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Stolen Laptop Alarms
torok writes "Three Engineering students from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, Canada have developed a laptop alarm complete with remote pager that detects if your laptop is being moved and sounds an alarm. The article is a bit sketchy on details, but it sounds like a cool idea."
... and if I hear one of these going off during a test, I'll find the engineers and beat them up!
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Like car alarms, I'm sure that laptop alarms will prove to be an important tool in the war on theft... not. This is going to be annoying as hell.
Remote tracking
Its one thing to know that your laptop is being stolen, and another to be able to track it down.
Something with a GPS would be more useful.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!! Now if only the robot would come and kick the crap out of the guy taking the laptop... that would be great.
Is this where I can look at stolen laptop alarms? Mine was stolen last week on the subway...
Depends on the price of course... but up to maybe $100, I'd definitely be interested in one of these.
*guards our preccciouss....*
maybe now I can get a drink in the cafeteria without keeping my head aimed at my laptop...
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Perhaps not exactly the same, but it's already been done for $50.
I am feeling fat and sassy
1. Secretly Detach Laptop Alarm
2. Attach to dog Bowser and set dog free.
3. Claim that laptop was lost.
4. ???.
5. Profit.
6. Buy new laptop with alarm.
7. Repeat.
If you can't find the guy who walked off with your laptop, press button 'B' and collect his ashes.
I had a security lock...a long time ago, it wasnt very secure though! It locked to the security cable but the plastic hook that the cable went into was busted off quite easily accidentally one time.
I wonder how feasible this idea is though, it seems like it would involve more difficulties than it is worth!
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
Beep beep beep, you laptop is being stolen.
Beep beep beep, you will never see it again.
Beep beep beep, haha.
I just keep a laptop that isn't worth stealing.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
I wonder what possesses people to steal others' laptops. Is there a deep insatiable need to steal inherent in the theives that brings them to that point? Are they doing it for kicks? Are used laptops really selling for so much at pawn shops and computer shows?
If we could understand the motivations of the theives, perhaps we could do away with these band-aid measures and find a way to keep laptops safe without having to resort to alarms, locks, and any number of other gizmos that only make owning a laptop a pain in the ass.
I have been pwned because my
Add a bomb to it and we can have some fun with it! :-D
Good. Maybe I can adapt one to go off when my wife picks up my wallet.
Anti-gravity? That was *my* little secret! But I never patented it! Boy, was *that* dumb!
I went to a university that installed PCs in each dorm room. This was 6-8 years ago, so maybe it's more common now, but at the time it was pretty revolutionary and cool. Anyway, a friend-of-a-friend brought his own PC to school and decided he didn't want the university's PC cluttering up his room. So he unhooked it and took it to another friend's place, off campus (not with the intention to steal, just relocate for the year). This other friend had DSL. 15 minutes after putting it on the DSL connection, tne university police department was at the door.
In theory, I know why this could happen, and actually thought it was pretty funny because it was a stupid thing to do. But obviously, there was some sort of "call home" software. Anyone know for sure?
This finally explains why this thinkpad won't stop its incessant beeping.
RFID!!! See, you knew you could find a reason to love it... :-)
If a notebook alarm goes off, the computer's already gone, but a custom paint job is easy to track down, given police involvement and photographs. It works for me!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
This doesn't really make sense. Yes, the whole reason for a laptop is for a person to be mobile. But it's not like a person needs to bring their laptop from their desk to the shitter. It's more like needing to bring it from their laptop to their house, or to the airport, or to the hotel room. Most circumstances don't dictate constant supervision.
I have a security cable that works great for when I'm in hotel rooms and the like. Enough for me.
The POINT of a laptop is that it is portable; that you can bring it with you wherever you go.
Isn't it your desktop that is more likely to be stolen while you are away than the laptop right there in your messenger bag?
One can buy an alarm for the car that notifies your pager (with a 1 mile range) that something is amiss with your car. Alarms like this are at least 15 years old.
If people would just pay more attention to their possesions and surroundings there wouldn't be a real big problem with this in the first place. Having an alarm will just give people an even more false sense of security, when inevetably, just like cars, the alarms will do little to stop theives.
Buckethead
In the end it comes down to the intelligence of the thief, the amount of computer experience they have, and the reason the laptop is stolen in the first place. The two reasons would be data recovery, the other to just sell the hardware. (I suppose a third would be to use it themselves).
The future of this technology I believe will be a BIOS based service. Something hard- coded in the BIOS that will be used to track the laptop. The car industry uses a GPS satellite to track some of its more expensive automobiles and perhaps that is where the laptop industry will go.
[..]
Systems hard coded with small GPS tracking units will creep into the corporate world, and users will be able to track where their laptops are if they?ve been stolen, and recovery will be more and more common.
1) Slip Zip-Lock under and around alarm.
2) Poor some water into bag, just enough to cover alarm.
3) Enjoy laptop.
You would be surprised just how easyily a lot of electonics are defeated with water. Nice idea, but it needs to be made water proof/resistant.
Yes, I call that 'uglification'. It's a good trick to keep the staplers, tape dispensers, footstools, etc., from running off at work.
I wonder if it might be enough to stick a prominent "Protected by Brink's Security" sticker on the lid. Maybe glue an old beeper case on, with a push button that flashes a red LED. After all, the threat of deterrence is almost as good as deterrence itself.
Anti-gravity? That was *my* little secret! But I never patented it! Boy, was *that* dumb!
I'm gonna start carrying EVERYTHING I own with me on my person.
Its interesting to know no company has really done something like this already. In the US we have the Lo Jack system for tracking stolen cars, but a company would have to wonder whether someone would be willing to pay anything over 200.00 for a laptop that'll probably be worth that much in a few months judging by the insane prices of comp stuff.
Governments and companies might be interested in this stuff, but to the ordinary joe blow user I don't think it means much. I think most people would take care of their personal laptops much more than they would something they didn't pay for. Aside from that, one could probably do something with an RFID tag on their own with some success if they can find some way to get their RFID tag to interact with a GPS system.
Another alternative would be a good old fashioned mechanism of tracking down MAC addresses, which would be painful but that is already doable.
MoFscker
Anyone know of a semi-cheap GPS tracker type solution I could use for my laptop? I feel like this is the only way I could not be paranoid about my laptop being stolen. Of course someone could find the transmitter and remove it but how likely is it that they would even think the laptop would be equipped with one.
The idea and actual implementation of the device was done over 5 years ago by some students for the Duracell competition. I don't recall what is it's callled exactly but you can google for it.
I call bullshit on this one.
You have *no* idea how easy it is to track down something like that. It's possible for a thief to sand down the paint and repaint the whole thing, but I figure it's just easier to get one where such work isn't required.
Don't some types of engravers leave a permanent mark that shows up under a blacklight? I remember back in my high school days my school provided an engraver for our graphing calculators specifically because even if a thief sanded down our names, they would still show up under a blacklight. Of course, IANAP (I am not a physicist), but this sounds rather sketchy...
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Just install BSD on it. Since this OS is dying, who would want the laptop?
Perhaps not exactly the same, but it's already been done for $50.
Yeah, but if you RFTA, the difference is their device doesn't activate until the remote (which is intended to be kept with the owner) is arounf 15ft away from the laptop.
From the article:
"The beauty of the electronic beast, according to Mitchell, is it allows the laptop owner to be mobile, which is, after all, the whole idea of laptops. There are few false alarms because of the deactivating device and the distance required between the laptop and its owner (about 15 feet) before the gizmo works.
"There are lots of systems out there that have just a thing that detects motion, so it blasts a siren just like the car alarms that no one listens to these days," said Mitchell."
Down in South Africa, They have car alarms that shoot flames and kill the thief.
Now my invention, car batteries attached to the laptop, of course it might be to heavy to steal, will have to work on that aspect...
yuo am teh suk
"vroom vroom!"
Looks exactly the same, minus the pager thing, which is probably only good for about the same range as a really loud siren.
There's also a company that made a PCMCIA version; if you moved the laptop any more than a certain amount, it started shrieking using a siren built-in to the card itself. I think it might have also had some software tie-ins, don't remember what
Please help metamoderate.
...on a laptop it's really stupid. I have a lojack installed with something VERY similar to this. It's one of the best anti-theft devices I've ever had on any car. I have a little keychain that I keep with my keys and inside the car is a kind of transmitter. If the car is moving and the keychain is not present, lojack will call my cell phone, send me an e-mail (I receive e-mails on my phone) and call my house. I can add more contact methods (text messaging, more phone numbers, like work or something) but these are the easiest ways to contact me.
The good thing about this (and the bad thing about the laptop one) is if I'm using a car, it's going to be on and the keys are gonna be in it so the keychain is gonna be in the car. If I'm going to go to the bathroom, I'm going to park, turn off my car, take the keys out and go to the bathroom. Now if I'm using a laptop, and I want to go to the bathroom, I'm not going to carry the laptop with me (and if I was going to carry the laptop the device becomes completely pointless.)
This device is useless, if you're going to be 15 feet away from your laptop (ok my bedroom is 15 feet across, it's not very far) you should be able to see anyone going near it that's going to attempt to take it. And if they're going to snatch it up while you're that close this little alarm won't help since they're gonna run and not really care who hears the alarm (they could always just smash it off with their foot, I mean it just hangs off the side, it might crack the case of the laptop but who cares they just got a free laptop.)
I've read more than a few of the posts degrading this particular technology. But let me ask those folks, how often do you leave your laptop and walk into the next room? I see this "invention" as a first-defense sort of thing. Sure, it would be made better by GPS tracking, blips on a PDA, and even a shiny new decoder ring. These things take time. Lest we not forget the ever-present business model, if this initial configuration takes off, GPS won't be far behind.
------ Send your whines to
Frankly, I just don't care . . .
This is what I consider one of those forehead-slapping-in-frustration type "inventions". Its the type that people come up with when they're trying to invent something. I won't go through all the layers of reasons why a laptop alarm is stupid. (A bunch of the comments already do a good job.)
Want a GOOD idea? Why not make a nice tiny USB fob with an alarm and a motion sensor. Stick it in, launch the app that comes with it (maybe include a 8mb flash disk with an app version for Win/Mac/Linux) and type your password. It it requires that password typed on the machine to move the motion sensor without it screaming bloody murder.
I doubt it happened. Besides, when have you seen campus police move that fast unless it's to ticket your illegally parked car?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Almost all available theft protection methods for laptops seem not to be working with Linux. So I have setup a survey of theft protection methods, which work for Linux laptops and notebooks. I hope to extend the survey to protection methods for Linux PDAs and mobile (cellular) Linux phones, too.
So when I "arm" my labtop with my remote does it make a chirping sound like a car alarm?? lol that would be pretty damn funny if it did. SIG---- http://www.mzlan.com MZLAN, one of the best gaming events in minnesota
Ambient [Servlet Based Webapp Engine]
More importent than the fact that you alert yourself "your PC is stolen, wakeup" is that your data is safe and can not be read by the thief.
Hard disc encryption (at least your homedir with your ssh keys, pgp key and other sensitive data) is more importent than a buzzing alert that gets turned off like car alarms....
with the proliferation of wi fi hotspots, you can develop a system that connects automatically in the presence of one and transmits data about its location to the owner
Hello,
I saw a similar device for sale as Best Buy from Fellowes called a Mobile Proximity Alarm. From looking at their web site it doesn't seem to have a motion detector, but sets of an alarm if the sensor is moved more than fifteen feet from the base. It cost about $30.00USD.
Obviously, it's hard to compare this against something which only exists in prototype form, but has anyone used one of these? If so, how well did it work?
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
i know a few people that jack laptops. you are exactly right, nobody wants to jack some laptop with hard-to-remove unique identification. it just makes it a bitch to sell. people tend to think about preventing stealing in the wrong way. instead of 'what would make this harder to take' they should be thinking 'what would make this harder to sell'. because THAT is the only true deterrent to stealing.
This removes the annoyance of an audible alarm, and requires a thief steal both the laptop AND the fob, assuming he/she knew a fob was even being used.
As an added bonus, if the fob is turned off, it ain't detected by the laptop. So the filesystem is now unusable. Combined with keyboard-based logins, this system would provide quite a bit of convenience.
Pretty cool stuff. I love seeing engineering students come up with new tech.
i've taken the opposite approach to alarms. if i have to leave the room, i just crank slayer on my laptop at full volume. when i hear the music begin to fade away, i know my laptop is being being stolen.
i call it my "proactive audio alarm system." maybe i should file a patent?
TODO: come up with a clever sig
I wonder if the inspiration for this is stolen laptops in a university setting. More generally, I wonder if this would work well in an open office setting where the public for whatever reason can easily gain access. I work in such a place, and laptops get stolen all the time from people who are lazy, don't lock up, step out "for just one second", and come back to their offices to find their laptops gone. There are usually people around, but nobody notices the theft. If the system is not prone to false positives, then it would have potential where I work.
Why bother with an audable alarm?
6 2%255E13762,00.html
Install a mobile phone inside the unit, which obviously would give the machine an internal modem. Then use a mobile tracking servive to find out where the mobile is if it ever gets inched. http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,83645
That and a decent bois lock and you should be safe!
Sorry, but I think most laptops are being stolen for hardware, not because of the software on them.
You are of course correct, keeping sensitive data encrypted on a laptop is the sensible thing to do but it's not enough. The thief will boot from a CD and simply reformat the hard drive.
Espionage is a different matter of course, but any agent carrying secret data on a laptop who lets the laptop out of sight allowing it to be stolen, should be put in jail.
You've got this sweet lil' notepad computer... when Mr. Thief put's stylus to display, the stylus explodes a dye capsule out the back covering Mr. Thief, and Mr. Thief's clothes with a pernitious and utterly permanent purple dye. Then the screen begins to flash;
Dear Mr. Thief,
You've just been sprayed with a powerful toxic dye. You have approximately 10 hours to report to the computer's true owner before it becomes too late to receive the antidote. You can reach the owner at; *PLACE YOUR PHONE NUMBER HERE*. You will then be given instructions on where to go, and how to get there. Your life depends on following these instructions exactly. This is what you get for being a waste of human DNA. I hope the rest of your day sucks too...
*The Original Owner of this Computer*
P.S. The computer better be in good condition when you arrive, or you won't be when you leave...
I mean with the rysin scare at the Senate, would you risk not getting in touch with the owner? Of course, you then contact the police, inform them you're running your own little sting operation, and make sure Mr. Thief is properly greeted as you get your computer back.
--Genda
...is the alarm going to blast after someone removes the battery before moving/stealing the laptop.
That's right, put a bright yellow placard with big black letters on top of an open laptop's keyboard that says "Steal Me!". A thief would think twice about stealing it since he might feel it's a joke being played on him.
Well, cellphone stealing has gone down a lot after joe sixpack's cellphone's price sunk to $99 or so. So if they start making laptops that only cost about $100 they won't be worth stealing anymore. Not that I see it happening, but...
I fully agree that uglification or some other unique identification is the key rather than alarms. Either that or never leaving your laptop anywhere. Ever.
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
Yes, I call that 'uglification'. It's a good trick to keep the staplers, tape dispensers, footstools, etc., from running off at work.
Its also a good trick to keep your girlfriend from running off with other guys.
I'm currently doing my Bachelors in electronics in a UK University, where final year EE students participate on the development of a fingerprint recognition device for mobile devices sponsored by one of the biggest cell phone companies (Sony-Ericsson). It's been done before for notebook computers (i believe siemens or Acer had a similar device), and we are working on the implementation of such device for mobile phones that are the most common things beeing stolen in the UK. The basic principle of this system is to match the pattern of the fingerprint of a person with the current stored fingerprint "image" of the owner on the phone. As soon as the microprocessor detects a false fingerprint image fed to the device, the phone locks up and idealy sends a sms to the service provider that the phone is beeing stolen. I, personally have worked on the FPGA implementation of the microcontroller, done with Verilog on Xilinx software and i'm confident that in the following years we will see lots of similar devices beeing manufactured for high-priced/valued products such as notebooks, phones, pdas etc.
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
A. If the battery is installed, then you will first want to disable its electronic alarm.
Break open the battery compartment to remove the battery
Cut the cable with a wire cutter (note: an ordinary paper cutter will not do); if the battery is still in the unit when the cable is cut, the alarm will sound continuously.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
We use it on our WAN/LAN too, because we have a lot of WiFi spots in our network. There are a few machines that are allowed on all WiFi spots (IT-dept. machines mostly), the rest is closed off based on MAC address. If I get on the network on a remote site, a few bells & whistles go off at our central office.
I think that's the way they did it. It's simple & effective (and implemented on most OS's.)The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
I saw one at Best Buy 3 days ago. Two parts, one on the unit, one in your pocket, alarms if they're more than 15 feet apart. google for proximity alarm site:bestbuy.com - it's sold by Fellowes and costs $30.
what happens if the cat jumps on it or bats it around? (trust me, this WILL happen)
If they move the laptop in reverse, you hear the truck's "beeeeeep pause beeeeeep pause beeeeeep..."
For some reason, I thought that an alarm device (like a lock) was already in market where you attach the alarm device to the laptop and the other component you keep with yourself. If the distance between you and the laptop exceeds a certain range, the alarm would go off...
The other thing I remember reading a while ago is there is a company that sells this service where if you subscribe to it and if your computer gets stolen, they can track it by IP address and they actually caught someone where you just install their software that secretly pings their server when you get online. The thief didnt format the stolen laptop's hard disk and just started using it. The owner had informaed this company which then went with the IP address to police and these guys caught the thief...
You'll find that it gives you a five-second window to deactivate before the alarm starts blaring...
Should cut down on the noise pollution "oops, accidently tripped my alarm" incidents.
Besides, it's not like a car alarm that goes off when somebody walks too close to it (or brushes up against your door in the parking lot, or taps your car with a shopping cart, etc). Somebody actually has to pick this up and move it before it sounds the alarm. Personally, if somebody is moving my laptop in my absence, you can bet I'm going to assume the worst and correct their behavior...
Sign me up for one of these babies.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
You must have had a lot of fun taking that through airport security... :-)
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
Lets imagine I put my laptop bag down at a Greyhound station and am looking at the bus schedules. One sly smooth handed theif picks up my bag and sneaks away, while I am looking the other direction. The device will give the theif a 15 feet head start! How fair is that!!?
We were rolling out a wireless network and it was at the manager's discretion on who received wlan cards for their laptop (since there already was a wired network, unessential for everyone to have it). This was back when the cards were worth around $80. Anyway, one of the engineers was turned down, and that day he went and stole someone else's the wlan card. By the end of the day he was escorted out when the stolen wlan's MAC address was traced to his logon.
does wonders on electronics... and this one hangs off the side of the laptop, allowing you to fry it without killing the object of your desire.
I had a friend who had a Van-DeGraff Generator, and I remember sending many types of old, unwanted electronics to that great microchip graveyard in the sky by taking them over to his house... old calculators, etc... the only thing that didn't die an ugly, static-electricity-induced death was my casio digital watch.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
As an SFU student and somebody that works on the SFU Surrey campus in research, I had the oppertunity to play with the actual prototype that these students put out.
I had my laptop secured with it, to test it out for a day.
Two things with it that I'd like to see rectified:
1. It seemed overly sensative to motions around it, a heavy truck went by outside (~6m away) and it went off.
2. if you use it, you do NOT have any way to cable-tie your laptop to a desk or whatever. yes it could be mutually exclusive, but I think these would be a lot more acceptance of this if you could use it in addition to another device to physically secure your laptop.
ICQ# : 30269588
"I used to be an idealist, but I got mugged by reality."
When I worked in a retail store 10 years ago we were selling these.
I am waiting for the portable balck-hole that one can turn-on and off at a whim. Then you can attach the supermassive body into the inside of the case. When a thief snatches your laptop the black-hold switchs on and the person is crushed at infinitum - thats cool security.
Exploding dye pack
face it your laptop needed a better color scheme anyway.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Did anyone else read this as "laptop alarms stolen - without the laptop attached" ??
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Insert high explosive into laptop (nonfunctioning "CDROM drive"/half-life battery). Add a pager.
:)...
If it receives a pager message with a valid detonation message (not just any message), it blows up after a silent delay or optionally sounds an alarm and blows up after a delay.
Of course this is dangerous, but then if you're a member of a terrorist organisation, it's a way to spread terror and cut down on theft at the same time (insert evil laughter).
Don't even need to recruit trained suicide bombers. Should be easy enough to get a laptop stolen initially.
Can imagine them rejoicing when the 1st thief is blown up at a McD or Starbucks.
If the thieves never survive, no-one else will ever know they aren't suicide bombers and they'd keep on stealing laptops.
If you use the alarm, laptop theft could drop significantly after the first two or three incidents.
Yes, it is conceivable that something with a GPS could be more useful, but GPS+transponder could take up too much space.
Luckily I don't work for a terrorist org
The article is about a Canadian device...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
...well that's what I think. If a thief knows there is an alarm they probably just dump or trash the laptop (in this case) and the chances of getting it back intact are very remote.
I use LapCop for my powerbook and my desktop for that matter. Combined with a firmware password (stopping anyone reformating your harddrive) you can install it as a invisible application and when your PowerBook is next connected to the internet via the modem or a network it will email you it's new IP information. Hopefully after that you can trace down it location with the help of the ISP it's connected to.
Granted not a good as a GSP based system, but a good and relatively cheap solution.
The "pager thing" is the whole point of their invention.
It means you, the user, do not need to explicily activate and deactivate the device making it much more likelly to protect you.
The Targus device is next to useless because it does not permit you to use your laptop without turning the device off. (If you try to work while it is on you are likelly to trip the motion sensor accidentally, especially while working on the road - where you will have the laptop on your lap.)
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Looks like soon all you'll need to do is call the police and they'll be able to locate your laptop precisely using its imbedded RFID tag - and probably trace on a map everywhere it has been in the last six months too.
while sco {
wget -O
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the florescent backlighting (high-voltage) as a theft deterent?
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
I bought my Thinkpad 3 years ago and remember seeing adds for similar alarm systems from IBM. A quick google for "laptop alarms" yields 87,300 results. Clearly this is not news. Guess it must be stuff that matters.
Terry Layne
Portland, OR
Several years ago, I remember issuing one of our company's salespeople a brand new Toshiba laptop with all the extras. He immediately took it, placed it in his new leather carrying bag, and put it in the trunk of his car. Later that afternoon, someone had taken a crow-bar, pried his trunk open, and stolen the whole thing - while his car sat in the company parking lot!
Laptop theft is VERY popular, because of the ease of reselling them, the portability, and the fact that you don't look "out of place" carrying one around in public.
There are already software systems in place that report your stolen laptop's whereabouts as soon as the thief tries connecting it up to the Internet. Seems to me this might be rather effective, but you're likely to only find the poor soul who purchased it used, not knowing it was stolen - rather than the original thief.
I'm not sure about this alarm idea. Probably not bad if you want some extra assistance catching someone who does a "snatch and run" on your laptop in a restaurant or something - but I bet many more laptops are stolen right out of hotel rooms while the owner is at dinner, out of vehicles, etc.
I have a long-term grassroots solution.
When a car alarm goes off for a long time I usually toss a rock at the car or key it to fsck it up, and leave a note saying how the only damage done was BECAUSE of the alarm. I do the same for house alarms.
Not only is it a wonderful release of built-up aggression, it helps to rid our society of this blight of annoying noise.
I drive a car without an alarm, I work and park in Boston, I leave my windows an inch open (to vent) and a CD player out on the dash, I've been doing this for FOUR YEARS and not had a thing stolen. Hell, I used to leave the thing UNLOCKED in Boston before I had a laptop, and nobody ever fscked with it.
Stealing a car these days is VERY hard to pull off without going to prison, and I've had more luck leaving my car 'vulnerable' than locking it down tight, it shows that you've got nothing worth taking.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Laptop alarms. HelLO. This isn't like a car alarm, where you have to be away and out of sight for hours on end. You can actually carry the thing with you.
I'm a college student. I've owned my Dell Inspiron 4100 for two years now. I follow a very simple policy to prevent it being stolen. If I'm not home, it's either in my locked house, in a drawer under some old shirts, (and if my house gets broken into, I will have bigger worries than whether they found my laptop) or it's in my possession, either in use or in my backpack. Not a huge black carrying case with the Dell logo on it, nor even a laptop bag of any sort - a $20 backpack from Target. And that backpack goes everywhere with me when I have it. I check it in with store security (and if they lose it, lawsuit!), I tuck it under the table in a restaurant, I quite simply do not let go of the thing or leave it anywhere.
Worked fine so far.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
But it's so much fun to jump up and down on the back of a car with an alarm and make it go off! Especially the really sensitive ones! Uh, guys, stop looking at me like that OK...
The system I suggested is applicable primarily when the value of the software (programs or information) outweighs the value of the hardware. Under these circumstances, the user will be less concerned about the $2000 piece of hardware than the $250,000 worth of information on that hardware.
Much of the operations planning I'm working on for a local company involves the use of laptops while en route to sites. The laptops themselves don't contain any private information, relying upon a central (secured) station to host that data, so the theft of information is less of a concern in these situations than that of the hardware.
When it comes to theft of hardware, there's no level of technology that'll prevent the theft itself once the laptop has been obtained. Your comment on espionage hit the nail on the head, though, which is where the encryption comes into play. (They should still be tossed in jail if they've chosen to ignore their training and be complete doughnuts. ;)
This isn't to say that these students don't have a market; however, they've focused on the wrong segment of the overall IT market. Devices like these should be marketed to top-level execs who can fork over five times the price they're planning on charging.
[Grins.]
A laptop alarm that notifies the owner should have a locked wrist bracelet... if the alarm is about to go off, the user has 15 seconds to disable it before it blares the alarm and simultaneously shocks the hell out of the owner for being lazy.
I think it's quite often a theft of opportunity, like put your laptop down for 1 second at the airport or at a shop and temporarily forget and walk away a few feet and BOOM: gone...
There was that story about a woman crying for help while she was being raped. The people just stood by & watched from their apartment windows because they assumed that someone had already called the police.
testing out my trending skills
DARPA Grand Challenge Kicks Off March 13th
Monday March 08, @10:40PM
GillBates0 writes "A quick reminder that the DARPA Grand Challenge is due to kick off March 13, the coming Saturday." He points to this "quick recap of the teams participating in the event," as well as details about the available satellite feeds. "The Atlanta-Journal Constitution is running a story about the event today. Quoting Frank Dellaert, co-director of Georgia Tech's robotics lab from the article, 'I would have trouble driving some of these roads myself. I think it's beyond the capabilities of autonomous vehicles today.' (shameless school plug). We'll see if the participants can prove him wrong."
The words ring true now, though I never expected such a -ve outcome.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam