Slashdot Mirror
What Is the Best Way To Track Stolen Gadgets?
An anonymous reader writes "Now that gadgets can determine their location and phone home, many companies are creating tools for finding lost and stolen gadgets. It sounds like a simple process, but this NY Times article describes a number of wildly different approaches. Some report all of the information back to the owner while others deliberately keep the owner in the dark to avoid dangerous confrontations. Some start grabbing pictures from the web cameras and logging keystrokes. Others just record IP addresses. Some don't do anything but record serial numbers to make it easier for the police to do their job. Are sophisticated systems dangerous because the tracking mechanisms could be misused to violate the privacy of the owner? Are the stakes different when a company purchases the software and gives the IT manager the ability to track everyone in the company? What are the best practices that are emerging? What should I recommend if my boss reads this article and wants to track our laptops and Blackberries?"
Some gadget, sure
You'd like to track.
What of that fur
Ever growing back?
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
If you love something, let it go.
If it doesn't come back, it never was yours.
We'd only have to snuff a few out. It'd make the nightly news, there'd be righteous outrage, and it'd blow over. People would tiptoe past that random laptop sitting unattended at Starbucks forevermore.
The webcam thing is okay and so is the tracking by IP. I like the getting even approach. Use GoToMyPC and mess with them. I live in a college town so the thief might be a student. I can log in and delete their term papers, or better yet edit them by inserting misspellings, incorrect facts, and lifting quotes from wikipedia and pasting them into the term paper unattributed. The term paper will have the name, the class, and the instructor listed on the upper righthand corner and I can visit the student before class and retrieve my laptop.
Ninjas
. . . they got more than just the suspect's fingerprints . . they got the whole fingers!
(Scene: A guy with a bandaged hand sitting in the police interrogation room. A detective walks in and tosses a package on the table.)
"Hey, Luigi, are these your fingers?"
"Never seen them before in my life, pal!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Have a program on it hit a server on your site for instructions, automatically. If it's ever stolen, report it stolen, then instruct it to hit known FBI child porn honeypots after erasing the program which contacts your own website. You won't get the gadget back, but you'll get to know the thief got punished way out of proportion to his crime.
My laptop has a Sony battery. It will catch fire shortly after being stolen. Or before. Whatever.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News