knows keeps theirs on them. So even if I was forced to open my bank app the worst thing they could do is see my account balance and send some money to my friends or my landlord.
" They instructed me to unlock my phone and other personal accounts. " - That would suck. As one who has also been robbed at gunpoint (Redwood City, CA), I remember clearly thinking - "Thankfully, all you're getting is a locked phone."
With touch ID, my password is a 24 character ridiculous combination of special characters, numbers, and letters (only typed on power up) - so If I ever get mugged again (highly unlikely now that I'm living in Singapore) - at the very least, they'll get the iPhone unlocked with my touch ID, and if they ask me to enter my password - zero chance of them memorizing it without taking a lot of detailed notes - which, honestly, muggers usually aren't into.
> instructed me to unlock my phone and other personal accounts.
Given that use this tactic will probably increase over time, phones and other portable computers should really support duress passwords.
The device should look like it unlocked properly, but really put everything in a type of read-only mode where writes and certain network transactions return success but don't actually do anything. Obviously, if network access (any type) is available, some sort of silent alarm can be raised at the same time.
I was thinking the same thing, but it would be very tricky to do right. If there's any tip-off, it could literally get someone killed. Plus, what if they just have you open your phone's browser to log into online banking? Not much the OS can do about that without making it obvious that the browser is locked down. You could claim to not use online banking, but would you be willing to risk your life? Or what about the email app? Making it read-only doesn't help much; giving a criminal read-only access to all your email would be a disaster. But again, it would be obvious something was up if the account was empty.
I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but it would be very difficult to do in a way that wouldn't be noticed, especially once it became common knowledge.
You just need to fool them for a few minutes until the mugger runs off. Everything could kick in after that or you could determine when the device has moved a significant distance after the duress password has been entered. In that short a time, your exposure is relatively limited. They can't get everything, and you could always record activity and use the network (that's still secretly active) to record what apps were opened during the exposure period, take periodic low-res screenshots that would show exactly what they were viewing, or even take a few mugger selfies. Upload it all in the background and send an email with everything the police might need to catch the little perp.
No mugger is going to stick around longer than they have to. The need to get away quickly would dictate the design choices for such functionality. Maybe we'll get lucky and a few security developers at Apple/Google/etc. will read this discussion and get some good ideas to think about :).
Thankfully, my OCBC online banking only allows you to interact with existing accounts. If you want to do anything interesting, you need to have a separate (Physical, completely offline) token to add new accounts, and you need the same token to "sign" transactions over a certain $$$ figure.
Yeah, that's the thing I want to do when someone has me at gunpoint! Make sure I suddenly have "bad connectivity".
You know what would be the better thing to do in that situation? Make damn sure shit works and they get what they're looking for. I'll worry about cancelling credit cards, etc. later.
Take a look at Cerberus [1], it has a lot of very helpful features that I haven't seen on other similar apps. Eg take silent photos on incorrect login attempts and email them to you, disable power-off, survive factory reset. I used it once successfully to recover my lost phone. It automatically sent photos to me of the person who found it, and I made my phone speak out a voice message asking them to please stay there while I came to collect it. The guy who found it was looking stunned when I arrived there a few minutes later.
I'm not affiliated with Cerberus in any way, just a happy customer.
That's... brilliant. You could do all sorts of things to protect the user's data while preserving the fiction that the device is unlocked and functioning as all you need to do is fake it for a few minutes to fool the mugger. After all, they don't stick around.
You could force the device to self-wipe data storage after X minutes or force specific apps to 'crash' on open (email, 2FA apps, banking, etc.) where even offline access could be detrimental.
Oops. Kind of blew right past that rather useful feature. Dial 911 and leave the microphone on, though it could lead to problems for the system in tracking down false alarms.
It probably makes more sense to just support remote-unlock and remote-password-change quickly/easily, after the fact. I wouldn't want to depend on duress passwords except if they worked exactly identically and ALSO sent a silent alarm.
For post-contact response, maybe even an IVR system you can call (from a public phone or something) and give an audio or DTMF password.
(I'd also like to get my phone droned after I move out of danger close radius, or the civilized city equivalent (police/bike gang/etc. show up at geolocation))
Having been robbed many times, including a kidnapping I can say that your logical thinking will go out of the window because of the nerves. I would find it difficult to remember a duress password and wouldn't trust myself with evaluating the situation properly to make the call whether to use it or not. I'd rather have an after-robbery mechanism to lock my phone once I am safe.
Isn't there an infiltration vector glibly called rubber hose cryptanalysis to describe this very thing? Nothing is ever 100% secure for this reason alone.
That reminds me of a thought I had recently. Often in movies and TV shows, someone will be torturing another for their secret information. And for some reason they always tell the truth. I've always wondered why movie characters don't lie more often in those situations. Because usually the torturer isn't in a position to confirm it's truth instantly, or sometimes at all.
Passwords are the one exception to this. You can always confirm a password instantly from anywhere. But it doesn't need to be that way, you can have duress passwords. Truecrypt supports hidden archives, where entering the fake password unlocks a different encrypted folder with different files. The same thing thing is true on some "secure photo" apps for phones. For a phone, you would have a password that bricks the phone after a certain time limit, like 24 hours. But appears to work fine for the moment.
I guess the hope would be that you have a smart mugger. A dumb one might shoot you on principle for forcing them to remember what they'd see as a ridiculous password. "Forget it man, keep the damn phone" is probably pretty unlikely. Unfortunately.
Most muggers don't actually want to kill people. Murder brings the cops a lot faster.
Murder rate is like 25x less, and even less common for strangers. (Though like half of stranger murders are during robbery, so yea, just do what you're told)
Definitely. An intelligent mugger likely isn't going to pull the trigger unless they think they have to or that have no choice. Of course, you have almost zero control over that so that probably sounds rather trite.
I was just joking about the dumb one shooting you, though I think any mugger would be pretty pissed if you rattle off a long gibberish password rather than "password1."
...this shows what kind of hellhole the usa has become. even in a city near or in silicon valley, well armed criminals roam the streets...pp are "measuring" their heart with sensors while being robbed and tell the internet about this. a "sane" society?
Actually crime rates in the US have been dropping steadily for decades.
Thought personally, not living in the US, just the thought of being robbed is like science fiction to me. And it's not like I live in a great country, but things like this just almost never happen here. Gas stations and convenience stores get robbed sometimes, your apartment might be broken into, but someone on the street robbing you? I don't know a single person this had happened to.
I looked up some international stats on robbery, but they don't differentiate between mugging of people on the street and robberies at businesses, banks, etc. The US has a rate about x3 higher than my country (Israel), but again, it doesn't tell you much.
I've seen disputes about how much (can look them up), but as the abstract notes, this was largely a mid-1970s thing, as advanced trauma treatment from the Vietnam War filtered into the US, although the process started in the last '50s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_Adams_Cowley
Murder rates aren't the only form of crime going down. Rape, robbery, property crimes are all down massively since the peak in the 1970s. One speculated reason is the removal of lead.
even in a city near or in silicon valley, well armed criminals roam the streets
Well, in most of the US, 43 out of 50 states, 5-10% of the civilian population could also be "well armed", and outside of (still) high crime areas like Chicago I think this sort of crime is much less common, and as noted by dvirsky the crime rates in general have been dropping for decades, although that's almost certainly more due to demographics than anything else (i.e. the population of young men).
My vision of a "sane society" is one where I don't necessarily bother with a sensor, although the data from one would certainly be neat, but one in which during a moment's inattention from the one with the gun, or when they stupidly ask me to empty my pockets, I draw my 1911 and give them some .45 ACP love instead of my can't lock in the first place feature phone etc. Assuming my situational awareness was so poor I hadn't started avoiding letting them get so close in the first place, a skill honed in the dozen years I lived as an unarmed pedestrian in the Boston area, yuck.
Before anyone goes off on an "oh, you're so deliciously macho" tangent, while you have to judge each incident by itself, statistically, resisting a criminal assault results in much better outcomes. If you live in Silicon Valley, well, it sucks to be you (even if this isn't your sort of thing, as it is nationwide for the 90-95% of the population who don't legally carry concealed, you don't benefit from herd immunity).
I don't have much to contribute, but it's always great to hear a fellow carrier on Hacker News. Especially one who carries a 1911. Glad there's a couple of us here.
For me, it's not entirely a "choice", they've fit my hand like a glove since I was a teen and I can shoot them very well whatever the quality of trigger or sights.
But I'm quite happy to carry one of the greatest legacies of John Moses Browning, and I marvel at how mature this technology is, where century old designs like the the Mauser 1898 rifle and the 1911 handgun are entirely competitive with the shiny new stuff, albeit maybe not quite as easy and inexpensive to manufacture or maintain.
statistically, resisting a criminal assault results in much better outcomes
I'd be willing to wager that simply passively handing over your wallet and phone, by a wide margin, results in better outcomes than trying to draw a weapon on a guy jacked up on adrenalin with his finger on the trigger pointed at you.
Anybody so stupid to risk a felony conviction on something so low-value as mugging someone, is probably stupid enough to pull the trigger if startled.
I'm personally not "willing to wager" about this, all I'm doing is reporting what the statisticians have discovered in their studies of the actual outcomes of crimes. I hope it goes without saying that for any particular crime, I wouldn't go by raw statistics but would judge the situation.
But I've read of accounts where citizens did things that struck us serious self-defense types as really stupid, but prevailed, and I don't judge them because I wasn't there and they were right, even if the risk struck us as too great.
Here, I'm imagining a scenario where my gun, which just happens to rest over my right back pocket where my wallet might be, wouldn't even visible to the criminals until they've got about 2-3 tenths of a second to respond, ideally where I'd also start moving laterally. And if it's night, I'd be wearing body armor (yeah, I'm paranoid :-), so even his being "stupid enough to pull the trigger" if he can manage to do so might not be the end of the world.
But it all comes down to your judgement of the situation, your luck, etc. ... and as many people have told me, you make your own luck as it were. Which circles back to what the statisticians discovered.
Fair enough - I can't disagree with anything you are saying here.
Honestly, one of the more astute things you mentioned was not getting into this situation in the first place, "Assuming my situational awareness was so poor I hadn't started avoiding letting them get so close in the first place," - I take full responsibility for getting mugged - it was after dark, on a deserted sidewalk - and my lack of situational awareness, directly led to the miscreants getting close enough to draw down on me and relieve me of my possessions.
I lived in a much rougher part of Oakland (17th and the lake, in 98-99) for 2 1/2 years, and never once came close to being on the receiving end of a crime, because I was always hyper aware of my environment. But, you get sloppy on the peninsula, and look what happens...
They could ask you to change it. Anyway - do as you are told. Devices are consumables. I would politely ask for my sim card and to make factory wipe though.
I'm curious if anyone's done real studies on heartrate and other biosensors for trained vs. untrained people, and people who could do something vs. not.
I've certainly felt vastly more calm (whether or not I actually did have a lower heart rate) when I had something to do.
I was mugged by a gang in Rio and, for a little over a minute, had a knife shoved against the front of my neck and a gun into my back. For me the experience was so bizarrely, intensely focused. The world didn't exist outside gazing into the eyes of the guy holding the knife. We just kept repeating back and forth to each other "não problemas, não problemas" until they left.
I came away wondering if training would have allowed me to think _at all_. It sounds like such a low bar, but I seriously don't think a single thought went through my head the entire time. It was pure experience.
For me it was always things I had zero control over (indirect fire, usually at night, usually single rounds, although terrifyingly close and walking-onto-me a couple times), which scared me when I thought it was effective and totally didn't bother me when I thought it was ineffective.
Except a few other times, where my remembered terror was highest in the incidents where I'd had no real response or control, and really just remember the action in cases where I did have some level of responsibility/control. But that might be a failure of memory.
Ah, yes. Every wearables-related startup loves unique sensor data. Muggings are apparently very unique and interesting. I bet murders would count, too. You can get a big spike and then a flat line.
What we can't see in the data is another period of slightly elevated heart rate, when you run away after the baddies are gone.
Seriously: never handle robbery as a simple transaction -- many times the robbers do realise in their aftermath that they should in fact have killed you, and you don't want to be still around then. (I've tried to link a good post here, but it's pretty hard to Google this subject. I'm not an expert, so handle my comment with caution.)
I think many realize that murder is a lot more serious than armed robbery. Not just the punishment, but also the work being done to find the perpetrators.
> many times the robbers do realise in their aftermath that they should in fact have killed you
Well I agree that you should get to as safe a location as possible immediately following a robbery, however I really would like to see the post you had in mind. Maybe I have a different percentage in mind when I read the word "many", but I'm highly skeptical that this is a common occurrence amongst robbers. Granted they tend not to be the best critical thinkers, but why would they risk adding homicide to the list of charges should they be caught?
Also, if they decided they want to, why would they only realize in their aftermath?
If the late killing really often happens, which I (not based on any data or anecdata) doubt, I would think the more likely mechanism would be that they decide up front, hesitate at the moment of truth, then realize you could recognize them later, making them go to jail for a long time, and then do it anyways.
We don't know why, but it's well established that the longer a criminal type has someone under their perceived complete control, the more likely it is that they will kill them.
The longer an encounter with a criminal, the more likely they are to commit a worse crime: both "practical" crimes like killing you to keep you quiet and purely malicious crimes like rape and torture.
It's surely a small number, but how small would it have to be for you to take the risk? It's not a rational act to rob someone, so it's a fair assumption that their next decision won't be solely based on reason or logic either.
Mind you, we don't know the heart rate of the robber.
This article seems fake to me.
The story feels a bit made up and the end reads like a tag line: "If you want to find out why I had the wearables on me — check out emozia."
The heart rate numbers themselves don't seem to make sense to me. 164 at the peak seems low for the drama/gravity of the situation.
I work for a very large wearable company so I have some knowledge of how heart rate sensors work
How did he know the timing of the peak? If he had a log it most likely simply had a time stamp of seconds. How does he correlate a random time stamp to the specific moment days after the event. Same comment about his heart rate hitting 130 when he shoves the gun into his ribs.
In general the story just feels fake.
Edit: do thieves really ask you to unlock your phone and banking apps? What app lets you send money that can't easily be traced?
The timing of those events relative to his heart rates does seem like, at least, embellishment.
> 164 at the peak seems low for the drama/gravity of the situation.
Would you think it's more reasonable to reach ~190-200? (Assuming the writer of the Medium story is ~25.) My only perspective comes from running with my fitbit, where it's pretty easy to reach 170.
I'd say 200 is reasonable. 140-160 is jogging/running, which is not that fast. When you're about to die and fight-or-flight reactions kick in (i.e. your whole entire body shifts to "OH SHIT" mode), I'd expect your HR to be through the roof.
Yeah, for men, 220 - age is your max heart rate, in theory. And "going to die suddenly" = max heart rate.
The other thing that's bullshit about the graph is that there are only 4 evenly spaced data points for what sounds like a 5-10 minute encounter. Don't believe it at all, why wouldn't you show real data? Or talk more about the data if that was the point of it?
Everyone's heart rate is different and I don't think with any certainty you can expect to predict what someone's HR is in any particular situation. Personally my absolute max HR I've seen in my whole life is 166 yet I regularly cycle with guys in their 50s that can reach 180-190. The only way to find your max HR is by measuring it.
I'm sure you're right that the exact timing is speculation, but a peak of 164 for an active individual seems quite reasonable to me (he did state bus resting heart rate is 58).
It's pretty pointless stealing a modern phone without getting it unlocked, isn't it? If anything that's a detail that someone making up a story would forget about.
I had the same feeling, but not for the plug (I think I stopped reading before that).
> I want to experience life, I want to help people, build companies, have a family.
"Build companies". Now I do realised that some people really DO want to do that, I've just never seen it mentioned in stories like this and it was what made me a bit "uhh" about the post.
Wouldn't call BS though. But that plug at the end does seem a bit convenient.
The world might be just a little brighter than your null hypothesis :)
I wrote the story first and foremost for myself, to get over what I felt was the shame of being robbed and powerless. So I started writing about my experience, what I learned and my takeaways and that process helped me forgive and move on! I shared the story because I thought it might help other people go though whatever difficult thing they are going though.
A lot of the story and a lot of details are not told in the medium post. The guys that robbed me are still at large and the investigation is still open. I hope to share more details in the future when I can!
i thought that the note about emozia was relevant to the story - since I don't think a lot of people in the general population wear custom hr sensors and analyze data coming from them. This was a post on medium. But it seems that the note bothered some people and distracted from the point of the story so I edited it out.
The case that I wanted to make in the article is live your life the way you want to live it, because knowing that you didn't when you run out of time is, apparently, really bad for your heart!
I hope you enjoyed the article and that it helped you in some way!
Thanks, here's my public apology.
I thought I'd go an extra inch and buy one of your products, but fellback to requesting a free demo as it all I could do from the site.
No worries at all!! This is my first foray into writing publicly and I am learning a lot from this and other discussions! It's really interesting and helpful! I'll incorporate some of the input into future articles. I'll certainly be mindful that the audience might be much broader than originally intended and to structure the content accordingly.
Yes - there is actually no way to purchase anything form emozia right now, which in this context is really funny/ironic.
The guy's a CEO of a heart rate company. I don't want to question his motivations too much, but it's obviously in his favor to publish something like this...
The guy's a CEO of a heart rate company. I don't want to question his motivations too much, but it's obviously in his favor to publish something like this...
There's a huge discrepancy between your comment being second from the top, and where a similar comment would be if we replace a mugging with an anonymous rape threat, even though both are equally unverifiable and easy to find details that seem odd.
And there are potentially life-saving applications of heart rate data, like the collaboration we're building with UCSF cardiology to detect abnormal heart rhythms:
Even with "just" 11 million Apple Watches sold, that's about 2,400,000,000,000 heart rate measurements per year. I think that will lead to all sorts of downstream applications.
Probably enormous for individuals and society, by detecting abnormal heart rate conditions we can medicate people to prevent a stroke, which is very very serious condition which requires allot of care.
But you do not need a watch, you can detect this by yourself with simple means, today:
What is great about these watches ist that you don't need to worry about that and it just measures it for you. Even in situations where you can't do it yourself, or simply have other things on your mind. Could you imagine someone measuring their pulse while being robbed or watching game of thrones? A wearable measures your puls in situations where you can't do it and that is the helpful part. Your heart read in controlled environments or after physical activities is Rather uninteresting because it has already been explored in depth.
My cardiac system is very sensitive to emotional loss. Grandmothers = tachycardia. Last break up nearly killed me. I wish I had a fitbit so my doctors wouldn't look at me like a sad puppy who cannot find a new woman and is making things up.
I have an autonomic nervous system disorder (postural tachycardia) that causes my heart rate to skyrocket at any kind of physical or emotional stress. Basically it's like my fight-or-flight response is broken and over-reacts to everything (even from seeing blood or just standing up). Serious emotional issues can triggers panic attacks for me pretty easily.
I went through a battery of heart tests that all turned up normal and I was diagnosed with anxiety, until years later when someone thought to test my nervous system. So yeah, I can relate.
But those heart tests even included wearing a monitor that didn't tell them anything useful other than that it was elevated at times... but not that there was a real physiological underlying cause beyond simple anxiety. Not sure they'd put any more interest in a Fitbit's data.
I don't have your condition but on its worse times my circular system was about to shut down, my 4 limbs were cut to sustain the rest. For months Any activity in one part of my body would cause the rest to feel numb. Even typing with two hands would saturate my brain. The story makes them smile as in "you wouldn't be speaking anymore if you experienced this". If I had a trace of the sudden lack of blood pressure they'd at least have something quantitative to consider rather than borderline incoherent speech. That said most generalist wouldn't consider it anyway as you said.
That's really interesting - I havent heard of those kinds of problems outside of autonomic issues. You actually got diagnosed with something else related to cardio that causes that?
And yeah if it's low blood pressure-related that's hard to show them, since it changes so much and will be different in the doc's office than normal, and because there's no real way to do continuous BP monitoring the way you can with heart rate. Luckily in my case there's a simple test you can do at home or in a doctor's office to see the BP drop quickly.
So far not, I have tests booked next week. My 'wikipedia' self diagnosis was something similar to takotsubo syndrom. Emotional pain -> hormone flush -> broken heart muscle functions -> BP shut -> vaso-constriction reflex attempting to restore BP. Few weeks later I had a feeling of 'clogged artery' on my left side. No pain though, otherwise I'd have gone to a hospital because it would have seem like an infarctus. Looked like a very bad BP, very bad diet (sadness->eating shit), fat deposit, occlusion, near infarction. I suspect it affected my brain too, I lost control of my left side for sophisticated movements, for months I couldn't type with both hands while reading what I was typing (had to alternate one word, check, next word). Things are coming back now but still I'd love to have a full checkup (angiography, brain scan) to avoid pushing too hard on my system before the time is right, problem is no doctor will send you for such tests unless you're crashing in front of them. Takes time. For a year I wished for more non invasive medical monitoring and tests..
Yep. I've been diagnosed with orthostatic hypotension too. I have bouts of low blood pressure, so it can drop when I stand too quickly or for too long, or when I exercise. My resting pressure doesn't read as low but I still feel the effects of it and treatments for low BP help my other symptoms...
There's no cure or anything, just a handful of treatments for the symptoms and to keep things under control. For the heart rate issues I take Xanax periodically as needed - it keeps anxiety from building up and setting off my heart rate (which then feeds the anxiety in a vicious circle).
The autonomic problems also cause periodic drops in blood pressure so I take a medication for that, but also have weird treatments for it like a high-salt diet and compression stockings I wear very day. I also take an ADD med for the cognitive impairment that comes along with drops in blood pressure.
I also have major on-going fatigue and gastrointestinal issues related to the autonomic problems (turns out your autonomic nervous system runs EVERYthing), and I'm about to be tested for food sensitivities to see if changing my diet might help those.
I recently learned how the SNS, pSNS and SNS are linked to every part of your body. Changed my mind about the potential spread of psychosomatic disorders.
Cardiio app on iOS—measures heart rate via camera covered by your finger—seems to reliably graph my arrhythmia. It doesn’t save the graph though, have to screenshot the result screen after finishing. You can see the out-of-order beats, should they happen during the measurement.
If I felt it was getting serious I’d look into a specialized device that can make it even more visible, letting me go to a doctor without awkwardness.
So far my arrhythmia seems like more or less episodical PVC though, if I interpret Wikipedia correctly. Happens reliably only during mentally / emotionally pressing moments, up to a beat every few seconds on bad days. Noticed that mild cardio, like jogging in place, helps ‘warm up’ the heart (feels cold during the episodes somehow).
You mean exercise avoid the misplaced beats ? averaging the rhythm ? Since my 'accident' I felt some for of orgasm when able to run for more than a few seconds. The warmth of blood reaching your cells, the heart pumping a little bit stronger but still regularly. The joy of living tissue.
Anecdotally, during a couple of more intense episodes, a bit of basic cardio (mild jogging in place, a few limp jumping jacks, not trying too hard) helped me reduce perceived ‘bad’ beat frequency, and yeah, felt nice, warmer, etc.
I don't think number of muggings in general has much to do with how easy is to obtain a gun. The root causes are probably unrelated. But how easy is to obtain a gun definitely correlates with relative increase in muggings with a gun.
That being said, I don't think (il)legality would have a direct impact on how easy is to obtain a gun in certain parts of the world (say Brasil).
> The root causes are probably unrelated. But how easy is to obtain a gun definitely correlates with relative increase in muggings with a gun.
That's true. I also think that it's likely that a gun is a better defence against mugging than is, say, a knife or one's fists. A small woman can shoot a large attacker, when her fists aren't going to be much use and a knife wound may not stop him until after he's already killed her. Having a gun doesn't mean that one will be able to draw and use it, of course; indeed, one may just end up giving one's attackers another weapon.
But I think the odds are better armed than unarmed.
There's a difference between mugging with a knife and with a pistol. Not because knife isn't deadly (it very much is), but because it's much harder (physically, psychologically and even time-wise) for the perpetrator to deliver the threat in case anything happens.
This puts my fear of public speaking into perspective. My heart rate during a department meeting where I had to speak for 5 minutes: http://imgur.com/x25MDJf (familiar topic, familiar crowd)
A guy who is about to surprise his girlfriend with a wedding proposal gets arrested because the police, with its newfound data-sink into Apple's tech stack and wearables, made legal by enhanced fear over domestic terrorism combined with a lack of public interest in privacy rights, had an illegal-behavior-trigger set to a similar heart rate spike and circumstantial behavior pattern. Since he kept his wedding plans to himself, he has no way to prove his story, and he's imprisoned along with actual potential terrorists who the feds have entrapped into collecting bomb materials or spying on high value targets. The girlfriend gets hit in an actual mass shooting soon after (since they've incrementally risen in frequency to once every few weeks), and the boyfriend is implicated and later convicted with a death sentence. Twenty years later, on the eve of his execution, a new law is passed that exonerates anyone who was convicted based on circumstantial statistical correlations - but a last minute push to the prison's e-mail and news alert apps introduces a bug that delays updates for 24 hours.
I find the heart rate peak of 164 surprising for a near-death experience. I am 27 and while working out, I typically hit 170-180 at it's peak.
American heart association website says 200 beats per minute is the average maximum for 20 -30 year old people. I'd assume the heart rate to reach that maximum during such intense situations.
I'm a marketer. So yes, the plug at the end makes me really suspicious about the authenticity of the story.
I couldn't identify with this story at all. If this happened to me - and it has in the past - I wouldn't think about any of that stuff. I'd just want them to finish me off.
I'm thirty years old, and I feel like if I was shot dead for some pointless reason like my ancient Moto G phone and whatever pittance of money I had on me, I'd not feel bad about it at all. I'm not currently working because I've had some health problems over the past year, getting back into work is an impossible maze of we'll-call-you-backs, send-us-your-CV-and-we'll-get-back-to-yous, we'll-keep-you-on-files, jobs with hundreds of applications, waiting for emails and calls that never come.
I feel like I'm a person too far in this part of the world, like there are too many people for the resources available and all I'm doing is taking up space, a sack of meat using up resources and contributing nothing. My dreams are modest - a minimum wage job and a small, private place to live - and yet they seem unattainable. Getting myself killed wouldn't bring any regrets for me, I wouldn't regret that I never got to live out my dreams, because I don't really have any. Killing me would free up some space for someone more worthwhile to take my space in the world.
I'm not actually anything - I don't have a role in the world, I'm just trying to survive and make enough money to live, and I don't even know why I want to stay alive. I honestly wish this would happen to me.
You talk of feeling valueless within the context of industrialised society.
There is a rather huge amount of world beyond the horizon, and many different ways of living.
As someone who has come face to face with their own mortality in a few ways (some slow and creeping, some "oh shit I'm about to die"), and has also shared a similar perspective to yours in the past - there's something about being faced with the actual prospect of imminent death beyond your control that adjusts your perspective more than you can fathom.
Either way - chin up, there's a lot more life to work and being "a functioning member of the economy". If you feel you're at rock bottom, then remember it can only get better.
I nearly died last year as a result of the health problems I was facing, and my immediate reaction was relief at the thought that I wouldn't have to face another day in the dead-end Linux sysadmin job I was doing at the time.
My aim, long-term, was always to lead a simple and frugal life rather than to try and amass as much wealth as possible. A small home, a place to grow food, a modest income from various bits-and-bobs of work.
But to do that, you need some money to start you out and that's where I'm failing. I'm out of the running for any professional jobs because of the break in employment and the competition for entry-level jobs is such that any slight gap in your employment history means you just get a "we'll call you back".
Having had health issues and a gap in employment history seems to mean I am no longer a useful or valid member of society. I wish I had died last year, so I wouldn't be wasting everyone's time and space.
I hear you with the health bit - if I weren't self employed I doubt any employer would have had the patience to sit through several years of erratic attendance, and it's been hard enough picking myself back up even with work to go back to, so I empathise with your position - I've been broke and hopeless before, too - serendipity usually strikes when you expect it least.
Useful doesn't equate to validity - and the fact that you're able to think in such empathic terms suggests that you are more useful than you might think.
Also, plenty of employers won't look at a gap and rule you out - big, autocratic miserable places will, but smaller shops usually care more about humans as people, and you might have more luck.
You based in the uk? What sort of sysadmin/security experience have you got?
I've worked mostly for charities and non-profit organisations in the past - I spent about three-four years working at a charity that provided hosting and audio streaming services to other organisations to generate income.
It's a pretty standard Linux sysadmin skillset - we were a LAMP CentOS shop primarily, we virtualised with OpenVZ and subsequently VMWare, nothing too out-of-the-ordinary, just general solid administration skills.
Those sound like totally transferable skills - and if you've experience on the security side of things, it's worth knowing that the industry is desperate for anyone who is willing to have "information security" as a core part of their role.
Chin up though, as glib as it sounds - being dead never solved anything for anybody, and sometimes it takes finding yourself in a really shitty, despairing place to see the way forwards. You'll make it, no matter how grim it looks today.
The only way to stay alive is by making money, and if I can't get a job, I am by definition a useless, surplus person. If I can't make money, I can't stay alive.
> if I can't get a job, I am by definition a useless, surplus person
No, because you are a unique human being with your own unique value (yes, just like every other human being). Those aren't empty words: you're worth something.
I know Vuka (the article's author) in real life. I'll send him a FB message and see if he would be willing to answer some of the burning questions asked here.
133 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadPresumably that included a bank acc app on your phone, can you get that cash back, etc?
With touch ID, my password is a 24 character ridiculous combination of special characters, numbers, and letters (only typed on power up) - so If I ever get mugged again (highly unlikely now that I'm living in Singapore) - at the very least, they'll get the iPhone unlocked with my touch ID, and if they ask me to enter my password - zero chance of them memorizing it without taking a lot of detailed notes - which, honestly, muggers usually aren't into.
Given that use this tactic will probably increase over time, phones and other portable computers should really support duress passwords.
The device should look like it unlocked properly, but really put everything in a type of read-only mode where writes and certain network transactions return success but don't actually do anything. Obviously, if network access (any type) is available, some sort of silent alarm can be raised at the same time.
I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but it would be very difficult to do in a way that wouldn't be noticed, especially once it became common knowledge.
No mugger is going to stick around longer than they have to. The need to get away quickly would dictate the design choices for such functionality. Maybe we'll get lucky and a few security developers at Apple/Google/etc. will read this discussion and get some good ideas to think about :).
You know what would be the better thing to do in that situation? Make damn sure shit works and they get what they're looking for. I'll worry about cancelling credit cards, etc. later.
I'm not affiliated with Cerberus in any way, just a happy customer.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lsdroid.ce...
If the thieves are somewhat savvy they will just hold down the power button until it turns off. Can't disable that in software.
You could force the device to self-wipe data storage after X minutes or force specific apps to 'crash' on open (email, 2FA apps, banking, etc.) where even offline access could be detrimental.
For post-contact response, maybe even an IVR system you can call (from a public phone or something) and give an audio or DTMF password.
(I'd also like to get my phone droned after I move out of danger close radius, or the civilized city equivalent (police/bike gang/etc. show up at geolocation))
When assaulted, just cooperate.
Passwords are the one exception to this. You can always confirm a password instantly from anywhere. But it doesn't need to be that way, you can have duress passwords. Truecrypt supports hidden archives, where entering the fake password unlocks a different encrypted folder with different files. The same thing thing is true on some "secure photo" apps for phones. For a phone, you would have a password that bricks the phone after a certain time limit, like 24 hours. But appears to work fine for the moment.
Murder rate is like 25x less, and even less common for strangers. (Though like half of stranger murders are during robbery, so yea, just do what you're told)
I was just joking about the dumb one shooting you, though I think any mugger would be pretty pissed if you rattle off a long gibberish password rather than "password1."
They could take a video.
Thought personally, not living in the US, just the thought of being robbed is like science fiction to me. And it's not like I live in a great country, but things like this just almost never happen here. Gas stations and convenience stores get robbed sometimes, your apartment might be broken into, but someone on the street robbing you? I don't know a single person this had happened to.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124155/
Well, in most of the US, 43 out of 50 states, 5-10% of the civilian population could also be "well armed", and outside of (still) high crime areas like Chicago I think this sort of crime is much less common, and as noted by dvirsky the crime rates in general have been dropping for decades, although that's almost certainly more due to demographics than anything else (i.e. the population of young men).
My vision of a "sane society" is one where I don't necessarily bother with a sensor, although the data from one would certainly be neat, but one in which during a moment's inattention from the one with the gun, or when they stupidly ask me to empty my pockets, I draw my 1911 and give them some .45 ACP love instead of my can't lock in the first place feature phone etc. Assuming my situational awareness was so poor I hadn't started avoiding letting them get so close in the first place, a skill honed in the dozen years I lived as an unarmed pedestrian in the Boston area, yuck.
Before anyone goes off on an "oh, you're so deliciously macho" tangent, while you have to judge each incident by itself, statistically, resisting a criminal assault results in much better outcomes. If you live in Silicon Valley, well, it sucks to be you (even if this isn't your sort of thing, as it is nationwide for the 90-95% of the population who don't legally carry concealed, you don't benefit from herd immunity).
But I'm quite happy to carry one of the greatest legacies of John Moses Browning, and I marvel at how mature this technology is, where century old designs like the the Mauser 1898 rifle and the 1911 handgun are entirely competitive with the shiny new stuff, albeit maybe not quite as easy and inexpensive to manufacture or maintain.
I'd be willing to wager that simply passively handing over your wallet and phone, by a wide margin, results in better outcomes than trying to draw a weapon on a guy jacked up on adrenalin with his finger on the trigger pointed at you.
Anybody so stupid to risk a felony conviction on something so low-value as mugging someone, is probably stupid enough to pull the trigger if startled.
But I've read of accounts where citizens did things that struck us serious self-defense types as really stupid, but prevailed, and I don't judge them because I wasn't there and they were right, even if the risk struck us as too great.
Here, I'm imagining a scenario where my gun, which just happens to rest over my right back pocket where my wallet might be, wouldn't even visible to the criminals until they've got about 2-3 tenths of a second to respond, ideally where I'd also start moving laterally. And if it's night, I'd be wearing body armor (yeah, I'm paranoid :-), so even his being "stupid enough to pull the trigger" if he can manage to do so might not be the end of the world.
But it all comes down to your judgement of the situation, your luck, etc. ... and as many people have told me, you make your own luck as it were. Which circles back to what the statisticians discovered.
Honestly, one of the more astute things you mentioned was not getting into this situation in the first place, "Assuming my situational awareness was so poor I hadn't started avoiding letting them get so close in the first place," - I take full responsibility for getting mugged - it was after dark, on a deserted sidewalk - and my lack of situational awareness, directly led to the miscreants getting close enough to draw down on me and relieve me of my possessions.
I lived in a much rougher part of Oakland (17th and the lake, in 98-99) for 2 1/2 years, and never once came close to being on the receiving end of a crime, because I was always hyper aware of my environment. But, you get sloppy on the peninsula, and look what happens...
I've certainly felt vastly more calm (whether or not I actually did have a lower heart rate) when I had something to do.
I came away wondering if training would have allowed me to think _at all_. It sounds like such a low bar, but I seriously don't think a single thought went through my head the entire time. It was pure experience.
Except a few other times, where my remembered terror was highest in the incidents where I'd had no real response or control, and really just remember the action in cases where I did have some level of responsibility/control. But that might be a failure of memory.
And not getting into bad situations in the first place. Avoidance is the best defence.
Seriously: never handle robbery as a simple transaction -- many times the robbers do realise in their aftermath that they should in fact have killed you, and you don't want to be still around then. (I've tried to link a good post here, but it's pretty hard to Google this subject. I'm not an expert, so handle my comment with caution.)
Well I agree that you should get to as safe a location as possible immediately following a robbery, however I really would like to see the post you had in mind. Maybe I have a different percentage in mind when I read the word "many", but I'm highly skeptical that this is a common occurrence amongst robbers. Granted they tend not to be the best critical thinkers, but why would they risk adding homicide to the list of charges should they be caught?
If the late killing really often happens, which I (not based on any data or anecdata) doubt, I would think the more likely mechanism would be that they decide up front, hesitate at the moment of truth, then realize you could recognize them later, making them go to jail for a long time, and then do it anyways.
The longer an encounter with a criminal, the more likely they are to commit a worse crime: both "practical" crimes like killing you to keep you quiet and purely malicious crimes like rape and torture.
Mind you, we don't know the heart rate of the robber.
edit: what makes you think its fake?
I work for a very large wearable company so I have some knowledge of how heart rate sensors work
How did he know the timing of the peak? If he had a log it most likely simply had a time stamp of seconds. How does he correlate a random time stamp to the specific moment days after the event. Same comment about his heart rate hitting 130 when he shoves the gun into his ribs.
In general the story just feels fake.
Edit: do thieves really ask you to unlock your phone and banking apps? What app lets you send money that can't easily be traced?
> 164 at the peak seems low for the drama/gravity of the situation.
Would you think it's more reasonable to reach ~190-200? (Assuming the writer of the Medium story is ~25.) My only perspective comes from running with my fitbit, where it's pretty easy to reach 170.
The other thing that's bullshit about the graph is that there are only 4 evenly spaced data points for what sounds like a 5-10 minute encounter. Don't believe it at all, why wouldn't you show real data? Or talk more about the data if that was the point of it?
It's pretty pointless stealing a modern phone without getting it unlocked, isn't it? If anything that's a detail that someone making up a story would forget about.
> I want to experience life, I want to help people, build companies, have a family.
"Build companies". Now I do realised that some people really DO want to do that, I've just never seen it mentioned in stories like this and it was what made me a bit "uhh" about the post.
Wouldn't call BS though. But that plug at the end does seem a bit convenient.
I wrote the story first and foremost for myself, to get over what I felt was the shame of being robbed and powerless. So I started writing about my experience, what I learned and my takeaways and that process helped me forgive and move on! I shared the story because I thought it might help other people go though whatever difficult thing they are going though.
A lot of the story and a lot of details are not told in the medium post. The guys that robbed me are still at large and the investigation is still open. I hope to share more details in the future when I can!
i thought that the note about emozia was relevant to the story - since I don't think a lot of people in the general population wear custom hr sensors and analyze data coming from them. This was a post on medium. But it seems that the note bothered some people and distracted from the point of the story so I edited it out.
The case that I wanted to make in the article is live your life the way you want to live it, because knowing that you didn't when you run out of time is, apparently, really bad for your heart!
I hope you enjoyed the article and that it helped you in some way!
Yes - there is actually no way to purchase anything form emozia right now, which in this context is really funny/ironic.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/a-mans-fitbit-captured...
Even more traumatic, there's what Game of Thrones does to your heart rate:
https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/08/13/what-game-of-thrones...
And there are potentially life-saving applications of heart rate data, like the collaboration we're building with UCSF cardiology to detect abnormal heart rhythms:
https://mRhythmStudy.org
Even with "just" 11 million Apple Watches sold, that's about 2,400,000,000,000 heart rate measurements per year. I think that will lead to all sorts of downstream applications.
But you do not need a watch, you can detect this by yourself with simple means, today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_KZlOSOOTg
I encourage you to see the above video, it may help you or someone you know.
I went through a battery of heart tests that all turned up normal and I was diagnosed with anxiety, until years later when someone thought to test my nervous system. So yeah, I can relate.
But those heart tests even included wearing a monitor that didn't tell them anything useful other than that it was elevated at times... but not that there was a real physiological underlying cause beyond simple anxiety. Not sure they'd put any more interest in a Fitbit's data.
And yeah if it's low blood pressure-related that's hard to show them, since it changes so much and will be different in the doc's office than normal, and because there's no real way to do continuous BP monitoring the way you can with heart rate. Luckily in my case there's a simple test you can do at home or in a doctor's office to see the BP drop quickly.
The autonomic problems also cause periodic drops in blood pressure so I take a medication for that, but also have weird treatments for it like a high-salt diet and compression stockings I wear very day. I also take an ADD med for the cognitive impairment that comes along with drops in blood pressure.
I also have major on-going fatigue and gastrointestinal issues related to the autonomic problems (turns out your autonomic nervous system runs EVERYthing), and I'm about to be tested for food sensitivities to see if changing my diet might help those.
If I felt it was getting serious I’d look into a specialized device that can make it even more visible, letting me go to a doctor without awkwardness.
So far my arrhythmia seems like more or less episodical PVC though, if I interpret Wikipedia correctly. Happens reliably only during mentally / emotionally pressing moments, up to a beat every few seconds on bad days. Noticed that mild cardio, like jogging in place, helps ‘warm up’ the heart (feels cold during the episodes somehow).
https://np.reddit.com/r/fitbit/comments/445ppj/hr_reading_co...
The reason? She was pregnant.
That being said, I don't think (il)legality would have a direct impact on how easy is to obtain a gun in certain parts of the world (say Brasil).
That's true. I also think that it's likely that a gun is a better defence against mugging than is, say, a knife or one's fists. A small woman can shoot a large attacker, when her fists aren't going to be much use and a knife wound may not stop him until after he's already killed her. Having a gun doesn't mean that one will be able to draw and use it, of course; indeed, one may just end up giving one's attackers another weapon.
But I think the odds are better armed than unarmed.
It's not exactly common in the US though.
A guy who is about to surprise his girlfriend with a wedding proposal gets arrested because the police, with its newfound data-sink into Apple's tech stack and wearables, made legal by enhanced fear over domestic terrorism combined with a lack of public interest in privacy rights, had an illegal-behavior-trigger set to a similar heart rate spike and circumstantial behavior pattern. Since he kept his wedding plans to himself, he has no way to prove his story, and he's imprisoned along with actual potential terrorists who the feds have entrapped into collecting bomb materials or spying on high value targets. The girlfriend gets hit in an actual mass shooting soon after (since they've incrementally risen in frequency to once every few weeks), and the boyfriend is implicated and later convicted with a death sentence. Twenty years later, on the eve of his execution, a new law is passed that exonerates anyone who was convicted based on circumstantial statistical correlations - but a last minute push to the prison's e-mail and news alert apps introduces a bug that delays updates for 24 hours.
Now if only I were a writer...
American heart association website says 200 beats per minute is the average maximum for 20 -30 year old people. I'd assume the heart rate to reach that maximum during such intense situations.
I'm a marketer. So yes, the plug at the end makes me really suspicious about the authenticity of the story.
I'm thirty years old, and I feel like if I was shot dead for some pointless reason like my ancient Moto G phone and whatever pittance of money I had on me, I'd not feel bad about it at all. I'm not currently working because I've had some health problems over the past year, getting back into work is an impossible maze of we'll-call-you-backs, send-us-your-CV-and-we'll-get-back-to-yous, we'll-keep-you-on-files, jobs with hundreds of applications, waiting for emails and calls that never come.
I feel like I'm a person too far in this part of the world, like there are too many people for the resources available and all I'm doing is taking up space, a sack of meat using up resources and contributing nothing. My dreams are modest - a minimum wage job and a small, private place to live - and yet they seem unattainable. Getting myself killed wouldn't bring any regrets for me, I wouldn't regret that I never got to live out my dreams, because I don't really have any. Killing me would free up some space for someone more worthwhile to take my space in the world.
I'm not actually anything - I don't have a role in the world, I'm just trying to survive and make enough money to live, and I don't even know why I want to stay alive. I honestly wish this would happen to me.
You talk of feeling valueless within the context of industrialised society.
There is a rather huge amount of world beyond the horizon, and many different ways of living.
As someone who has come face to face with their own mortality in a few ways (some slow and creeping, some "oh shit I'm about to die"), and has also shared a similar perspective to yours in the past - there's something about being faced with the actual prospect of imminent death beyond your control that adjusts your perspective more than you can fathom.
Either way - chin up, there's a lot more life to work and being "a functioning member of the economy". If you feel you're at rock bottom, then remember it can only get better.
My aim, long-term, was always to lead a simple and frugal life rather than to try and amass as much wealth as possible. A small home, a place to grow food, a modest income from various bits-and-bobs of work.
But to do that, you need some money to start you out and that's where I'm failing. I'm out of the running for any professional jobs because of the break in employment and the competition for entry-level jobs is such that any slight gap in your employment history means you just get a "we'll call you back".
Having had health issues and a gap in employment history seems to mean I am no longer a useful or valid member of society. I wish I had died last year, so I wouldn't be wasting everyone's time and space.
Useful doesn't equate to validity - and the fact that you're able to think in such empathic terms suggests that you are more useful than you might think.
Also, plenty of employers won't look at a gap and rule you out - big, autocratic miserable places will, but smaller shops usually care more about humans as people, and you might have more luck.
You based in the uk? What sort of sysadmin/security experience have you got?
It's a pretty standard Linux sysadmin skillset - we were a LAMP CentOS shop primarily, we virtualised with OpenVZ and subsequently VMWare, nothing too out-of-the-ordinary, just general solid administration skills.
Chin up though, as glib as it sounds - being dead never solved anything for anybody, and sometimes it takes finding yourself in a really shitty, despairing place to see the way forwards. You'll make it, no matter how grim it looks today.
No, because you are a unique human being with your own unique value (yes, just like every other human being). Those aren't empty words: you're worth something.
Will update if I hear back.