www.lighterthief.org

Tracking stolen lighters around the world...

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Thoughts

These are just some random notes at the moment, made when I think of them. I think that this project is quite an interesting social experiment; if you have comments, please contact me.

Adding the means to identify lighters will also change the system in some way.

• people will treat the lighters differently
• maybe it would become a competition to try and steal the lighter
• could encourage people to try and hold onto their lighter more than usual

Also, it is too easy to spoof the system if you want to mess things up. skew. but maybe easy to spot?

• someone wanting to just mess around could guess at numbers and then choose where the lighter has been. This has been minimized, by using a non-reversible mapping between ids on the labels and those shown on the site. Also, more redundancy could be added to the numbers (like VISA numbers) extent - by using VISA type card numbers (lots of redundancy).
  I have put some systems in place to make it more difficult to guess numbers, but someone with enough intent is always going to be able to break a system like this.
• The other big problem is that if people get into competition with each other, it is so easy to just pretend you've got the lighter again - after all, you already know the id. I don't imagine it would be that much fun though. Surely more fun to actually steal the lighter, then let your mate know via the website.

Predictions

I think that there is going to be quite a lot of movement around the world, but its anyone's guess really. Last year I managed to trace a lighter back 3 stages, Japan -> Edinburgh -> Cambridge. Then within days I lost it. I'm hoping that this website is going to answer that question for me.

Results

As I write this (14/04/2003), 20% of lighters taken to ATP have been registered at least once. I think thats pretty good going for only 4 days after the event. Going from the messages that people are leaving, it seems that some people may not understand the aims of the project, and just think its nice I gave them a lighter. This will change when they lose it, and they discover that they can track where it is in the world (or is it only me that finds this interesting?). Also it seems a lot of people want to give their lighters away to people in (or going to) cool places.

It was an interesting enough social experiment just giving lighters away at ATP. Very few people could just accept one, they were sure there was some kind of catch. I suppose this is one result of living in a capitalist world. Bring on the gift economy. Hiding lighters in nooks and crannies seemed to work (at least they weren't there when I got back), and throwing them to people as I ran past didn't give them time to question!

Update. Now its the 22/05/2003. 40% of the ATP lighters are registered (40 days after the event). You can see from the stats page that people are twice as likely to give their lighter to someone else than have it stolen. This could be because I gave a lot away at ATP, rather than lost them through stealing. So I think that people are carrying on that vibe, and passing them on when a good opportunity arises. I'm hoping that after a while the story will end as people just steal the lighter from the current owner. Either that or I'll have to change the URL to lightergifting.org

So far I'm right about lighter movement around the world, but probably for the wrong reasons. If you're looking to give a lighter away and you like the system - you'll give it to someone going to a cool place. One to watch is lighter 5064. This was an ATP lighter, taken to the states, but then stolen by galaxia. It all depends whether galaxia wants to keep the lighter!