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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.
Is this where I can look at stolen laptop alarms? Mine was stolen last week on the subway...
Perhaps not exactly the same, but it's already been done for $50.
I am feeling fat and sassy
If you can't find the guy who walked off with your laptop, press button 'B' and collect his ashes.
Beep beep beep, you laptop is being stolen.
Beep beep beep, you will never see it again.
Beep beep beep, haha.
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?
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.
I have a sneaking suspicion it's because they want to take your stuff. Without, like, paying for it.
Now that you know their motivation perhaps you can do away with band-aid measures to prevent it, and then apply it to diamonds, money and TV sets so we can get rid of all of our alarms, locks and stuff.
Should be easy. It's surprising that nobody's done it already, innit?
KFG
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
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.
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.
...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 dealt with stolen computer equipment. Both with tracking down our own lost equipment and I knew a guy who dealt in stolen laptops.
What happens to stolen computer equipment? Ebay. That's where a lot of it ends up.
Some of it also is sold in person, but never by the person who stole it. The particular guy I knew had a loose network of people with whom he'd trade laptops so the laptops he sold came from the other coast of the US.
In all cases, these guys are usually pretty dumb. The won't even format the machines but that's not because they care about the data, it's because they can't deal with basic driver/software issues. If the machine has a BIOS password on it, it ends up in the dumpster. Software-based "phone home" theft prevention systems are likely quite successful - one of our own machines was tracked down that way, but the software that called home was meant for our own usage auditing, not for tracking stolen equipment.
I really find it hard to believe that someone would try to steal a laptop for the data on it. First of all, you need to know whose machine you're taking and that means trailing someone around for days until the machine is left unattended. This is very unlikely - thieves don't operate like this. If you just grabbed a random laptop and happened to find some MSFT financial reports on it, how exactly would you sell that? Do you call up IBM's corporate espionage hotline from a payphone? I mean, come on, be realistic.
The only way a thief could possibly care about the data on a laptop is if a stolen machine coincidentally happened to lead to some hot investment tip, like an upcoming takeover (or something else that the thief could capitalize on without threat of discovery), but the people that steal laptops don't have accounts with Merryl Lynch, but rather accounts with their drug dealer. If the thief actually had some computer/engineering/financial know-how, he would have a better-paying safer job, but these people don't know how to operate Excel.
It can be tempting to fantasize about a stolen laptop underground with international spies and mob bosses, but these thieves aren't exactly long-term planners. They happen upon an unattended machine and figure it will get them their fix for the week.
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/
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....
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
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.
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.
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"I used to be an idealist, but I got mugged by reality."