March 10, 2004

Idea to track a stolen laptop. Using a customized default browser homepage, no less. I thought this might interest some monkeys. Run it up the old flagpole, etc. "The computer would, in effect, send a beacon back to its owner after being stolen." Interesting. Via kottke
posted by Nostrildamus 20 years ago
  • Easily circumvented. Only effective if action is carried out before someone half savvy gets their hand on it.
  • I don't think this is that effective. Is that hit on a particular website enough proof to actually get a subponea anyway? What is the theief connects at some WiFi hotspot or another is a commercial location? The idea quickly falls apart I think. Just too many assumptions for me. There has to be a better way to implement the same thing.
  • Kinda naive, I think. I'm not a laptop thief, but I wouldn't connect it to any network until after it's been reformatted. Anything that relies on software to work is going to be ineffective unless it's something that( and I'm doing some hand-waving crazy talk here) lives in the boot-sector. Until you can cram a GPS transmitter into your laptop, it's all snake oil.
  • Yeah exactly, just putting a GPS transmitter on it would be as good an idea as any. That makes a whole lot more sense to me - especially since the laptop is such a portable thing. Something like Lo Jack for laptops is what we really need.
  • What is the typical profile of a burglar anyway, besides what we hear through TV and rumors? I haven't seen this discussed anywhere, not even in the source article. How are we going to know what works against a thief without understanding who they are? I'm not even convinced that Thief T. Crackhead would be the one using the laptop, much less knowing how to reformat and reinstall an OS.
  • You might want to read the article about the woman with the $1M bill at WalMart. There are smart thieves, and there are really, really dumb one. No, it's not the only thing I'd do to protect a laptop, but it's one of the things I'd do. Okay, that's a bit of a fib. Specifically, it's what I'd do for my laptop if I were doing anything at all, which I'm currently not. Though it is registered with apple, so if anyone calls for service on it, I can get it back that way. But, yeah, if I went through the trouble of securing my laptop, I'd get a chain to lock it down, plus this thing, plus a chron job and, who knows, maybe something in the Open Firmware if I wanted to go super-crazy.
  • laptop security seems to be more important to me these days. might have to do with the fact that now i actually own one. i've heard of the lowjack-style software apps, but they don't seem to work if the system has been reformatted. the external dongles, keycards, and thumbprint recognition bits that are coming out now, preventing access to the system or it's files unless active and attached, are pretty cool, but unfortunately all they can do is keep someone else from yanking your info. they still get to keep your laptop. don't know if you could bypass these at boot to reformat the drive or not. if i was this guy, i'd be moving. soon. that many break-ins? damn. of course i'm from small-town middle america. what do i know about crime?
  • I remember reading about an interesting little application that acts like Lo Jack on a laptop. It hides in the system as a service, so it's transparent to the user. When connected to the internet, it will send a message to you a message with the ip address that has been assigned. From what I remember, it will provide the ip address of the proxy, if it's on a private network. Of course, this is rendered ineffective if the hard drive is swapped out or if the system is formatted.
  • boo_radley: Hand waving is the icing of the crazy talk cake.
  • After doing a little googling, there's a company called zTrace which offers a service similar to this. They claim that it's not only undetectable, but uneraseable. Replacing the hard drive would still bypass.... It's a good idea, but I don't like relying on a company for this. I'm always afraid that the company will go belly-up, or will change their privacy policies on me down the road. It would be nice if this could be integrated directly into the driver for hardware -- it could be turned on/off via command line or a little GUI application. Being integrated into the driver, it would be invisible to the user, and if the hardware device has ROM memory, it could still function as normal, even if the hard drive was swapped out.