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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."
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
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?
Ok, so I read the article a little more closely, and yes, their idea is good, but it's also pretty costly for what it does. Basically, a little common sense is all you need. No security system is failproof. Everyone knows that even though it's unlikely, your home could get broken into this very night. Still, you'll leave your laptop unsecured on a desk or in a bag or wherever seems fit. However, if you're in a library or a coffee shop or wherever you wouldn't normally leave your laptop unoccupied, would you really want to get up and go to the bathroom assuming it is protected by a $95 hack? I wouldn't, and I consider myself trusting. But I sure as hell am not going to trust my PowerBook to any security device other than my watchful eye. Oh, and could there ever be insurance if it failed to operate? If the product came with a big disclaimer, that should raise red flags right away.
I am feeling fat and sassy
I disagree that loud laptop alarms won't be effective because they're unnoticed -- after all, the places they'd be used would most likely be study areas or libraries, which are typically very quiet. A 105 decibel alarm in such an area would certainly get people's attention. The problem is that it'd be terribly obnoxious as well. Personally, I think if someone did use one of these somewhere like a library, it'd work great scaring off the would-be thief but not so great against the subsequent mob coming to bash it into silence with textbooks and binders ...
That reminds me of a story... Some guy tracked down a stolen iMac using Applescript and Timbucktu.
It's actually an interesting read to see how this guy traced an iMac stolen from his sister's home.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
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.
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
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.
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 think you are overestimating the add expenses because lots of that stuff can be integrated to laptop with a lot lower cost when it is designed. I think motion sensor (a chip) itself does not cost much and a PC has enough processing power to handle signal same way sa temperature sensors (I think in stand-alone system prosessing, battery and case are the most expensive part, not the actual sensor).
A GPS system is not a good method to locate laptops, because they are mostly used indoors - cars are much more frequently used outdoors :-). You can have a cellular phone integrated in your laptop (or on PC Card) and use it for both locating postion and sending information on location. The postition accuracy is not as good as with GPS, but it works also indoors.
In my opinion, the extra cost is only motion sensor (manufacturer could use that to void warraty if computer has got too hard hits :-( ), and software.
If these devices becomes common, then the thiefs start carrying metal cases where they drop stolen laptops and then reinstal laptop in some place that does not have cellular coverage.
I'm working at a consulting company, i.e. programmer-for-hire. This is a MAJOR problem. Thieves are on the lookout for your laptop and they are not easily scared. We've had several stories: people going for a cup of coffee - laptop gone. People coming home, unloading groceries, coming back for the laptop - gone.
We've even had people who walked to their car, opened the passenger's side and put their laptop in. Then walked to the other side of the car and go and sit behind the wheel, just to see a hand grabbing their laptop. Thugs actually waited on the carpark waiting for people to get into their cars!!! You have to be extremely paranoid nowadays.
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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 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?
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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!
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.
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...
Well, there's probably some company in China that's already prototyped a cheap knockoff in the last day or two that'll be on the market in 2 weeks for $25 :)
As for the alarm side of things, instead of noise, I'd personally like a laptop security system that had a smokecloak-type system installed in it:
http://www.smokecloak.com
When the alarm goes off, it generates an enormous amount of smoke/fog from a liquid. Gets a LOT of attention and in a small room, would prevent anything else from being stolen.
I'd definately have one of those installed if I owned a retail business.
Infact, I wish they'd make a car model - would make it pretty tough to steal a car if the passenger compartment slowly (so that the thief would hopefully be smart enough to stop safely before the vision was totally obscured) filled with dense smoke so the thief couldn't see.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I'm late to the party, so I'm tagging along on your comment, but this idea is hardly new, I had a 286 Bondwell laptop that came with a built-in alarm. It was a mercury type switch, once set, if you moved the laptop, a BIOS-type password would lock the hard drive and a *LOUD* wail would be emitted.
This was way back in 1992....
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
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.
Heh. I know some people who would disagree with you.
Th POINT is for the thief to notice it and be discouraged from stealing the laptop... Now you have to make it nearly inseparable from the laptop and it might even work...
Even though they are ignored by most people, think of it in the reference frame a car thief. Would you want the car you are attempting to steal to sound off a siren? Yeah, car alarms are annoying, but they also work.
I hate my sig
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.