(Photo: Hashgram)

Leave it to the NYPD to make an Android phone useful for more than countless Snapchats. More than 400 smartphones have been distributed to officers since last summer as part of a pilot program to make it easier for them to access police data on-the-go, reports the New York Times.

Despite the fact the phones can’t make or receive calls, it can quickly access a trove of helpful information, like arrest records and surveillance video from nearby buildings. The phones are a better alternative for the officers who currently have to use their slow-loading in-car computers or communicate with dispatchers to find similar information.

The phones' instant access to detailed data provides a fuller picture of the suspect at hand thus making it harder for criminals to lie, said Officer Tom Donaldson to the Times:

“I tell them, ‘I’m going to see your picture,’ ” the officer said. “They don’t realize we have this technology. They can’t tell me a lie because I know everything.”

Imagine how cocky he is at trivia night.

When you know, you know.

Here's an important cultural milestone for online dating: a digital Bonnie and Clyde! The San Mateo County Times reports it was an "online romance" that led to a recent pair of local robberies. Ah, l'amour.

According to the Times: 

"Just a few weeks after a couple met online and started dating they allegedly robbed two people at gunpoint in San Mateo.

Prosecutors say David Charles Cooper, 18, carried out the robberies while his girlfriend Keyana Deseriee McLish, 19, drove the getaway car: a red Honda Accord."

See, don't you feel so much better about telling your great aunt you met your current boyfriend on Plenty of Fish?

A "sandwich." (Photo: Hashgram)

Gangs may soon join teens in the “totally over Facebook” collective. The NYPD announced yesterday that it has arrested 63 members from three East Harlem gangs, after they left a trail of evidence boasting about their exploints online.

Authorities said the members—all men, 16 to 25—are responsible for 30 non-fatal shootings in the neighborhood since 2009. When using Facebook to plan their hits, they often used slang words. For example, guns were identified as “biscuit” or “clickety,” while ammunition were often labeled as “sea shellz" and "gas."

A gang member would post a status update saying they needed “electricity for the 2 and 5 train" if their .25-caliber pistol was low on ammo. They also bestowed East Harlem with the quaint nickname of “New Iraq.”

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly credited his troops' social media surveillance with stopping the violence:

'Social media remains a double-edged sword in our crime fighting strategies. It is used by crew members to brag about past crimes, taunt rivals, and incite violence,' he said.  'On the other hand, we use social media to document past crimes and intercept new ones being talked about openly by crew members on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.'

Imagine how low crime stats could dip if the NYPD gets Facebook Home.

(Photo: Apple)

Apple's iPad is a magnificent tool that can be used for education, entertainment and communication. It has revolutionized the way we interact with computers. It is not, however, a weapon.

The Staten Island Advance reports that Tottenville firefighter Eric Bischoff was arrested on Monday for allegedly hitting his wife over the head twice with an iPad. The two were arguing over a photo Mr. Bischoff's wife had just uploaded to the Internet, but the police declined to describe the image's content.

Let this be a word of warning: just because you don't agree with your significant other over a Reddit picture doesn't mean you can assault them with electronic devices.

Mr. Bischoff told The Advance, "I pleaded innocent in court, and I categorically deny the charges against me."

(h/t Gothamist)

Onswipe’s office. (Photo: Michelle Young, Untapped Cities)

A few weeks ago, Betabeat caught wind of a handful of attempted robberies that had taken place at startup offices around the Flatiron area. On a visit to his office, Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste told us that a few men who looked to be in their early 20s had come to Onswipe claiming to be soliciting money for a sports team. Instead, they attempted to steal some of the company's iPads.

According to a police report filed by Onswipe and obtained by Betabeat, three men entered Onswipe's offices on West 14th Street on Thursday, July 26 at 4:40 p.m.

Onswipe's office is essentially one big loft-like space, with a few conference rooms scattered around the periphery. The company has iPads displaying various websites that employ the Onswipe experience lined up in the reception area. According to the report, the alleged thieves lifted four iPads and attempted to conceal them before an office manager asked for them back. The thieves returned them and left. According to the report, one suspect, a 19-year-old male, was arrested a few weeks later on August 15.

Onswipe isn't the only startup office in the area to be hit with an attempted robbery. Shelby.TV also experienced a similar issue. Were these robbers watching TechStars or something?

"From what I know of the situation, they came in, said they were raising money for their football team or something, and tried to look around quite a bit," Shelby CEO Reece Pacheco told Betabeat. "Luckily my team is very alert and just said 'not interested' and sent them on their way before they were able to do anything."

Mr. Pacheco said that those at Shelby believe the perps to be the same ones who hit Onswipe. "They came to our office the same day that they hit up the seventh and eighth floors in our building," he told us. "And one of the people on those floors knew of them because of a connection to Onswipe."

The attempted robberies seem particularly noteworthy in light of recent escapades by Silicon Swindler Shirley Hornstein, who duped Valleyites in part by relying on the tech scene's trusting and collaborative atmosphere. It's convenient to think of Startupland as a happy, shiny place where people focus on iterating their butts off, slinging business cards as effortlessly as they throw back mugs of Lost Tribes beer. But there's a fine line between being open and being gullible. Luckily, both Onswipe and Shelby were able to successfully protect their businesses from what could have potentially turned out to be thousands of dollars in property loss.

Has your NYC office been the target of an attempted robbery? Let us know: tips[at]betabeat[dot]com.

Hackers having fun, unlike Sam Yin.

Manhattan's district attorney has slapped Gucci hacker Sam Chihlung Yin with up to six years in state prison for hacking the corporate network of Gucci American, Inc. In a press release from the office of Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., the D.A. noted that Mr. Yin pleaded guilty in mid-July to one felony count of computer tampering in the first degree and 10 felony counts of "criminal possession of computer related material."

Mr. Vance's announcement regarding Mr. Yin's sentence included a quote from the D.A. that could be read as a none-too-veiled warning to anyone else tempted to follow the former Gucci network engineer's example:

Today, a computer hacker is going to state prison for attacking the network of his former employer, which is one of the more than 900 fashion companies based here in New York. As we have seen in many cybercrime cases, these so-called 'insiders' at companies have the ability to harm their employers, co-workers, and the company's clients, customers, and even products. This is but one example in the fight against cybercrime and our ongoing efforts to repel attacks and protect electronic systems.

Sam Yin was apparently the worst kind of disgruntled ex-employee. After he was fired from his job at Gucci he accessed a secret account he'd created while working there and began wreaking havoc on the fashion retailer's systems, shutting off off servers and in some cases deleting data. Mr. Yin then doubled down on his shenanigans by using a fake identity to somehow socially hack his way into the network and gain near total control via knowledge of administrator passwords. Mr. Yin ultimately deleted the company's email accounts, which the D.A. stated "cost Gucci hundreds of thousands of dollars in diminished productivity, restoration and remediation measures, and other expenses."

Sam Yin turns 36 tomorrow. With any luck could be out of prison before he turns 39. We suspect he'll have a hell of a time finding a new I.T. job once he's released.

Here, he made an app for you. (Image Devdsp on Flickr

Mobile devices are a brave new frontier for cyber thieves, and the BBC reports malware creators are cashing in. Citing surveys by Lookout mobile security, the BBC states that sneaky cash-snatching apps have increased from 29 to 62 percent of all smartphone malware. Users acquire the thieving bugs when they ride into your phone on the backs of seemingly innocent apps:

Kevin Mahaffey, head of technology at Lookout, said phone fraudsters were increasingly using viruses that surreptitiously added charges to a user's bill to cash in.

Over the last few months, he said, Lookout had seen fraudsters stop experimenting with ways to steal cash and move on to large scale campaigns on networks where they knew they would succeed.

Mr. Mahaffey told the BBC that thieves are seeking "a repeatable, scalable" method for acquiring more money and once they have it, "they try to get as big as possible."

Lookout calls these kinds of apps "Crimeware" and says at the moment crimeware is becoming a big problem in Russia, China and India.

As if seeding phones with viruses that steal money isn't bad enough, though, the BBC's report concludes that crimeware could also help "artificially inflate the popularity of" advertisements or even a song, ultimately sending more money into the cyber-thieves' pockets.

So besides being a crime against all music, the next "Friday" could also end up secretly enriching the Russian mafia.

Don't do this.

Around 9 a.m. Friday 53-year-old Jeffrey Johnson, a former accessories designer with Hazan Imports, shot and killed a 41-year-old former co-worker. Reports from the scene indicate the shooter was confronted by police outside the Empire State Building and was killed when he opened fire. At least nine others were injured during the shootout.

Every smartphone owner in the vicinity began tweeting about the drama, many uploading photos taken on the fly--to Twitter and, perhaps more strangely, Instagram.

Instagram even posted a blog entry highlighting some of the photos taken at ground level and from offices several stories above the scene. Some of the photos circulating online, including those on Instagram, were gruesome. One particularly disturbing shot, evidently taken from high above the scene, showed a partially nude body surrounded by police personnel, lying in a pool of blood.

Posting witnesses' and bystanders' amateur smartphone pics of unfolding and newsworthy events may by now seem encoded in Twitter's DNA. Although this exchange between Anil Dash and Jeff Jarvis proves not everyone is willing to accept such horrible content. After Mr. Jarvis tweeted a link to a photo (warning: it is a graphic photo) taken by a Twitter user with the pungent handle @yoassman, Mr. Dash objected that there was no warning about the nature of the image.

But there's something slightly surreal about uploading your hastily-shot iPhone pic of a bloody white sheet over a mysterious shape on the sidewalk to Instagram. More than Twitter and many other social media networks, Instagram is built upon a kind of Silicon Valley-born rosy worldview that seeks to filter our world, lift us for a moment out of the mundane. Instagram is where you post your child's senior prom pics and photos of your artfully-rendered fruit salad. It has built its reputation with forced nostalgia, with manufactured hipness. Instagram wistfully washes hasty iPhone snaps with a pleasant sense of time gone by. There would be something comic about the concept of crime scene photos on Instagram if the reality wasn't so horrific.

Instagram seems to have signaled they want it both ways: to let us prettify memories as if we're living in a hazy, bygone era but also have a Tahrir Square news moment in the spotlight.

On Sunday the Times published the melancholy and disturbing tale of former dot-com millionaire Jennifer Sultan, who is sitting at Rikers Island, facing the prospect of years in prison.

Jennifer Sultan's name is not familiar to anyone in tech today, but at one time she and her boyfriend Adam Cohen were sitting atop a small, forward-looking, valuable startup called Live Online. Ms. Sultan and Mr. Cohen sold Live Online in 2000 for $70 million. They rented a house in the Hamptons. They bought a big loft not far from Fifth Avenue.  But that was 12 years ago. Now? The Times reports:

Now, a little more than a decade later, Ms. Sultan is bankrupt and sitting in a jail cell, unable to pull together $85,000 for bail. If convicted, she faces 15 years to life in prison on charges of selling prescription painkillers to an undercover police officer and of trying to sell a .357 Magnum to the man accused of being the ringleader.

Her life has in some ways followed the arc of her times, with even more extreme swings.

Times writer Russ Buettner notes that Jennifer Sultan "rode the euphoria of the late-1990s" tech boom to cashing in at 25, but that bubble burst in an epic way and her apparent good fortune went along with it. She and Mr. Cohen tried out new tech ventures but they ended in fractured business relationships. The couple attempted to maintain their lifestyle, but bills began to mount and eventually they were faced with foreclosures, evictions and bankruptcy. Business associates told the Times they were behaving "strangely."

The Times also reported that Mr. Cohen told a judge in bankruptcy court the couple lived "like animals" unable to "provide for ourselves." Now that Ms. Sultan is in jail, she and Mr. Cohen also face contempt charges in bankruptcy court, where they have to represent themselves, as their attorneys quit.

The entire story may read like a big bucket of cold, dirty water on everyone TED-Talking their way to the party now, but it's doubtful anyone will take note. That is until their own millions start to wear thin.

(flickr.com/smemon)

Every savvy Facebooker knows that bragging about your misdeeds on the mostly-public social networking site is a huge no-no, but perhaps a lesser-known adage is this one: Don't accept friend requests from strangers, especially if they look like they might spend their days fighting crime for a living.

The New York Daily News reported yesterday that a cluster of NYPD cops nailed one of the city's worst burgling crews by friending them on Facebook and tracking their status updates for details about potential robberies.

Says the Daily News:

Officer Michael Rodrigues gleaned clues from the Facebook walls of members of the Brower Boys, a gang of teenagers who stole electronics from apartments and sold them to bodegas and other stores, authorities said Wednesday. The intel allowed police to trail the teens and arrest them immediately after they committed the crimes, officials said.

When the cops saw one of the members post "it's break-in day on the avenue," they set up their cameras and recorded two of the members breaking into an apartment, then arrested them.

The Wire: now with Mark Zuckerberg.