Burglar Nabbed By Backup Program

Bruce Perens writes "A Berkeley, California, burglar engineered his own arrest, and that of his girlfriend, when he stole a laptop and used it as his personal computer. He didn't realize that the laptop had an automatic backup program, and that the photos he took were being copied to his victim's backup repository. Berkeley police recognized him, and his location, from the photos."

Comments

Re:A product here?

[Nikker]

Since this is /., 1 cron job and an addition to your /etc/rc.local(or distro equiv.) would do the trick. You could first use mencoder to capture and video sources (using command line it will take snaps at intervals all on its own) and rsync as you cron job taking the diffs of the whole drive to online storage, bonus points to trigger a sync the moment the network route becomes available. Nifty idea would be to set up a gmail account and use it to store incremental backups rather than the original image, 7-8 GB of diffs could likely go a long way.

Well that's just stupid

[drsquare]

You don't use the laptop you steal, you sell it down the pub or gut it for parts.

Amateur.

Re:Getting to be a cliche

[Dr_Barnowl]

If the owner was complying with the Windows EULA, the license sticker was firmly applied to the computer, so he only needs a install disk ; the serial number is already there.

Re:Which backup program

[David Gerard]

Cygwin does crontabs very nicely to do all sorts of Unixy things. It's a fantastic way to make a Windows box halfway sanely usable. Particularly if you set up sshd.