Slashdot Mirror
Protecting My Daughter's Notebook?
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."
You have a naive daughter (who let her iPod get stolen) and you're worried about her laptop computer? You need to be worried about her other laptop unless you want some worse surprises a few months from now ("Him? That's going to be the father of my grandchild?!?").
Good luck, man.
Signed,
Father of two daughters approaching college faster than he wants to admit.
I am a
You can't prevent theft, and you might not be able to track it down.
But, you *can* get a rider on your insurance that will cover theft of the laptop.
That, and backups of whatever term paper she's currently working on kept in a separate place, is what you need.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
What does she want it for? Could she, for example, make do with a low-spec laptop worth a few hundred currency units of your choice, rigged up as a thin terminal to a higher-spec but secure machine somewhere else? This would be ideal for doing actual work; small and portable at the human end, large and capable (and backed up) at the machine end.
This way, the human end is undesireable and unlikely to be stolen. And if it is stolen, it's cheap to replace and all documents will be preserved.
It should be fairly trivial if you can program. You can even get a free perl interpreter (ActivePerl or something) if you don't have VisualC++ or somesuch. Put your program in the startup folder, or as a scheduled task.
The simplest would be to make a secret webpage for her and set that as her homepage in IE. Although that is trivial to change, whoever steals it (or buys the stolen thing) will probably boot it up and start IE, hitting your web page.
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.
A friend of mine had their laptop stolen once, and I saw them come on MSN. I wrote down the IP address, only to find out that it was my friend logging in from their home PC.
In short, if you steal a laptop, you either wipe the hard drive, or bypass the boot process with a CD to snoop around at data.
Get your daughter a proximity alarm, so if she walks away from the laptop, or if it's grabbed from her, a loud alarm sounds.
My other suggestion is insurance. It shouldn't cost too much ($50/yr) and it'll cover theft. I had my laptop stolen once, and it was insured, so I replaced it easily. Not only that, it was quite easy to deal with the insurance folks (no horror stories here!).
Besides, even if you know what IP it's coming from, what goes does that do you? Are you going to go vigilante on them? The police aren't likely to care much -- they don't usually give such thefts very high priority.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Teach your daughter to be responsible. I can tell you every laptop stolen in college was someone being irresponsible. They left their dorm rooms unlocked with laptops out on desks not locked to anything. They would leave laptops unattended in the library for a few minutes while they went to get coffee. Nobody is going to steal her laptop out of her hands or out of her backpack while she's wearing it. If your daughter was more responsible with her belongings they wont get stolen. Any tech solution you have to find it after it gets stolen is unecessary if your daughter takes care of her things.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Since you asked about something that would phone home I would suggest Timbuktu from Netopia. There was a story a few years ago about how a brother recovered his sister's stolen computer by using its phone home functionality.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
start/all programs/accessories/system tools/scheduled tasks
alternatively, you can install cygwin and cron as a service; it works well for me
Seriously. If you don't have a need to worry about appearances (i.e., she's not taking it to corporate meetings), stickers (lots of them) go a long way. Thieves who aren't just stealing it for their own personal use will think twice about stealing anything that is easily identifiable because it would be easy to pick out at a pawn shop, and black-market type folks aren't going to want something that stands out so much. Thieves are generally looking for a quick buck, so they generally aren't going to be interested in scraping all those stickers off, either.
Also, in addition to writing down serial numbers, write down her MAC address (both the ethernet and the wireless if she has both). If it does get stolen, hand them off to the school's computer center. I know of two separate cases where students stole school computers, and were caught within a day the moment they plugged the thing into the network and turned it on. Hopefully they would be willing to do such a thing for your daughter in the event that such a thing happens.
But the single most important thing you can do is make sure that she locks her door and, if she has a ground floor room, keeps the windows closed when she's out. A lot of people I knew at college thought they didn't need to because folks around the dorm would keep an eye on things or something like that, but it just isn't true. There were several cases at my school (which only had 1,100 students) where someone from outside the college just walked into the dorms while classes were in session, tried doors, and walked out with the expensive stuff from the rooms with unlocked doors. If they walked in on someone, they would just make an excuse to the effect of, "Sorry, wrong room." And act like they were visiting someone and don't really know their way around very well yet.
And it's not exactly related to electronics, but, if she uses a purse, get her to quit. Otherwise, she's going to get sick of lugging it around at a party or while she's hunting for books at the library and she'll leave it next to the coat pile or in her study cubby, only to come back and find it gone.
Jesus christ, How do you go from someone having something stolen (especially something as desirable and easy to take as an ipod) to someone who is so carteless that she'll go out and get pregnant by the first guy she lays eyes on. Where do you get off on insulting a parent like that, are you stupid or juat a misogynist bastard.
Pardon my rough language but it was no more then your attitude deserved.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Most of the posts I see so far are offtopic, insulting, and unhelpful. The guy asked for a tech solution, we're tech people! Help him out. I had a laptop stolen from my dorm a couple years ago, it sucked. I say just write a nice little program that hides itself and gives you a remote shell. Then have it 'phone home' just by updating its IP with a free dynamic dns service. When you need to get into the box, just ssh to the hostname. Call up the school and tell them the IP/MAC, and they will be able to help you if it is on the campus network. Avoid 'locking down' the box, as this will just encourage the theif to format the drive before you have a chance to find it (which he may do anyway). Perhaps other /.ers can elaborate. Good luck!
eBayDig 1s a typo saerch engien
Kim Komando has a reference to several companies that do what you ask.
Dear Kim: I bought my son a laptop. Is there a way it can be tracked if it is stolen?
Dear Reader: Yes. There is software that works over the Internet to report the location of a stolen laptop. When a thief connects the laptop to the Internet, the software reports its location to a special Web site. CyberAngel (www.sentryinc.com, $60 annually), CompuTracePlus (www.computrace. com, $50 annually) and zTrace (www. ztrace.com, $50 annually) are three companies that offer laptop locator software and services.
For MACs you might also try LapCop which emails you when the computer "disappears."
In addition, as literally anything could be on the drive, encrypt it. The translation slowdown will be barely noticeable and will save you if your child decided to put your VISA card in plain text files. Also, while a hardware password may seem like a great idea, if someone does steal the machine, it will never call home because they cannot get past the password.
I would then add a real easy to use laptop lock. If it is hard to use, it will not be used. No one wants to try and grab eight books from the library while lugging around their laptop. So they set it down for "just a minute."
Finally, for the "team her to be responsible" crowd: a college is about the least secure environment to which we will ever expose ourselves. People are free to come and go in most dorms, doors are secure as your least responsible roommate. College is also where more growing up occurs. Lighten up.
(a command that sucks to use, by the way)
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Some people etch the VIN of their vehicle on every window.
I had a roomie in college who spray-painted his shiny new HP48-SX (circa 1991) flourescent safety orange. It looked god-awful, but I doubt anyone considered it a target. :)
Buy some 2nd-hand laptop and do a creative case mod on it. Wire her or initials in bright purple LEDs on the top cover or something. It'll stand out like a sore thumb, easy to spot if she's looking for it, and it'll be a bitch to fence to someone else.
Method of processing duck feet
What's all this poppycock about phone home software and remote logins and thin clients? This is rather simple...
1a. Buy a MicroSaver with guaranteed replacement from Kensington. As long as you file police report in X number of hours, Kensington will give you up to $1500 of the total cost if it was stolen while on the lock. Make sure she uses it. If it's on her desk, it's tethered.
1a corollary. When she's out, the dorm is locked.
1b. When it's not on her dorm desk, it is either in her hands, on a table or in front of her, or within arms reach. No exceptions. No "I just left it for a minute".
2. As another poster said, make it identifiable easily. Put a ton of stickers on it. Get your dremel out and carve in a name, address, phone number, and mention of reward.
3. Write down serial #s and MAC addresses, keep them on file. Report them to all the nessecary authorities if it's stolen. This includes the campus IT staff - when it comes to finding it by MAC address they can be your best friends. Unlike trying to trace an IP address over the net, they should be able to track the laptop to a physical location quickly if it's plugged into the campus network.
4. Backup. Backup. Backup. Nuff said.
5. If you're really paranoid, get a proximity alarm. Small device attaches to laptop, other device attaches to daughter. She goes too far, it goes off and draws attention.
...and that's all there is to it.
Make her pay for the laptop out of her own pocket. I guarantee she'll take a LOT better care of it if it's HER money that paid for it.
First, I'd try to find a programmer, because this is going to take a little bit of coding. I'm going to give you a sort of spec; you can hire a starving college kid to hook this up for you on the cheap. OK? Here goes:
1. Locate a simple, downloadable SMTP library. You want this to be something that can be used within a piece of software to generate and send an email. VB, for example, has a Sendmail.dll file you can download somewhere, with a simple interface for creating and sending email. It's worth googling for (I don't remember it offhand).
2. Have your coder write some code that gets back the results of ipconfig (is it still called ipconfig on XP? I think that's the one for Windows 2000) and stuffs it in the body of an email. That'll give you what you need. Make sure the email also contains a timestamp, because you'll want to see who had that IP address at that time.
3. If you want to get really fancy, you can have your developer use whois (if the system has that; have to check) to find out who owns the subnet the laptop is on. That'll tell you whether its her university or a private ISP. If you can find a whois server on the web that'll let you do an automated check, that'll work too, just open a brief http connection. Netsol won't do it; they make you enter text from an image every time. Grumble...
4. You want the program to run very quietly without output on startup. You'll want to call it something innocuous, like SYSverCHK.exe, something people will figure is system related.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head... Good luck!
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
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.
Bios password isn't got to stop the theft, it's going to stop the laptop being used afterwards ... until they hard-reset the bios. It might work against you as it might result in the laptop being trashed. If it's used then you at least have a chance to catch the culprit(s).
If you want to discourage theft I reckon the grunge look (ie case mod it to hell, as others suggest) is the only way.
If you want to inhibit theft a cable lock is a good idea.
If you want to reduce financial loss then get insurance.
If you want to reduce data loss, get backing up.
Once trick I have for my own laptop is I carry it around in a bag that doesn't look like a laptop bag.
Putting it in a laptop bag is equivalent wearing a neon sign that says "I have a laptop. Please steal it." Especially if it has the manufacturer on the site just to clear any doubts any potential thief has about the contents.
Some better ideas are:
- Get a briefcase and fill it with foam padding
- There are laptop rucksacks you can get, which are less obvious
An interesting fortune from Slashdot at the bottom of my page in this story:
"A girl's conscience doesn't really keep her from doing anything wrong-- it merely keeps her from enjoying it. "
- Sometimes you're the pidgeon, sometimes you're the statue.