Phoenix Unveils Anti-Theft BIOS

Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @03:55PM from the phoning-home dept.

linuxwrangler writes "According to articles at PC World, c|net, Internet Week and elsewhere, Phoenix Technology is introducing a new BIOS-based anti-theft system. Every time a TheftGuard equipped machine connects to the internet it pings a server at Phoenix which can instruct the machine to wipe its hard drive, report its location or disable itself. Given that most people don't want to have their every movement tracked and don't want someone else to have the power to wipe their drives, Phoenix figures that corporate clients are the prime customer. I just wonder who is liable when a company sells a surplus laptop on eBay but gets their inventory control screwed up and reports it as stolen..."

1 of 458 comments (clear)

Re:Shortly after the BIOS was unveiled by Debian+Troll · 2003-05-27 22:15 · Score: 0, Troll

i haven't had time yet to read this story though i feel i must comment.

debian already has an anti-theft BIOS. It was hacked in by the legendary joel "espy" klecker shortly before his untimely death waiting for "woody" to become stable. he was forced to run his kidney dialysis machine on the notoriously unstable "potato" "release", which as anyone running this dreadful abortion of an operating system knows, is riddled with bugs in critical system services, like SVCHOST.EXE for example.

try debian today!