Slashdot Mirror
"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."
How long before the paparazzi start arranging for Macs to be "won" by celebrities or "given" to them as "thanks". For that matter how long before a stalker arranges such a prize/gift?
;P
With this having been posted to Slashdot, Natalie Portman is going to wonder where all those Macs and cases of instant grits came from.
for that matter, why is it showing a countdown at all??
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The LED is probably sitting across the power lines to the camera. Camera has power = LED is on. there is no non-physical way to disable it.
Personally, I have Undercover installed on all my and my siblings laptops.
I wish the guy that wrote the command line tool (iSightCapture) to take photos would either release the source or make some updates. A video capture CLI tool would be awesome.
I'm thinking of writing my own poor man's Undercover using cron, bash scripts and curl. Attempt to curl a website which I have access to, all the website does is return a 1 or a 0. (Stolen, not stolen). If anything gets taken just update my website and next time my Mac connects to the net, it gets what it needs.
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.
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]-
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!
That's because no one knows. No matter how good or how bad he was, he would still be awarded every prize there was.
Titicus (spelling?), the historian,Tacitus, Annals 15.38-44. Accounts are also given by Cassius Dio book 62, and Suetonius' Life of Nero.
He rushed down, helped to fight the fires, gave shelter, and provided food at either a discounted or free rate. I'm not entirely sure if it was free or discounted and I lack the initiative to look this stuff up.Not everyone is as lazy. Tacitus continues after the passage you refer to (15.39), "These acts, though popular, produced no effect, since a rumour had gone forth everywhere that, at the very time when the city was in flames, the emperor appeared on a private stage and sang the Sack of Troy, comparing present misfortunes with the calamities of antiquity." The same story is given by Suetonius and Cassius Dio, who appear to have used different evidence for their accounts, making it all but certain that the story is pretty accurate.
What did happen is that Nero used this fire to persecute the Christians but that was after the fire when the people were looking for someone to blame.Based on the evidence of Tacitus, Cassius Dio, and Suetonius, there is a possibility, albeit slim, that he was entirely accurate in this allocation of blame.