Slashdot Mirror
Delete Data On Netbook If Stolen?
An anonymous reader writes "I have just moved overseas on a 2-year working holiday visa and so I picked up a netbook for the interim, an MSI Wind U100 Plus running WinXP. I love it to bits. But as I am traveling around I am somewhat worried about theft. Most of my important stuff is in Gmail and Google Docs; however, I don't always have Net access and find it useful to gear up the offline versions for both. Ideally I would like to securely delete all the offline data from the hard drive if it were stolen. Since it is backed up in the cloud, and the netbook is so cheap I don't really care about recovery, a solution that bricks it would be fine — and indeed would give me a warm glow knowing a prospective thief would have wasted their time. But it's not good if they can extract the HD and get at the data some other way. All thief-foiling suggestions are welcome, be they software, hardware, or other."
set up a scheduled task to wipe the drive unless you cancel it. Then don't forget to cancel it.
The answer to your problem is whole disk encryption, not trying to delete the data.
Feh. Your so-called answer does not include the word 'thermite' or the phrase 'earth-shattering kaboom'. And you call yourself a geek?
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Where's the ka-boom. There was supposed to be an earth shattering ka-boom.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
the part where the original poster said "Running WinXP" may not have made it all the way in.
I despise answers that randomly suggest competing products without really answering the question. It's like "My lawnmower won't start" and "Well, if you had goats, then you could feed them a different feed to make them more motivated." Try to advertise less and answer the frakking question more, MMkay?
The correct answer is truecrypt for Windows XP then simply encrypt the drive and voila! No password no data. But I can't think of any other way to totally brick it and still have it legal to travel with. After all customs tends to frown on C4, even if all you are doing is trying to teach thieves a valuable lesson in respecting peoples property.
Of course if you really wanted to make them suffer you could keep a small DOS partition and have it set to load in case of incorrect password and then use a batch file to play slides of Goatse and Tubgirl and maybe a few choice selections from 2 girls one cup, while playing a wav file of that damned annoying frog full blast on endless loop, but I think you may risk getting arrested for crimes against humanity. But I'm sure after the thief was done throwing up and washing out his eyes with bleach a valuable lesson would be learned.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.