"Camden CID is appealing for witnesses who saw the group of between three and five men (dressed as police officers - my insert) in the area around St Pancras Way at approximately 9pm."

I imagine anyone who was hanging around St. Pancras Way at nine o'clock that evening - on seeing a group of three-to-five "police officers" would, once their jaw was recovered from the pavement, have legged it sharpish.

So were the Coppers on the roof looking for a large jolly Man in a Bright red suit with a big white beard then?

Raiders use roof ruse to dupe data dudes? If you're going to alliterate, do it in style...

If they put the effort in with the uniforms and violent robbery, why would they steal motherboards. An expensive server board complete with CPU(s) and RAM would be hard to resell for a good price even if it wasn't stolen. Selling a quantity identical to those stolen would attract a load of attention, I think they were after the data or at an outside bet carrying out a physical DOS following a blackmail type scheme.

If betting firms are reported to be paying 10s of thousands in cash for a threat of downtime then the Xmas period could be the same for small but big Internet retailers.

Anyway, motherboards were not the reason to run the heist, they would have gone to a Dabs/other warehouse for that.

Unconditional obedience to a uniform means that people will be able to use that uniform in malicious ways.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, particularly if the plan to have most of the policing done from massive central stations and only a few local cops who knock off at 8 PM nearby - how easy do you think it'd be to break into one of those local copshops, steal the uniforms there (because NO ONE wears their uniform home if they can help it), and abuse the uniform's authority?

I read that as "Police launch hunt for bogus boobies".

The mind... boggled.

Not the BOFH and PFY surely.

You better do (unconditional obedience). Might save your life.

The rogue ones only want your mainboards, the real ones, if not obeyed, might want your life (Jean Charles de Menezes, anyone).

What? They dismantled equipment for the motherboards? They aren't something that fail so often that a data centre would need to keep many if any spares on site.

There were thefts of memory from computers years ago, but not now. It simply isn't worth it.

You really have NO idea of what a "police state" is do you?

It is NOT a state where people obey the police (or even their impostures).

It IS where the police can be the ones setting the laws, determining guilt, and executing punishments - with no legal recourse.

Even as policed as the UK is, that is quite not the case, as recent payouts by the Met and UK governments for police transgressions have proven. In a true police state, the officers that shot Menezes wouldn't have even undergone an investigation. In fact, in a real police state his shooting never would have made it into the papers or TV newscasts, as the police would have detained all the media and confiscated all cameras.

In historical terms, both the US and the UK are remarkably free from police malfeasance...for proof, try visiting North Korea or Iran or even Russia right now and criticizing the police or government. Go ahead, and tell us about it when you get out of jail in 15 years...

Robert

"I read that as "Police launch hunt for bogus boobies"."

You are not alone. I envisaged a story about stolen breast implants.

If the breast implants had been made by IBM, they would be big blue bogus boobies.

If IBM hired Laurent Garnier to make counterfeit breast implants, they would be big blue bogus boogie-woogie boobies.

And if the police caught up with them, the headline would be "Bobbies bust big blue bogus boogie-woogie boobie bandits".

It seems like every host/colocation/dedicated server provider has a vid or flash animation banging on about how good the security at their data centres are but this obviously means that they are not good enouigh!

I once *seriously* pissed off the people at the data center in Vauxhall (you know who you are) when a sales director was trying to pitch more service at us after the company had been annoyingly slow in delivering what we needed (nothing evil, the usual bureaucratic nonsense).

In the middle of an increasingly boring meeting he decided to use me to sell for him by asking what I thought of their data centre as I'd been there the week before. When I agreed with him even my line manager woke up because it's not my habit to be complimentary, so they knew something was coming (I have a bit of a reputation for pranks anyway).

By pure chance I had amused myself that day by signing in as Fred Flintstone because nobody bothered to check ID, and my colleague had nicely played along by not even blinking and just signing his name.

So I mention this, the guy goes bright red and most of my colleagues fall over the table laughing (my only defence is that the guy was seriously irritating and had invited himself so - to me - he was fair game). An hour later I get a call from the guys at the hosting company asking what the hell I've been up to (we had quite a good working relation, just some directors were idiots).

On enquiring why, he told me that the whole club of directors had just gone into session and he'd heard my name and my company be uttered a few times, loudly, in what appeared to be a serious bollocking :-). When I told them it emerged we shared a dislike for that sales director, and I heard later they didn't exactly let him forget this :-).

Next time they DID check ID, of course, but I know from experience that it'll wear off. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to walk in and out of the London Stock Exchange building for 2 weeks without showing a badge either. It's a bad habit, I admit, a sort of social engineering for beginners. It's not hard to do at all once you've worked out your fallback strategy (with the LSE I had the badge actually in my pocket, I was just checking how long I could get away with 'forgetting' it).

Note: all of this was quite a few years ago. They *may* have learned eventually, and it's worth noting that at Kings Cross there appears to have been threats of violence (it seems unlikely people allow themselves to be tied up otherwise). I personally wouldn't risk my skin for some overinsured piece of kit either, and if nobody thought of installing a silent alarm trigger I would want to have a word with the security manager there afterwards..

What amuses me, though, that this has happened in the city of CCTV and nobody seems to have a clear picture of the bad bogus bobbies.

Now, does anyone know where the Paris Hilton film studio is?..

it is generally Uniboard modules they are after. these are motherboards for big Suns that cost many, many bucks. i had an ex-thief once describe to me in incredible detail the inside of a Sun rack - frightening. the motherboards have nice telephone-like handles that geeks use to hotplug and robbers use to identify and blag very quickly.

I'm sure that much of this stuff goes off-shore and is stolen to order. Most high-end kit is put on maintenance contracts and thus serial numbers etc are audited, so companies like Sun will know if some kit reported stolen appears anywhere else.

The lesson is to have a proper asset registry, and thus be able to report accurately what is stolen, not sure whether putting up signs to that effect would prevent theft?

Although the kit I use at work is fairly ordinary (1U servers, core2duo, 8GB ram, 750G or 1TB drives * 4), we record serial numbers of chassis + motherboard + drives, the ether macs, etc etc. We do similar things for laptops too.

just look for the special blue hatband. ;)

Call me Mr Paranoid but there seems to be a hugely profitable market for data these days, the missing child benefit disks being my point. Stolen motherboards? Sorry, just doesn't cut it..

Makes me wonder who is doing the buying but what worries me more is who is doing the selling? Who is to say your email provider isn't having 'accidents' that don't get found out and are worth millions?

Data can be worth a lot of money never mind the used equipment and it's impossible to trace unlike hardware. You can also sell it to more than one buyer it's a good earner. No doubt they can sell the equipment but the data is the real reason to stick up a data center.

...who read it "they gang banged motherboards" ? oO

"It IS where the police can be the ones setting the laws, determining guilt, and executing punishments - with no legal recourse".

You mean like the one that the British Government maintained for over 30 years in six counties of Ireland?

"In fact, in a real police state his shooting never would have made it into the papers or TV newscasts, as the police would have detained all the media and confiscated all cameras".

See above comment.

Tangential IT angle- controling the media is one of the first steps in establishment of a police state. To quote Patrick Henry:

"I disagree utterly with what you say, but will fight to the death for your right to say it".

The right to fight is an integral part of a free society - and is one that is removed when the state controls the media and judicial process (as it did in Ireland under the Special Powers Act). Oh, and when it removes your right to own a firearm- but that's a whole other issue.

""I disagree utterly with what you say, but will fight to the death for your right to say it"."

I thought that was Descarte...

Yes, most probably mainboards out of high-end server. With say 4 cpus and 64Gb memory they fetch £200K new. They'd definitely have to export them tho, the UK market has a limited population of buyers who would all inventory the serial nos.

Oh, and @anonymous coward, if you think NI was a police state, you're deluding yourself - how many public enquiries into police methods did they hold in China or Korea last year? And as for the right to bear arms, you're in the wrong continent. We grew out of such childish things long ago in the UK.

I think an industry insider would be a more likely recipient of these goods. So, who, in the industry, would need a whole lot of enterprise-class and Data-Center-ready hardware?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/09/microsoft_mega_data_center/

And, as BillG said just before he "bought out" CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet;

"Oh, I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks!"

Or maybe when these people get their insurance money, and buy their new hardware, they'll be forced into MS Server 2008 .. which will drive them to Vista desktops .. a lure to drag up new OS sales through hardware acquisition, by shortening the hardware lifecycle?

I know MS are involved here somewhere ... its cunning plan .. Baldrick-cunning ..

That's a new one one report a bent cop to another cop !

As if , all you need is to show them is a mirror and they would be able to look directly at all the crooked and bent cops in the eye !

"I disagree utterly with what you say, but will fight to the death for your right to say it"

It was actually Evelyn Beatrice Hall expressing Voltaire's opinion on Claude Adrien Helvétius.

I just registered to point that out.

"""I disagree utterly with what you say, but will fight to the death for your right to say it"."

I thought that was Descarte..."

And I thought it was Voltaire that originated it

Well, "service interruption" is one way of putting it!. Like Ronnie Biggs and "the Great Train Service Interruption."

(No Virgin jokes please)

This could have been a far better story if all those eyesight errors were actually right... Missing Boobies and Gang-banging motherboards? Its genius

I've once had to give visitor passes back to security - who were asleep at the desk! Had to wake them up when we got there too... this was about 4 years ago mind.

"It IS where the police can be the ones setting the laws, determining guilt, and executing punishments - with no legal recourse."

Already, roads closed for hours on end when a few minutes would suffice.

Road blocks being set up several streets ahead of an incident, and people being unnecessarily refused access to those streets even though they were unaffected by the incident.

In Edmonton they closed a whole area for THREE DAYS when again a couple of hours should have been enough.

The police have far too many powers and are widely abusing them by closing roads off willy nilly and not even bothering to think about the consequences.

And that's even before they get issued with tasers ready to shoot everybody who crosses the road other than at a pedestrian crossing.

This may become extra expensive of any of those boxes are running OEM-licensed versions of MS (ahem) Servers. Replace motherboard? Sorry your OEM LICENSE is no longer valid. Buy a new one (for the correct amount of users, add one user per application), and start your reinstall.

Let's hope for the victims (those owning the computers) they were running a real OS like FreeBSD, Solaris, or Gnu T^HHurd, and not Microstop Swindle 2003.

//Svein

Living in Tottenham myself, I find the idea of Edmonton being closed off for long periods of time quite pleasing. ;)

As someone who grew up in said police state, with British Rifles pointing at me every day on the way to and from school I can confirm that N.Ireland was a police state- . though I have been pleasantly surprised at the changes wrought in the past 28 years.

As for the wrong continent- I prefer to think that I am now on the right continent, being now a resident of the Great State of Texas. Over here, Gun Control means hitting your target.

Haha. I know exactly which hosting company you mean. I used to work as a contractor for them on a project for which they didn't have the skill sets in house to achieve, yet they ran projects for other large corporates promising to provide the exact same skill sets which they couldn't look after in-house due to the fact that they'd made all their key staff redundant!

I heard today that it's only a single customer that was affected, which makes me think more and more like this was organised crime against a specific company and not a robbery for the sake of it.

"Over here, Gun Control means hitting your target."

Yes. Shame it doesn't mean identifying it as friend or foe first.

"Living in Tottenham myself, I find the idea of Edmonton being closed off for long periods of time quite pleasing. ;)"

Not if your coming through Edmonton on your way home when they close it off -- three days you'd have to live off fried chicken...