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"Back To My Mac" Catches a Thief
robipilot writes "Mac stolen, Mac comes online, owner connects using 'Back to My Mac,' owner takes picture of culprit, and voila, criminal caught. OK, it wasn't quite that simple, but here's an interesting story of using some built-in technology on the Mac to recover a stolen laptop."
Thousands of peepholes for the guys in Cupertino to look through...
What?
I'm curious to know how would taking a picture of a musical instrument help in this matter...
Mac thieves are dumber than mac users? I guess that makes sense...
:o)
Hey now. Put your lattes back on stun. Don't be too offended by the joke -- that means I'm right.
Glad to see all those silly little programs aren't so silly after all.
Takes picture without the user knowing it? Wooow... most windows boxes do that and more every day for years
and a flower
and a "minor planet"
and my mum's name
Please explain what the features built into Windows are that would provide such advantage.
Yeah. I thought so. I am not saying Mac OS X is better, I am simply stating that your post is ignorant, stupid, and lacks a decent point.
Yep ! Viola is french for rape. And voilà is written with an accent.
Anyone else a little concerned that this could be used to spy on you if it becomes compromised?
would the original poster mind putting up an article that is locked behind registration !
Wouldn't the first thing you'd want to do is format the machine? I highly doubt this laptop would have been returned if some basic ... maintenance... had been preformed. And for the extra paranoid... purchase a new system board would all but guarantee the thing would never come back.
This makes me think a good idea would be to have some software running on my laptop that invisibly records it's IP address to a log file on an external server. This should be enough in most cases to get a pretty good idea of the location of the laptop when the thief boots it. Might even lead to an exact location if the ISP was forthcoming. Has this idea been thought of? Is it in use? Obvious problems with the idea?
so whats to stop a unruly script kiddie from gaining access to your mac and noting your account info or watching personal activities with your wife/hubby. it's great the bandit got busted but i don't feel good about that kind of remote access. just my 2 cents worth
did something like this in 2000. See p. 15 of this 3 MB zipped Powerpoint.
See also P-p-p-Powerbook! for a possible laugh.
#!
I know, this being Slashdot we have to worry about the privacy issues, compare the Mac to somebody's Vista laptop, disparage the cops, fret about security in general, and not fail to point out that a viola is indeed a stringed instrument.
But there's just something so damned satisfying about imagining these two thugs being caught red-handed with the loot. There's the impression of the victim realizing that she may be onto something. Her "Now I've got you, you son of a bitch!" as the fatal snap takes place. The "Oh, shit" realization of the thief, probably followed by frantic thoughts of how he might go about flushing two widescreen TV's and assorted recreational electronics. The genuine gratification of being able to walk into the police station and say, "Here are photographs of the guys who ripped off our stuff, actually using some of our stuff, and we know who they are..." Perhaps then the THUD THUD THUD at the malefactors' door.
It's got all the elements of the classic cautionary tale, and just reading it should bring at least a brief and sarcastic smile to the face of anybody who's ever been robbed.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
It was nice of those guys to stand in front of her computer and pose for her like they were in mug shots. It's almost like they knew they did something wrong! Oh wait...
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Install faraday cage in macbook chop shop.
Alternatively, wear Nixon mask while chopping (I am not a crook!).
I can't remember the last time I forgot anything.
She took a picture of a viola?
Ok, wtf is this about Back to My Mac costing money to use? Since when does remote desktop to a machine and operating system you paid for require a subscription? Microsoft isn't the only evil son of a bitch.
Apple -= 6_666_666_666;
This has been done several times before, on Mac and other platforms. Does anyone remember the original backdoor software for windows 10 years ago?
This just looks like a bunch of Apple marketing hype. Nothing new here folks.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
a) She lives on Ridgeview Avenue.
b) She's at the edge of the city's downtown.
c) Many of the homes in the area have been renovated recently.
d) She lives in a colonial-style house.
e) The house is diagonally opposite a church.
If that's not enough info: One of the laptops was a Macintosh belonging to Kait Duplaga, who works at the Apple store in the Westchester mall and thus knows how to use all its bells and whistles. Just tail her from where she works.
The only info in this that's actually relevant is the fact that she works at an Apple store, and that's she did not wish to be interviewed. The rest is either a reporter padding an article with irrelevant information, or attempting to indirectly violate her right to privacy.
Either way, very poor journalism.
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
to get a good image in low light. If you use the capture method you might get a darkish and hard to see image.
But you use the snapshot function and it flares the backlight acting like a flash and you get a nice clearly lit image. Hence the countdown timer so you are ready for when it snaps your pic....
Which would you rather have in court?
and fuck alan alda, the fag.
at least he doesn't suck steve jobs dick.
and who the fuck would steal a mac but another fag? at least he'll enjoy getting fucked up the ass in prison.
she's captured proof of living descendants of homo neanderthalensis... I smell a Nobel!
I guess it was the Emperor Nero effect, so he needed a violin to chill out about his Mac being stolen.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is for this reason that i have OpenVPN and a running SSH server on my laptop.
And yes, the endpoint is firewalled off...so thieves shall not be sneaking into my network over it.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
In the early days of webcams I used to work for this tech company, the bos (a techofile) had just set up a webcam from his computer in the London office to his computer in the New York office. He then flow to New York, a cople of guys and I where working quite late, when I see this other junior guy sat in the boss's chair saying with his legs on the boss's desk imitating the boss's voice "I am the boss and I am gay". When suddenly the computer screen turned on and he saw the boss telling him "YOU ARE FIRED". It was so funny to see this guy's face! (in fairness, the boss was gay ...)
the thieves night in jail is now on a gay bondage site
scumbags
add to that that she took a photo instead of just using printscreen.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
No, "viola" doesn't mean anything in french. "Viol" means rape.
Undercover does this sort of thing. It transmits network information, screenshots, and pictures from Macs with iSights. http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/
*blinking cursor*
is this a mac ad?
hahahaha...
And yes, voilà IS written with an accent.
The thing is, most people haven't enabled a password to log into their computer or to wake it from sleep mode. It certainly is smart to have a login password, but the vast vast majority don't, and most also don't even realize that you [i]can[/i] have one.
Would "Back to my mac" work behind a router? I don't think it would.
I was thinking about something like this for a while, and this is a practical example, albeit, with different technology.
Did anyone see the movie, with Patrick Stewart, "Safe House?" To make a long story short, he has to enter a password every day to ensure an automated system does not activate. If he ever fails to enter that password, the system assumes he's dead and will let loose damaging blackmail that keeps him alive.
Anyway, a system like that would be very cool for home users. A small "safe house" program that gets run at startup that prompts for a password and gives you a number of tries. If the password is unsuccessful, the camera is activated, and web cam photos are sent to a known server when the network comes up, along with sound as well. Possibly key strokes and new documents web traffic and sites. All this happens quietly, in fact, there is no feedback as to the password being unsuccessful after the second try.
This information, along with the IP address, can be used to identify the thief and recover the property.
Well, it's the verb to rape (violer) at the third person of the simple past. A bit far fetched, but technically right...
I run Ubuntu on my home PCs and changed the default login screen to list the users. I created a 'Guest' account and in it's description I put 'Password = 123qwe' (not the real password). The assumption is that a burglar , not knowing much about OS'es, will want to use the PC and will choose the easiest path to gain access. When they turn the PC on the login screen gives them a list of users and an option of choosing "Guest Account with the Password shown. All household users have been told to *never* use this account and why.
This 'Guest' account is CharRooted and has Firefox, IM and other Internet clients all on the desktop but that's about it. Under the hood it opens up SSH, VNC, Terminal Server and every other conceivable way of gaining access. It starts a script that every 30 minutes emails my Gmail account with IP address and connection information. Also, logging on to this account invokes a 'Nuke' scrip that will DBAN type wipe the system if I don't deactivate it within 7 days.
It's not a perfect solution but it has all the capabilities and features of the subscription tracking services that can cost hundreds a year and it's all pretty easy to setup. If any thief steals my PC and uses it to connect to the Internet I will know everything about their connection and have full access to the machine. If it's truly lost and I can't regain control after they login, it self destructs.
Now that I thinks about it, this should be a Ubuntu package or at least a HowTO.
-[d]-
If you steal a computer, unless you are after its data, REFORMAT it first.
even if it doesn't have some sort of tracing, it might have a virus.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wow, "built-in technology on the Mac" makes it sound so important. I guess those brilliant inventors at Apple must have labored very hard to copy the idea of building in a camera above a laptop screen from Sony.
Or she had nothing on the computer she wanted to password protect. Why must a computer be password protected?
My laptop is password protected but all my personal data isn't on it anyway - thats what networks are for - so when I take my laptop on the plane if not carrying information about my finances with me.
IIRC, SGI did this back in the mid-90s. There had been many repeated computer thefts from the building and surrounding buildings, so they put some motion detection s/w onto an SGI Indy to record anything that moved. All Indy's shipped with a webcam - I think they were one of the first to do so.
Worked like a charm, apparently.
This was at their HQ in Reading, UK. I heard about this second hand, so I don't know the details.
Max.
This experience has taught me to never steal someone's macbook on the rare occasion I don't have electrical tape in my backpack.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
There are a million more things you can do on a PC than a Mac. If you don't know the difference you are either blind, or in a state of denial because you own a mac. Yeah. I thought so. I'm not saying 'vista' is any good, but ANY PC (laptop or desktop) is better. Simply stating that you do not seem to realize the awesome variety of capabilities of a PC compared to a MAC. Example? Do you have team fortress 2? lol. no. you just have e-mail.
I've already got my laptop making hourly requests to a non-existent image on a website I control. So if it ever goes walking, I might get an IP address from that. As someone pointed out, I might want to create a guest account, so that the thief would be willing to use the laptop as-is.
But what other sensory information does my laptop have? One thought: Wifi. Even before it connects, it can give you the names of wireless networks nearby. If you could somehow upload that list to a server you control, there is a small chance you might be able to wardrive your way to victory. But command-line wifi utilities seem to be rare. Any ideas?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to actually use a laptop you stole? I mean, the camera thing was funny, but even without it, it's not exactly a new story to hear of a stolen laptop tracked down once it was connected to the net.
Smart thieves fence their stuff and forget about it.
But she's an idiot who got her laptop back, Einstein.
Or maybe "knows how to use all the bells and whistles" has a different meaning for most people than it does for the Slashdot crowd?
All they are saying in this article is that she is smarter than the average word processor/email/web browsing computer user, not that she is some technical wizard.
Talk to the average person on the street, and they will think this is pretty impressive. They don't know what 'printscreen' is, they wouldn't know how to use remote access software, if they even knew it existed, and there's probably a surprising number of mac owners who don't even know what that "funny black square" (the camera) on top of their laptop does..
Did anyone see the movie, with Patrick Stewart, "Safe House?"
I don't know if it ever played in theatres - I found it in the bargain bin at a walmart - too bad, I thought it was a great little movie.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
There is a Linux program called 'motion' that works pretty good. http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Most laptops have a microphone (of dubious quality, but present nonetheless) - pipe that to a personal ShoutCast server or something along those lines. Odds are pretty good that the thief will have their name called at some point or another.
We care because I have it on good authority that women often use their Macs after having just come out of the shower, a good workout, being smeared in grits, rolling in Jell-O, bathing in whipped cream, and/or while do a self-breast exam. That's why we care!
You act like you haven't had your domain sqatted on by Jenny's Personal Co-Ed Webcam Sexperience after missing a payment that one time that it happened to me.
A Mac doesn't have a traditional PC-style BIOS. Instead what it has is called an EFI. EFI stands for Extensible Firmware Interface. This does essentially the same thing as BIOS.
Unless the owner has disabled alternate booting through the EFI, you can change anyone's Mac OS user password by booting with a Mac OS installer DVD and using a standard password utility to change the root password or any user password.
A program called Undercover will transmit pictures using the built-in iSight camera (with the green indicator light disabled - despite what other posters have said, you CAN transmit video and disable the indicator light in software) and also report back the public IP address of the illegitimate user. If the owner has disabled alternate booting through the EFI, this software is very difficult to remove.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Why didn't you tell me this a few days ago before my laptop was stolen!
I'm resigned to checking the local pawnbrokers and looking on ebay. Sad thing is that they didn't take the power cable so it's next to useless, this IBM Thinkpad R40e has 30 seconds of battery life (awesome ain't it)! That means the laptop is probably in a skip / river somewhere whilst I rue missing backing up last week!
But the fucking New York Times has screwed her over again. First the article describes what was stolen from her home (thanks for the inventory). Then it describes where she lives, including nearby landmarks! So now anyone else that might wants another crack at her place knows where to find it. Including friends and relatives of the accused!!
Nothing beats being made a victim for having a brain and knowing how to use it! Thanks so much NYT :(
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
The best way would be to fit a GPS module e.g. http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php?cPath=4_17
Mount it inside your laptop somewhere, hook it up to a serial header internally.
Write a small bit of code to send location to your website/email cc: police.
Some GPS modules have built-in cell phones- they can call you wirelessly, or you can call them for a location fix.
...for back to my mac.
Amoung the things a Mac can do, is run Windows in a window. But in this case, The Mac had enough hardware and software support to aid in its recovery. We know there are lojack programs out there we can buy for money and install. In this case, the built in support was goof enough. I suppose the thief is a VICTIM because he didn't authorize his picture to be taken? I am sorry they didn't post the thief's picture on the Internet. I LOL about the thought of the the thief realizing his picture was about to be taken. HA HA HA.
(Too lazy to lower my comment threshold) but if you're interested in setting up Back to My Mac without a .Mac subscription, check our this article.
Bark less. Wag more.
i was robbed a long time ago: someone climbed in the window of my apt & took my stereo & albums (yes, vinyl, it was that long ago;-)
after the sinking feeling subsided, i called a friend, who had just dropped in to visit the day before in the company of 2 friends of his, to commiserate...
he called back a few minutes later, told me that the 2 guys had just been with him when he took my call...they turned white when they heard i was calling & had 2 leave suddenly;-}
my friend gave me their names & car description, which i passed on the the cops, who stopped them 1/2 way back 2 pittsburgh in posession of my stuff, drugs & a gun...the next day i got my stuff back, and my friend & i learned all about the company 1 keeps;-}
But option-shift-k has always been a fine way to type the apple logo for those who cant stop calling it the "apple key."
-- thinkyhead software and media
Well, it worked out well for her in this instance. I would imagine that anyone wanting to make use of any such software as this, will also have to remove their login passwords. I guess i should put a big notice on my laptop saying finger print scanner, so that nobody will try to steat it (it is an IBM, so there is no chance they are getting in).
sorry everybody!
-mkb
If someone gains physical access to your Mac laptop it doesn't matter if you've set a password or not. They can connect its firewire port to another Mac and reboot it in Target mode to gain full access to the hard drive. They can start it up in single-user mode and set any password they want or change permissions on any files and folders.
The thieves had no savvy, that much is certain.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Bad argument. Try again, and at least study up before you give false support.
this reminds me of New Yorkers using cell phone cameras to help prevent rape and other crimes. i hope i never have to do this, but glad to know i can. - Georgia Giatras
good to know, good to know. Trent Decatur