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Ask Slashdot: Anti-Theft Products For the Over-Equipped Household?
First time accepted submitter Dufflepod (3656815) writes "After yet another hardware purchase last week, I realized with some alarm just how drastically an enterprising burglar could increase the crapulence quotient of my life if they ever made off with my hardware. The house is alarmed, but much to my annoyance it isn't always set when people go out for any length of time. Ideally I want to 'alarm' the expensive items among my various PCs, UPS, NAS box, test equipment, and some of the sundry other gadgets & gizmos I require to stroke my inner geek. Over the past few days I have spent hours Googling for every combination of "anti-theft perimeter alarm radius motion detector vibration wireless" etc etc.. I have found various possible solutions, though the cost of some of them does make my eyes water (eg SonicShock @ €150/box). Has anyone out there decided to bite-the-bullet and protect their kit with decent alarms, and do you have any suggested 'do's & don'ts'?" So how would you secure valuable items, as opposed to securing the entire place?
Yeah, don't.
You can install FindMyWhatever on some items, but for the most part, you're wasting your time.
Thieves look for targets of opportunity. Make your home less friendly. Place a camera in plain view and out of reach. Put up a beware of Doug sign and get a Glock window decal.
If someone comes for your electronics specifically, it's an inside job. You can avoid that by screening your friends better.
In the meantime, just do regular backups offsite.
Backup your data. Everything else can easily be bought for the price of a few years security.
1) Very consistent off site backups for data
2) Full inventory of items you own
3) If theft occurs, use home owners insurance to get your money back. You'll probably end up with a free hardware upgrade in the process.
What is better?
a) 100% chance of giving up your time and money now securing your items.
vs.
b) (very low)% chance of having to give up time if a theft does occur
The cost of securing your items may balance out any deductibles you have to pay to have home owners insurance cover the lost items.
A loud noise sounds! Your neighbours all ignore it - probably a false alarm - and the burgler goes about his business. Even if someone does call the police, plenty of time to grab the obvious valuables and load up his car to escape before the police could arrive. It can't hurt, but don't depend on it.
Some sort of camera system recording to a remote server (encrypted, of course) might help. It wouldn't deter any thieves, because they wouldn't know about it, but it would give you some tiny sliver of hope getting things back. Maybe you'll get lucky and the police will recognise someone with priors. Don't expect them to send out the forensics team and run prints against the database unless you are rich and/or famous, but it'd be better than nothing.
Also, offsite records of all serial numbers, and apply indelible security marks in visible places. Good for patrolling eBay to see if your stuff turns up, proving ownership and such. Plus you can report it to the manufacturers, who usually have a list of stolen serials - that way if the sucker who buys the stolen goods ever tries to get a warranty claim it'll be flagged.
But I guarantee you that any security system that actually prevents theft should cost you more money than reasonable insurance would cost. It should also cost more money than the thing you are protecting. You know those Storage Wars shows? When they find a safe, it it usually worth more than what is inside it.
If insurance costs more than the stuff is worth, than that means you live in a high crime area and should move someplace safer.
But in the USA or other stable country, under no circumstance should it ever be a cost effective to secure your home possessions. Insurance should always make more sense.
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does not mean what you think it means. If you don't know what it means, don't use it.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
First of all, you balk at the cost of some of these solutions - yes, they are expensive and yes, they'll be mostly for added assurance that IF someone breaks in and IF the alarm wasn't set and IF the thief is even interested in it and IF the thief then decides to take it (lot's of if's). If your setup is mobile (eg. you're a DJ or mobile contractor) then those solutions are useful. But for the rest, they are merely added insurance and typically useless.
I'd say, use an alarm system that you can connect to (some of the DIY systems do run Linux) and use some type of motion sensing timeout to set the alarm or use BT to check if someone is still in the house etc. etc.. There are a lot of cheap and creative solutions to this problem.
Most thieves won't break in if you have an alarm (sticker), there are other, lower hanging fruit. A thief won't break in when you have a dog (again with the fruit thing). A thief will only take what's small and valuable (what's easily sold, what's easily carried). Most thieves aren't smart nor tech savvy and doesn't know that little black box costs $5000 but they'll sure destroy it regardless of whether there is an alarm attached to it (especially if there is an alarm attached to it).
I'd say, stop worrying, take backups of your data off-site, get homeowners or renters insurance. The laptops/tablets/phones will disappear in any case, the UPS/PC/NAS most likely won't unless there is a group and they are actively clearing out the entire house (posing as movers to the neighbors). Thieves are also very destructive so regardless of what they take, they may destroy whatever you're trying to protect and a destroyed NAS is just as good as a stolen NAS. Theft recovery systems don't work because the police won't put in the legwork (see the recurring stories on MacBooks and iOS devices being located by the customer). The insurance will pay you back for the 'stuff', they can't recovery your data however and that is the case for fire, flood and other damage as well.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Not too sure about this. I do not know the statistics, but all competent thieves know how to handle dogs, even packs of big dogs are no trouble for the determined thief. Sometimes in fact is is better to go with the tiny loud ones.
But I hear people really interested in protecting their shit are getting Emus, Emus are very territorial, and no one comes prepared to fight off a hyper aggressive 200 pound turkey (which can outrun them 3 times over). They also survive very well after getting shot, apparently, for some reason.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Try to get the other occupants to set the alarm when you are away. Get an alarm that has the ability to set it via a cell phone. Keep your bushes and shrubs cut back and don't give would be thieves a place to hide. Also choose prickly bushes up close to the house. Good out door lighting. Motion detector activated lights are good as it won't piss off the neighbors as much and save electricity. Also make sure the lights are high enough that someone can't just unplug or disable them.
Don't put stickers on your house advertising you have guns, or what brand alarm you are using. Guns are a popular theft item. More so than your computers I would guess. Having an ADT sticker (or what ever brand alarm) simply tells a good thief what they need to do to circumvent your alarm. Most ADT alarms can be defeated by simply cutting the phone line. Almost none have a cellular card in them.
I don't know if you or your family are dog people, but dobermans are fantastic family dogs. I have one who is very well trained. He's very friendly to people when I tell him it's OK. But Allah, God, Buda, Eris, Xenu help you if you come in the house uninvited. I also have two other dobermans who are not as well trained as he is, but they follow his lead. When he doesn't like something, they don't either.
the house is alarmed, but much to my annoyance it isn't always set when people go out for any length of time.
Shock therapy ought to solve this.
You just have to remember to shock them right after they fail to set the alarm, or they won't make the connection between the unwanted behavior and the punishment.
Security systems might be worthwhile for your own safety, but not for protecting against burglary. Unless you're very lucky, response times pretty much guarantee anyone will be in and out before the police have even dispatched a unit.
What you need isn't security; it's insurance. It's cheaper than monitored security systems, more dependable, and doesn't suffer from the risks of technical failures or circumvention (though ignoring it is more likely than circumvention). In the event of a burglary, your things will be replaced. (Make sure your policy covers replacement cost, not depreciated market value). And keep your important data backed up!.
(Disclaimer: YMMV, and selecting a policy requires due diligence.)
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I know it is not what you are asking, but the much more simple solution is to just get a decent renters / home owners insurance policy with a premium that you can afford and a level of coverage that will allow you to replace everything. The added benefit is that if you need to replace it, the odds are the old gear will no longer be available and you will get to purchase newer, better gear. FWIW, my renter's insurance policy with State Farm costs me something like $150 every six months, and has up $20,000 in coverage. That's more than enough to replace a couple of computers and some television sets.
If your concern is data loss, you are approaching this the wrong way. You protect against data loss with offsite replication.
I think it's important to keep in mind that there's a point at which "more security" stops making sense and "more insurance" becomes a better option. I've had clients get overly-obsessed with security, trying to buy software that can locate/control your lost/stolen items remotely, locking everything down for physical security, etc. Then when they look at the project to secure everything, I point out that it'd be easier to insure everything instead. Along with everything else, there's no perfect security. You could go through all the effort and expense of securing things, and it could still get stolen.
Aside from that, consider whether you can just reinforce security around a closet and lock everything in there. And then train people to arm the house alarm before leaving. Even the most secure door isn't going to keep your house secure if people keep propping it open.
Alarms simply tell you you've been robbed.
A far more effective strategy is to ensure that anyone entering your house uninvited will find it impossible to stay long enough to steal your stuff.
To do this, you want lots of *internal* sirens that run at 120dB+.
If the intruders ears start bleeding as soon as they enter the building, they will retreat at a very hasty pace.
That's how my alarms are configured. They ring me over the cellular network and generate an internal sould level that is intollerably loud (as I have discovered on the two occasions I forgot to disarm the system myself) :-)
If he's going to get your iPad he might as well take some life-long hearing damage with him :-)
No, much too simple..
Set up webcams all around the house, each tied to a raspberry pi, with wired interconnects (bad guys might have jammers), and battery backups. Run all the images to a central image processing facility where you do image recognition and recognize the pieces of equipment, and calculate their exact position by comparing among multiple views. Develop an algorithm that looks for "theft" type movement of the device (as opposed to dog pulling it off the shelf or earthquakes), and when that algorithm detects a potential theft, you retrieve the previous history of images from within your abode and apply another feature extraction algorithm to find all the people, do facial and/or gait recognition against a database to identify the perpetrator. Since you already have a complete RF monitoring system set up (I assume), you can go and figure out what the cellphone number of the perp is by looking at the IMEI in the messages it sends and cross referencing it. Then, you can send the police the GPS coordinates of the perp's cellphone.
There *Is* a fair amount of computation required here, so some sort of UPS operated beowulf cluster will probably be required to do the image processing (or you could purchase cloud services).
All of the software needed is available as open source, although it is likely you'll have to do a bit of configuration (not all of it is for the same distros.. you might need to run a bunch of VMs, or fix the build files appropriately), and there's probably some minor bugs in the software you'll need to fix (curse those grad students who do 95% of the work, get their thesis approved, and then abandon their software, leaving the 5% which is inevitably the part you need to have working). You might need to write some glue scripts and some simple bash, perl, awk, and sed scripts. But hey, if you were some lame script kiddy or wanted a turnkey solution, you'd be looking for a MS product, and we know better. You want to get down and dirty with the metal of the system.
So, once a burglary has got in to your house most of the problem has already occurred. Even if your insurance pays there is a major inconvenience in making the claim, fighting the assessment and getting the repairs performed to your satisfaction. Best to prevent the whole possibility of that happening.
How do you keep bad people out of your house? Alarms, cameras (oh joy! you can watch the video of your home being wrecked), trackers - all irrelevant and with little deterrent value. If you want to stop people even trying to get in to your home, get a dog. A big, noisy dog.
If you can't get a dog (here comes the geek bit), get a recording of a dog. Hook it up to a PIR and an Arduino and have it play when anyone approaches the property. If you can arrange a stereo playback, process the soundtrack to make it appear as if the dog is moving around the house. If you want to go for extra "realism", rig up a weight attached to a motor that thumps the front door - the higher up the door, the bigger the dog appears to be - as if the dog had its paws on the door. You need LOUD and you need LONG. A recording that stops after a few seconds won't convince anyone. Especially if it replays exactly the same track each time.
Finally, keep the pitch of the barking low. Nobody's scared of a squeaky little mutt. But if you slow it down, the animal sounds a lot larger and scarier.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Have steel-hardened doors, etc. If it looks like difficult access, they will go to neighbor. Just don't leave door open, garage-door open, etc. Build a safe room. Work from home, don't go on vacation, and only have food delivered. Screen all food with a paid food tester. I just make sure I have crappier stuff than neighbors.
The first and best way to avoid being robbed.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
They stole his printer!
John
Also sign that says, "beware of dragon"
http://books.google.com/books?...
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Burglars mostly look for easy to sell, small, valuable items : cash, jewelry, etc... They usually won't stay longer than a few minutes.
Do you really think a burglar will bother with a UPS or any of these big, heavy, boxes that only a few people want ?
They may however damage some of your stuff as they mess around your house searching for hiding places but anti-theft products won't help you with this.
As for the remaining cases : insiders and real professional burglars who know exactly what to take, unless you become completely paranoid, you won't stop them.
So : backup your data offsite, get a good insurance, do the minimum so that you are not the low hanging fruit (basically what is mandated by most insurance contract), keep calm and carry on.
But just to be sure, don't store your angle grinder near it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Data. Use an offsite backup service or do like me and set up an offsite backup with rsync over ssh to a remote location under your control. All my drives or home folders are encrypted so even if the boxes do get stolen I won't have to worry as much. As long as my data is safe who cares about hardware that insurance will pay to replace?
This strategy also protects you from floods, fires, etc. Not just theft.
Actually, I see a plan forming here.
If you have a gun sticker in your window, the crooks won't bother with your electronics, but will head directly for the gun safe (it IS in a safe, right?)
Put a sign on the safe saying intruders will be shot (might as well warn them) and then rig it so that anyone opening the safe (which helpfully has the key taped to the top) will trigger the firearm aimed out the door.
Do like schools and get a steel case to bolt the equipment to the furniture. Steal the computer? Only if you're able to walk out with the entire desk.
Cranky educator.
I, too, spend years living in a pretty rough neighborhood. (Two houses down from me, someone ran an old Chevy through the middle of a guy's living room on purpose, because he wasn't happy with the drugs they sold him. A few houses down the street, the other direction, I heard a single gunshot -- and found out the next day the guy had an argument with his wife and decided to make sure he had the last word, using his shotgun.)
In 6 years there, though? I never had anyone break in once. (Some teenagers did steal my lawnmower that was sitting on the back porch, but I heard later that was going on all over town as a group of kids figured out they could make some quick money reselling the engines to repair shops.) I solved that by chaining up its replacement with a bike chain to the railing going up my back porch steps.
The whole time, I was known as the "computer guy" in the neighborhood and had expensive systems set up at home. So why wasn't I ever targeted?
I didn't waste time or money on an alarm system. (Heck, my next-door neighbor had ADT and he was still burglarized twice.) The biggest thing that helped in my case was making good friends with my neighbors on both sides of my place and letting them know if I was going to be gone for any length of time. Most burglaries really are "inside jobs", at least in the sense that the burglar knows something about the situation. If they get the idea that someone's usually home at your place, they'll choose a different target. (Most thieves aren't thrilled about the idea of having to commit armed robberies instead. They'd rather not up the ante quite that high.....) Additionally, if they get the idea your neighbors actually watch out for you -- they'll go elsewhere. Ideally, they want a place where they can park a vehicle and load it up with your stuff, and nobody will notice or care.
I agree that some cameras can't hurt though. If you're into computers anyway, surely you can rig up a few wi-fi webcams with night vision to watch over your vehicle in your driveway and so forth, and automate it so it only records when it sees motion. Cheap insurance. Probably also helps if you have a loud, barking dog -- but I didn't even do that.
....your intruder is a deaf guy!
And a dog will probably bring some perspective into your life, make you care a little less about all that stuff.
So what you're saying is, after all your nice things have been either chewed up, knocked over, or peed on by your dog it won't bother you as much when they get stolen?