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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.
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.
...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.
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....
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.