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Protecting My Daughter's Notebook?

Posted by Cliff on from the quick-phone-home-with-IP-scripts dept.

ctwxman asks: "My daughter enters college in the fall. This past week she spent three days on campus for orientation... and had her iPod stolen! That got me to thinking about protecting her brand new laptop. I'll physically lock it to something immovable -- that's simple. However, I've got a website and it's got a log. Is there a way to make her laptop quietly 'phone home' every time it boots so I can get the IP address and always see where it is? Her machine runs XP, but knowing Slashdot, suggestions for all OSes will be appreciated."

4 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. OS X solution by Matt+Clare · · Score: 1, Interesting
    I've got this on my PowerBook
    % crontab -l
    1 * * * * nice -n 19 curl -sfA 'PowerMatt' -o /dev/null <a href="http://www.mattclare.ca/the_url_i_chose/">ht tp://www.mattclare.ca/the_url_i_chose/</a>
    But, where's the cron system in XP????????
    --
    .\.\att Clare
  2. Really Simple Idea by buelba · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is simple but eventually they can hack around it:

    1. Set up a subdirectory on your Web page, say "foo.com/google/" that directs to google.com.

    2. Set up her homepage as foo.com/google. Don't tell anyone else about foo.com/google.

    3. When the thieves boot up the PC and get on the Web, they'll automatically go to foo.com/google and, hopefully, won't even notice the redirect. You'll get at least one hit and maybe more.

    The down side is that your daughter will trigger these logs too. (That'll happen with pretty much any technique you use, though.) Promise us that you won't go checking on her surfing times.

    1. Re:Really Simple Idea by menscher · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I've done basically the same thing for some customers -- I set their browser homepage to my site, which just instantly redirects them to their desired homepage. The user doesn't notice any delay, or even remember I'm doing this. But if his laptop is ever stolen, I can start watching logs for connections.

      On the linux side I have it wget that page as part of the init scripts. So if it boots when attached to the network, it will phone home.

      Obviously this doesn't protect against thieves that wipe the drive before going online. But I think most casual thieves wouldn't, since then they'd have to reinstall Windows, Office software, etc.

      Been doing this for years... hardly anything new or exciting. And no, I don't spy. Seeing how often he opens a browser or goes to his home page isn't exactly interesting info anyway.

  3. Re:mod parent up! by mysidia · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Then set a BIOS password and set a hard drive password to block access to the configuration, and make the CD-ROM non-bootable... nope, no pirate copies of XP here.

    For bonus points, set a hard drive password and/or put a boot image on the network card itself that silently connects to the network, phones home _And THEN_ boots the OS.