Laptop Anti-Theft Devices

mathin writes: "The NYTimes has an interesting article about laptop theft 'alarms' and services to help track down your laptop if it's swiped." Laptops are a lot like bicycles: if you have a 50-pound laptop, it doesn't need a lock.

Comments

Mine was stolen

[EnVisiCrypt]

A couple of years ago, I bought a brand new laptop. I went into a store for a couple of minutes and left my month old laptop sitting on the seat of my car, door unlocked (stupid, I know), knowing I would only be gone for a couple minutes.

When I got back home, I tried to boot up and nothing happened after the fan kicked on. After a couple of minutes of jiggling the power cord wire, I opened the case and found that my processor was stolen along with my two 64MB ram units. Someone had bothered to open it up, take the stuff, and close it again

That is definitely a situation in which tracking would not have helped.

The Information can be worth more than the laptop

[Schlemphfer]

Pogue's article had some great things to say about the technology of tracking down stolen laptops. It would have been good to make the point that, many times, the information on the laptop is worth far more than the laptop itself.

About 18 months ago Qualcomm's CEO had his laptop swiped during a conference. The laptop was thought to have all kinds of trade secrets. Losing a several-thousand dollar laptop was a trivial loss for the CEO. But shareholders were rightfully worried that Qualcomm's strategies for implementing CDMA rollout were now in the hands of rivals. To my knowledge, they never got the laptop back. And the theft was, I suspect, for the hard drive's trade secrets rather than for the actual laptop.

Re:Dude!

[EricLivingston]

Actually, I've tried it and it's EXTREMELY hard to duplicate the motions - the accelerometer inside is incredibly sensitive. I sat across from the CEO of Caveo who, right in front of me, armed the mechanism with a couple of tilts - a very simple motion password. We watched him do it a couple of times. I, and my companion, tried to duplicate that motion for several minutes and completely failed. You really don't have any idea how hard it is to duplicate exactly the motions of another's arms until you try.

The sensitivity of the angles you tilt, for instance, is something like within 1 degree, and the acceleration parameters are also extremely precise (so, for instance, if you lift the laptop an inch or two while also tilting it, this counts).

Surprisingly, it's actually NOT that difficult to duplicate your own motions - muscle memory is far more precise than I ever thought.

But, really, until you try it you can't imagine how difficult it really it to duplicate even simple motion passwords.

A few points

[Rogerborg]

1. Having an old/crap/50lbs laptop will only stop it from being stolen if there's an obviously better one sitting right next to it.
2. When the alarm goes off, what's the first thing the thief is going to do? Better hope that your laptop can survive being hurled violently to the ground.
3. If the thief doesn't throw your laptop away, are you going to chase them? If you think possession of your laptop is more important than your health, perhaps you need to evaluate why you feel that you need to carry something so valuable that it might get you killed.
4. (A little aside about human nature) According to my friends in IS, most corporate owned laptops are stolen by employees. (Pop quiz: How many corporations want to collect metrics that say how crooked their employees are? It's simply recorded as unspecified theft, or even depreciation) My current employer actually has a tacit policy that laptops pass down the food chain until they reach a dark, quiet corner, then they slip out the back door. It's actually less hassle and cost to the company than trying to protect them, or for that matter trying to sell them on. Also, having confidential files on a stolen laptop is a lot less embarassing for the IS guys than having them found on a "wiped for resale" laptop. Very cynically enterprising of them.

If you don't want your laptop stolen, don't ever let it get into a situation where it can be stolen, because (people being what they are) it will be. And if you think you absolutely can't live without your laptop, do yourself a favour and evaluate what you actually mean by that. Chances are you'll find it's simply not true.