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

Reactive Loss Prevention

[Everach]

The majority of the companies I work with use capital insurance policies to cover the cost of replacing stolen equipment. With the proliferation of anti-theft devices, will insurance companies take the automobile route and provide discounts for using them? Or will they begin to require such devices to provide coverage at all?

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.

Re:Mine was stolen

[Mignon]

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

Was your laptop sitting in a bathtub full of ice with a note on the windshield telling you to call 911?

michael:

[Wakko Warner]

50-pound computers are what we here in the industry call "desktops".

- A.P.

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.

deterrants

[Alien54]

The pcmcia card they mentioned is more of a deterrent than anything else. It is trivial to bypass, but is okay for a public place like a restaurant.

this statistic was startling:

As many as 30 percent of the stolen laptops are gone for good because they are never used to go online after being stolen.

Never mind that If I had a system like that I would just wipe the drive to begin with. Of course, common crooks may not bother.

Dude!

[Romancer]

That has got to be the most easily comprimised password method ever!

you: Tilt left - right - back to arm laptop, and leave...

you : come back and tilt laptop right - back - left

Person outside looking in sees you do this and comes in and takes your laptop, disarming it with your (super secret password tilt combo) while you feel secure cause you spent a hundred dollars on a security device.

what a joke, that method shouldn't even exist, too many stupid users are gonna use it.

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 couple of minutes

[wiredog]

I have this vision of a stripped laptop on cinderblocks.

The end of laptop theft as we know it!

[dipfan]

Excellent news ... as we know, audio alarms and tracking bugs have totally eliminated theft in the automobile industry, and I imagine these devices will do the same for laptops.

Insturance

[swagr]

True story:
I was working in a corner of a cafe late at night when I guy came in, sat beside me, stuck a knife to my side and said "put the laptop in the bag".

My laptop was locked to the table, but I gladly unlocked it in return for my safety.

Anyway, insurance covered the loss.

Also, I had a removable hard drive with all my work on it, and I pleaded with the thief to let me keep it, and he let me!

So ultimately, I ended up with a newer machine, and a spare drive, and the thief ended up with a password protected laptop. Just goes to show, crime doesn't pay.

Re:Insturance

[Rogerborg]

• I was working in a corner of a cafe late at night when I guy came in, sat beside me, stuck a knife to my side and said "put the laptop in the bag".

I'll top that. Friend of mine came out of the University about 1am, and locked up behind him. Three guys grabbed him, showed him the knife and said "Play nice". They hailed a cab, put him in it, and said "Take us to your apartment," which he did. They then took him up, sat him on the floor, and carefully cleaned the place out, including his laptop (and the keys to the University), and made it utterly clear to him what would happen if he reported any of this. He said that it was a surreal experience, and the scariest thing was how utterly casual and bored they were, like they could not give a fuck how many people saw them, whether he shouted for help, or whether they knifed him or not. On the bright side, they did pay for the cab.

• I ended up with a newer machine, and a spare drive, and the thief ended up with a password protected laptop. Just goes to show, crime doesn't pay

Well, crime probably paid about $50, the price of a "good cosmetic condition, fails to boot" laptop on eBay, or at the local fence. And that's rather the point about laptop security: it doesn't matter how bad you make the proposition look, if someone decides to take your laptop (or cell phone, or anything else) they're going to do it. You will have to make the decision whether it's worth carrying something so valuable that you're prepared to risk your life protecting it. I think that you (and my friend) made the right decision. "Hero" tends to be a posthumous epithet, barring superior firepower and the opportunity and will to use it.

The flipside of all this is: never, ever buy goods in a "too good to be true" deal from someone who's not keen to answer questions on where they came from, because more often that not, there's a victim in there somewhere. Are we all quite clear on that?

Re:50 pounds?

[matt_wilts]

If your laptop is 50 pounds, it's not really a laptop, is it?!

You don't know how big his lap is.

IBM

[Detritus]

IBM has the right idea. In some (all?) of their laptops, the main board and hard drive have passwords that can't be disabled or bypassed without major surgery. If you forget the password, tough, the subassembly must be replaced. If this was more common, laptops would be less attractive to thieves.

Missing the point

[mikosullivan]

A lot of people commenting on how various anti-theft devices won't help because they can be worked around are missing the point. Security is done in layers. You implement a variety of security measures to improve the odds catching different situations. So, the car-alarm style card in the laptop won't stop the person who sat and watched you tilt in your "passtilt", but it will inhibit the many, many potential thieves who simply walk by and see an unattended laptop.

The best laptop-theft-prevention is staying with the computer. That may be where wearable computers have their best value. A computer around your belt with a glasses-style display won't be easily forgotten.

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.

Re:Motion unlock code?

[CokeBear]

I believe the code was actually "Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-Start" (For unlimited lives in Contra on the original Nintendo.

Laptop Bag?

[imadork]

I've found that a good way to keep a laptop from being stolen is to not put it in a bag that screams, "There's a laptop in this bag!"

My wife has a Pismo G3 from her employer, whose IT department bought her a Targus laptop bag with the order because "We do it for all Laptop orders". Never mind the fact that the bag was obviously made to fit a boxy PC laptop, not the curvy Pismo. Ultimately, she found a backpack with a laptop compartment built in, and bought it herself. She's willing to trade the fact that her laptop bag doesn't look "Professional" (read: pretentious) for the fact that nobody knows its a laptop bag. Nobody's stolen it yet....

And the Targus laptop bag is sitting somewhere on a spare desk in her department. Nobody else wants to use it, either.

Re:Laptop Bag?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a co-worker who uses a diaper bag to carry her laptop. It's a good quality bag with lots of pockets. Nobody wants to steal a diaper bad, but somebody did once steal the laptop case she was using to carry diapers around.

Targus laptop bags and the opposite of stealth.

[Nonesuch]

My Targus bag looks more like a briefcase than a laptop case. Yeah, it does look "Professional" (or even pretentious), like a lawyer's case for briefs.

I'm very very happy with Targus -- not just the quality, but also the support (broke the strap two years after getting the bag, they sent a new, improved strap, for free).

The big drawback to Targus bags is that they are heavy. That is also their strength, as the bag takes a lot of abuse, saving the laptop inside from harm.

Speaking of a good way to keep a laptop from being stolen is to not put it in a bag that screams, "There's a laptop in this bag!" , I have a pile of clean old Compaq laptop bags without the laptops...

These bags scream "There is a Compaq Laptop in this bag!", though there isn't -- I give them to family members to use as briefcases, lunch bags, and even keep one in the back of my truck to hold my jumper cables.

Nobody has stolen my jumper cables or my nieces schoolbooks... yet.