Wifi and Laptops Adds Up To Theft

Ant writes to mention an SFGate article about the increase in laptop theft in the world of ubiquitous wifi. From the article: "San Francisco police statistics show a disturbing trend. Just 18 laptop computer robberies were logged in 2004, but the figure jumped to 48 last year. There were 18 as of the end of March, a pace that could surpass 70 crimes this year. 'It's a changing culture, and crime is following it'"

Comments

There is a shopping center in the SF Bay Area

[Anonymous Coward]

in Milpitas (McCarthy Ranch) that thieves have been targeting. They do there during lunch and right after work, and do "smah and grab" style robberies on cars. The target: laptops in bags left unattended while the victim shops. Police have had to issue special alerts to shoppers.

Put your laptop in the trunk when you leave your office, so that potential thieves don't see you place it there when you arrive at the mall.

Robbery != Theft.

[vhold]

Once again I think the summarizer has confused the words and thus the discussion.

The key word here is robbery, which means violence or intimidation being used to steal the property.

I'm sure the number of laptop thefts is vastly higher. I worked at one company in the south of market area a few years back that was broken into several times and lost nearly 10 laptops alone.

Use your brain

[Y-Crate]

I work at a large book retailer that has a well-established network of coffee bars outfitted with wireless hotspots.

This company loves for customers to hang out for hours (and truth be told, many hang out all day and night several days a week) because they invariably buy more stuff the longer they stick around. The longer they stay, the more relaxed they become. When it comes time to get a new book, many will simply get up and walk away from their unattended laptop for anywhere between 1 and 20 minutes (don't get me started on table camping). Many days I've stood there during slow periods in amazement at the amount of very expensive hardware just left in the open with no one to watch it.

It's inevitable that thieves will begin to exploit this as I've seen the same level of carelessness at similar retailers and sister stores in several states. There really isn't much I can do about it other than make friendly reminders when talking to customers - which risks offending the all-too-common customer with the over-inflated sense of self importance who finds any suggestion that they alter their behavior in any way (even if it will benefit them) as a severe insult.

I try to keep an eye on things, even though it's not my responsibility, and I'm usually too busy to notice what's going on in the seating area unless there is a major disturbance (in other words: never).

"Casual" laptop theft is going to increasingly be a problem, but not one that I fear to any great extent as in most cases it can be defeated with the help of common sense which itself is a rare commodity these days.

Re:A simple precaution

[PoitNarf]

Clever idea. Here's something a bit more advanced, but it costs money ofcourse. It's called Computrace and it's available on just about any laptop (they even have an OS X version). Their tracking agent attempts to make a call out to their servers every 24 hours. If it doesn't have an active internet connection, it will attempt to dial out through the modem if a phone line is connected. Newer Dells and IBMs actually store the tracking agent in the systems BIOS, so unless they plan on changing the motherboard out they're out of luck. We use this at my workplace quite extensively now, and have even used it to track "missing" laptops successfully. Check out their website for more info: http://www.absolute.com/