Do bored hotel staff get curious about devices in their lost and found?
Dear Honey Stick Diary -
It looks like my decision to let sleeping Honey Sticks lie was the right thing to do. I had initially discovered that if I returned to places where sticks had been dropped, people would sometimes have turned them in. This was interesting to know. However, I found it hard to consistently follow up on this practice, as the locations were not always convenient.
So, I knew that sometimes sticks would get found and be turned in to authorities, where they would sit in a Lost and Found for some period of time. But this raised a question whose answer would be just as interesting.
This week, a Honey Stick that I had left at a pay phone in a hotel lobby back in February got activated. While I don’t collect IP addresses permanently, I do run an IP address to Domain Name conversion to find out if the user was on a public ISP or a private domain.
In the case of this stick, the domain came back clearly as the hotel’s subdomain within an ISP. (I discard the actual domain name for privacy reasons, once I determine whether or not it was a private domain belonging to the site where the stick was dropped.) So, clearly, the stick had been either turned in to, or found by, a hotel staff member. They either put it into a Lost and Found or sat on it for a month.
At about 5am, more than a month after finding it, the stick was inserted into a hotel computer connected to the internet, and the user opened almost every file on the stick. As soon as they hit the file that informed them of the project, they stopped opening files and links. They could have tried to indicate whether they were going to keep it, return it, discard it, or continue the experiment. However, all contact ceased at that point.
So, maybe I’m learning about some “statute of limitations” on hotel lost and founds, or maybe curious and impatient staff members just can’t leave these things alone.
I’ve put a few sticks in various hotels, and I think these are good locations for having them picked up by bored, transitory business people.
If you have any comments or questions about the Honey Stick Project, want to contribute, or want to set up a private test for your organization, please let me know by adding a comment, or sending an email to inquiries@honeystickproject.com
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Do bored hotel staff get curious about devices in their lost and found?
Dear Honey Stick Diary -
It looks like my decision to let sleeping Honey Sticks lie was the right thing to do. I had initially discovered that if I returned to places where sticks had been dropped, people would sometimes have turned them in. This was interesting to know. However, I found it hard to consistently follow up on this practice, as the locations were not always convenient.
So, I knew that sometimes sticks would get found and be turned in to authorities, where they would sit in a Lost and Found for some period of time. But this raised a question whose answer would be just as interesting.
This week, a Honey Stick that I had left at a pay phone in a hotel lobby back in February got activated. While I don’t collect IP addresses permanently, I do run an IP address to Domain Name conversion to find out if the user was on a public ISP or a private domain.
In the case of this stick, the domain came back clearly as the hotel’s subdomain within an ISP. (I discard the actual domain name for privacy reasons, once I determine whether or not it was a private domain belonging to the site where the stick was dropped.) So, clearly, the stick had been either turned in to, or found by, a hotel staff member. They either put it into a Lost and Found or sat on it for a month.
At about 5am, more than a month after finding it, the stick was inserted into a hotel computer connected to the internet, and the user opened almost every file on the stick. As soon as they hit the file that informed them of the project, they stopped opening files and links. They could have tried to indicate whether they were going to keep it, return it, discard it, or continue the experiment. However, all contact ceased at that point.
So, maybe I’m learning about some “statute of limitations” on hotel lost and founds, or maybe curious and impatient staff members just can’t leave these things alone.
I’ve put a few sticks in various hotels, and I think these are good locations for having them picked up by bored, transitory business people.
If you have any comments or questions about the Honey Stick Project, want to contribute, or want to set up a private test for your organization, please let me know by adding a comment, or sending an email to inquiries@honeystickproject.com