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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."
Ah, yes. Very secure the Macintosh is.
What?
Yep ! Viola is french for rape. And voilà is written with an accent.
You use CMD+SHIFT+3 to take a screen shot on a Mac. Then again, it saves it to a file on the desktop, and not to the clipboard.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
Its part of Photobooth, its to warn you its going to take a "flash" picture for icons or whatever. It flashes by turning the screen brightness up all the way and turning it white for a second. The countdown is an an aid to compose your pictures, I don't think stealth photos is quite what Photobooth is meant for.
That goes all the way back to the original 128K Mac, when you had a few special commands wedged in there. If I recall correctly, Apple-shift-1 (and 2) ejected the floppy, and 3 was the picture and 4 did something else (maybe actually print it.)
If it were funny, sure, but the joke just fell flat.
Like most computers with built-in webcams, the MacBooks feature a prominent green LED that lights up when the camera is in use. This LED cannot be disabled in software. If Apple were actually spying on people with their computers' built-in cameras, someone would have noticed, fast.
Command+Shift+Ctrl+3 copies to the clipboard.
Also, Command+Shift[+Ctrl]+4 gives you a reticle to do a rectangular selection before copying to the desktop/clipboard.
OMG! Wau!
And using TinkerTool or other such applications you can change it to be:
PNG, PDF, TIFF, PICT, JPEG, JPEG 2000, BMP, GIF, PSD, CGI or TGA.
You don't *have* to use the .Mac to do this, there are numerous different scripts people have made/thought of using the built in camera.
Taking iSight photos during invalid login attempts
Take photos via cron every 5 minutes
Take a photo everytime the lid is opened (Includes all of his pictures.
Undercover does this sort of thing. It transmits network information, screenshots, and pictures from Macs with iSights. http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/
*blinking cursor*
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.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
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!
in this case, the 'victim' had her IM automatically sign in whenever the laptop went online, and she got a call from a good friend, congratulating her on getting her laptop back. But the thing is, the laptop owner was paying '$99 a year' for the 'ability' from any 'mac' to sign in and control the computer from anywhere (including, taking a photo and sending it over IM)
now, you could have a an automatic program to upload to a web server, but in this case, the owner used a subscription service from apple to gain control of the camera remotely, and snap a picture, ironically, the laptop starts a timer , and he tried to raise his hand to obscure the camera, but apparently, the picture is taken too fast for a person to realize what's going on.
just the picture the cops said would have been useful in catching the crook (they would have given copies to the places that fence stolen stuff, and they'd call the cops while 'figuring out the value' of the goods before they knew what was happening... it's a crime to purchase stolen goods after all) but in this case, the person was an acquaintance of their roommate, so they went to the cops to tell then who had the stuff, before they had even fenced the goods.
so apparently, you should fence your stolen laptops without hooking them to the internet. (and with automatic wireless networking and people with open networks, that might be hard in some cities if you even turn it on)
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
(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.