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Burglar Nabbed By Backup Program

Posted by samzenpus on from the stupid-is-as-stupid-does dept.

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."

4 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. A product here? by jimmyhat3939 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The question is whether there's some product that could be installed for this specific purpose. Laptops with webcams seem like they'd be a reasonable target. Also, I seem to recall something being installed right into the bios to facilitate this sort of recovery. Or even something involving MAC addresses. Most thieves aren't smart enough to change those, and on a laptop I'm not sure you could even really do that in hardware (though I know you can do it in software, on linux at least)

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    1. Re:A product here? by Twinky · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I do sincerely hope your girlfriend knows about this. Does she?

    2. Re:A product here? by dangitman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Since this is /., 1 cron job and an addition to your /etc/rc.local(or distro equiv.) would do the trick.

      Unless it's a Mac, as soon as the thief discovers it has Linux installed, he's going to wipe the system and install Windows, and cron or your scripts won't be available.

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      ... and then they built the supercollider.
    3. Re:A product here? by Jjeff1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes, there is a product, computrace makes a product that is installed at the BIOS level on a lot of corporate level laptops. Even if you replace the hard drive, it reinstalls itself.