Camera thieves meet their match

Hayes, the head of learning and development at a Melbourne firm, was in Canberra on business three years ago. He was walking down the street carrying his camera in a day pack that was attached to another bag, nevertheless within about 20 seconds of him walking, he realised his camera bag was missing.

"There was no recourse, there was no insurance – right away after the camera was stolen within half an hour I was down at the local police station in Canberra reporting it missing when all is said and done on, however after that it was a matter of getting over it," he said in a phone interview.

He said his site was a very database-intensive application however running it online, in the "cloud",  provided a seamless experience. Burns said he now has multiple web crawlers being run by his community and on Amazon's cloud-computing architecture.

The site doesn't work with stolen mobile phones because there are no phones that store their serial number in photos, Burns said.

Rather than advising thieves of a loophole, it more indicates how far behind the legal system has fallen in terms of relating to new innovation.