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Thief Returns Stolen Laptop Contents On USB Stick
While it's true that Sweden is responsible for unleashing IKEA and ABBA on humanity, not everything they produce is terrible. Their thieves are some of the most considerate in the world. An unnamed professor at Umeå University received a USB stick with all his data after his laptop was stolen. From the article: "The professor, who teaches at Umeå University in northern Sweden, was devastated when ten years of work stored on his laptop was stolen. But to his surprise, a week after the theft, the entire contents of his laptop were posted to him on a USB stick. 'I am very happy,' the unnamed professor told the local Västerbottens-Kuriren newspaper. 'This story makes me feel hope for humanity.'"
His butt was saved by an unusually considerate thief, but I hope he learns his lesson and makes backups of his life's work on a regular basis. There's really no excuse for losing 10 years worth of work because your laptop was stolen. What if the thing caught on fire? Or the hard drive self destructed? It's ridiculous not to back up something that important.
I read the internet for the articles.
That phrase doesn't mean what you think it means
What makes you think the thief returned it? He probably took the cash and tossed it and some university groundskeeper found it in the bushes and returned it.
USB sticks hold around 8GB of data now, on average. 8GB is a lot of raw numbers, text, or source code.
Unless you're taking video, audio recordings, or taking a shitload of high-res photos as part of your research, 8GB can easily cover a decade's work.
Reminds me of what my old computer science teacher used to say:
Remember: Real men don't take backups. But they do cry a lot.
Life is Reality
There are PLENTY of autorun.ini based trojans that spread thanks to many versions of windows insane desire to interpret autorun without asking. What's more, with the default settings, the victim would never even see the trojan files.
Even turning off autorun isn't enough.
If you're interested:
http://windowssecrets.com/2007/11/08/02-One-quick-trick-prevents-Autorun-attacks
I set these registry settings on every family member's PC.
I started looking at these, and realized, "why do I even need a CD player in my car anymore?". So I did another search and found there are a few models that have no CD player (or DVD) at all, and are just "digital media receivers". You'd think that these models would be cheaper, since they can dispense with the CD/DVD mechanism, but noooo, they're actually rather expensive compared to the models that play CDs, MP3 CDs, and have front USB ports.