Mistaken Identity

Man, this is the sort of thing that only happens to interesting newspaper columnist! So, the setup- Some guy, somewhere, bought a webcam and pointed it out of his front window, looking out at his cul-de-sac. Then he installed some software so that when it detects motion, it saves four frames as JPG files and emails them to himself at work and at home.

Okay, so, ready for the punchline? He mistyped his home email address and all of the pictures came to me instead. So, starting at 10pm on Sunday, I started receiving a steady stream of pictures, until eventually there were 352 messages in my inbox.

Just for kicks, my friends and I tried to see if we could find the guy who was sending these. Noel used the IP address from the emails to geolocate him in Floral Park, NY.

IP Address Country Region City ISP 167.206.4.196 UNITED STATES US NEW YORK FLORAL PARK CABLEVISION

Based on the fact that his emails copied "robert_lerner@medco.com", Derek suggested looking up all the Robert Lerners in New York. And sure enough, there's one in Floral Park! But a satellite map of his house doesn't look at all like the pictures. Maybe google has his work address listed instead?


Jeff at work noticed that, in the first set of images, at night, you can see a reflection off of the window pane, of someone in the room with the camera! But it's hard to make out enough to determine gender, let alone facial features.




My next guess was that he does live at the address Google showed, but was setting the camera up for someone else... But then by 3pm or so the next day, he either unplugged the camera or fixed the typo, because the pictures stopped. Oh well, I was getting tired of the mystery anyway. So the next question is, if I email this guy, what should I say?


PS - just for kicks, click this image to watch a time-lapse version of all 352 images. I made it using two commands in DOS. Hurray for imagemagick!