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."

Comments

Why do people steal laptops?

[ObviousGuy]

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.

Funny story

[jargoone]

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?

Re:Targus Defcon

[nial-in-a-box]

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.

Re:Damn laptop alarms

[nodwick]

The creators say exactly the same thing:

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.

What they don't say is how their device solves the problem. As far as I can tell, when it goes off, it still makes the same annoying sounds.

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 ...

Re:What it doesn't do

[rampant mac]

"Remote tracking"

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.

GPS? Not yet, maybe just a matter of time

[dtio]

See LAPTOP SECURITY: PAST, PRESENT by Andrew Mueller (google's pdf cache) which is a bit outdated but still very interesting:

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.

A SERIOUS, EASY WAY TO DEFEAT...

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

I've seen this done easily with motion detectors like this one all the time.

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.

Re:What it doesn't do

[cerberusss]

Someone broke into his car while on a business trip, left the CDs, DVDs, etc. and took the computer

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.

So don't use alarms. :>

[daTHoK]

Instead, use encrypted filesystem technology linked with the sensoring these guys have already envisioned. Said filesystem (whether it's stand-alone or hosted by FAT32/Ext3/etc) would remain encrypted, and access to it is granted only when the user's fob is within range.

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.

Fingerprint recognition

[Elusive_Cure]

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.