I don't think that's a solution. As a law abiding citizen I'd only carry a gun if I was going to kill someone, all my friends have the same belief.
That is an interesting belief, nothing wrong with that -- but what you say further down concerns me.
I misplace my cellular phone all the time, if I carried a gun I'd probably ending up misplacing that a lot too. I don't wake up in the morning expecting to kill someone, even in self-defence, hence I never carry weapons.
I don't wake up in the morning expecting to fight a fire or pull a car out of a ditch, but I carry tow straps and an extinguisher in my truck. OTOH, if you feel that you are that unreliable and do not want to take responsibility for your own defense, then you shouldn't carry weapons.
When someone robs you, it tends to happen at an inconvenient time. If I had a lethal weapon built into my brain or something then maybe I'd use it at that time, but then when I go to a bar, get totally drunk and shoot someone as a joke, I mean that's not something I want to do. I cannot guarantee that I won't do that when I'm drunk, I don't think anyone can and thus guns are bad.
That is a rather simplistic view of the world. I have never done anything to hurt somebody 'as a joke' drunk or sober. I don't normally 'Get totally drunk', and my friends who have CHL's drink even less frequently. Statistics support the assertion that CHL holders are overall more responsible and law-abiding than the average citizen.
If I walked into a bar and even suspected anyone in there who might be drunk might have a gun even for self-defence, I'd walk straight out and go to another bar.
It's just like the 'Don't drink and drive' campaigns. If you are going out to get drunk, you find a designated driver.
I certainly agree that crackheads (not cokeheads, crystal coke is an expensive, upscale drug; related thefts tend to be of the white-collar variety)
A lot of "white collar crime" is committed to fund a "white collar drug habit", primarily coke. That includes a huge percentage of in-house corporate laptop shrinkage.
If it wasn't so tragic, I'd make some quip about how London deserves this sort of result after turning themselves into a nation of disarmed victims. But no city 'deserves' a high crime rate, even if they have instituted the equivalent of "OSHA for criminals"
Maybe in your picket fence suburb you can afford to kick a criminal's ass, but over here it's becoming real risky business.
Compare your london carjacking story with the stories about
this Louisiana law, where even the staunchest oppponents of the change admit that it has a deterrant effect.
So even if I hear that laptop alarm go off I'm gonna ignore it and take the insurance.
Is this the obligatory "guns don't kill people" post? If so, thanks for doing it without the usual cliches.
You're welcome.
For some real enlightenment, check out the statistics on the percentage of murder victims with cocaine in their bloodstream.
If there's any inference to be made here, I don't think it's that gun muggers have more self-discipline than knife muggers.
The unpopular inference is that firearms restrictions may actually increase the number of victims injured in these crimes.
It seems obvious to me that anybody who uses intentional injury as a form of communication would prefer a knife to a gun. Despite all the "just wing him" scenes in the movies, a shooter can't really control whether a gunshot is fatal. I don't know much about the professional standards in the your-money-or-your-life business, but unnecessary homicides would seem to be counterproductive.
According to the cops, such crimes are acts of desparation by addicts in withdrawal, so they are not entirely rational... but they also want an easy quiet crime that won't make the newspapers.
Laptops are a popular target because they are easy to turn into cash, and often left unattended. This makes them more attractive than say, a purse, which may or may not contain items of value.
I want to know what city/university this refers to, so I can avoid it like the plague.
Three guys grabbed him, showed him the knife and said "Play nice". They hailed a cab, put him in it, and said "Take us to your apartment," which he did.
These guys were obviously well-connected, given their total lack of concern about witnesses. I think the residents of this city have
problems that are a lot more serious and basic than laptop theft!
Agreed.
An interesting statistic -- generally an attacker with a knife is much more likely to cut a victim to 'show he means business' than an attacker with a gun. Generally, people attacked by a gun-wielding assaliant are less likely to be injured.
Even if it does work, the thief will know the alarm is activated so he'll pull out his gun and shoot you while he runs away. Or he might shoot you *before* he takes the laptop. I think I'll take the insurance payout instead;-)
That is bullshit. I used to hang out with Chicago cops -- "mugger shoots victim" is a rare story, and the truth is usually "mob hit disguised as mugging misreported by media".
Shooting people is noisy, messy, and tends to get a lot of investigative attention.
The average thief is some crackhead looking for an easy score so he can get his next fix, or the twichty low-level manager in the next cubicle over funding his cocaine habit (or covering his E-trade margin account losses).
In either case, snatch-and-grab robbers tend to be unarmed, and even armed robbers don't want to shoot you, they want an easy quiet getaway from a 'property crime' that likely won't even result in a police report.
It's a big step from "burglar" or "mugger" to "murderer". Even in the worst of the projects, few people are so far out of it that they will take that step for the hundred bucks your laptop will gain them.
... you might as well just put it into hibernate mode, it saves power, and let the BIOS password deal with the thief.
...
If you are going to walk away from the laptop then *take it with you* or use BIOS-protected APM.
The thief isn't going to care about the BIOS password, he just wants to hand it off to his fence for fifty or a hundred bucks. The fence will see that it powers up, then add it to a bulk lot of other laptops, which will go to a wholesaler that knows how to get around BIOS passwords.
Don't believe me? Buy your local beat cop a pint and ask him yourself.
This also brings up another problem with laptops. PCMCIA cards in general are quite easy to remove ...
A good crook could clear out a few thousand dollars worth of hardware in about 10 minutes, all inconspicuously since these things are quite pocketable.
Computer stores learned this the hard way. Used to be, when you went to the CDW showroom half the floor model laptops (locked down with a cable lock) would have been stripped of every removeable part, from hard drives to taking a screwdriver to the bottom access panel and stripping out the RAM.
Lately CDW locks the laptops up with this wire bondage cage that makes component removal more difficult, but you still see the occasional machine where a small hand has managed to wiggle out the 2.5 hard drive, etc.
My oldest laptop is designed so when the cable lock is in the 'security slot', you cannot remove the hard drive.
So does anyone know of ways to physically secure PCMCIA devices?
Some Toshiba models have two points to attach a cable lock, the second being below the (plastic) door that covers the PCMCIA slots. Attach a physically large security lock, and you block access to the eject button and/or the cards.
If you are protecting valuable hardware and/or data, consider requiring keycard+PIN for physical access to the server room.
Make sure you control all access, including the potential for intrusion from above and below -- dropped ceilings and raised floors often make an easy path for a skinny crook to get from a public area to a controlled location.
For around $1K in equipment you can set up four cameras, a quad combiner, and a time-lapse VCR system to provide a video record of everybody entering and leaving the room.
We've examined many different options to handle the camera monitoring and recording with a digital system, but there is no PC solution that comes close to the good old $200 surveillance VCR. Plus, videotape is going to be more acceptable when you need to involve law enforcement.
One last note -- make sure the VCR itself is in a seperate controlled access location. Not much point in a videotape record when the thief can simply eject your tape and walk off with the evidence.
If you are stuck with a space the size of a wiring closet, do what the professionals do with their wiring closets... install one or two "relay racks" (also known as "telco frames") and use those to mount your systems.
These are more limited in what you can mount, though with the right shelves they can fit some pretty big PCs.
My Targus bag looks more like a briefcase than a laptop case. Yeah, it does look "Professional" (or even pretentious), like a lawyer's case for briefs.
I'm very very happy with Targus -- not just the quality, but also the support (broke the strap two years after getting the bag, they sent a new, improved strap, for free).
The big drawback to Targus bags is that they are heavy. That is also their strength, as the bag takes a lot of abuse, saving the laptop inside from harm.
Speaking of a good way to keep a laptop from being stolen is to not put it in a bag that screams, "There's a laptop in this bag!" , I have a pile of clean old Compaq laptop bags without the laptops...
These bags scream "There is a Compaq Laptop in this bag!", though there isn't -- I give them to family members to use as briefcases, lunch bags, and even keep one in the back of my truck to hold my jumper cables.
Nobody has stolen my jumper cables or my nieces schoolbooks... yet.
Even for as few as four cabinets, it makes sense to do things right the first time.
Make sure everything is to CAT-5E specs!
Install a 24-port patch panel in each rack. Consider punching down at least 12 ports in each, if not all 24.
Run all of these connections back to a 'patch rack' or 'patch wall' and make all of your inter-rack and rack-to-desktop connections at this central location. Document all changes, and you are golden.
We run a pair of 20-amp circuits to hardwired 'plugmold' power outlet strips mounted to each rack, with the 'left' and 'right' side being fed from a distinct UPS and battery (two giant UPS systems, one giant diesel generator).
Thus every power strip has it's own circuit breaker, overloading any one will only take out half of the equipment in one rack.
There was a time when companies could ask for money and then have something delivered to it's customers.
Soon, this practise became standard all over the world and lots of people payed for things like TV and Radio. All non-physical in it's form, but yet valued highly enough for the consumers to spend their cash on it.
Except for the consumers who chose not to pay, and instead pirated the signals. People have been cracking PayTV mechanisms and distributing hardware 'free TV' solutions for decades.
The Internet did not 'cause' the consumer to start buying hack hardware for the pay services, it just accelerates the process and makes it easier for consumers to find the piracy hardware and purchase it without having to deal with their local mafia franchisee.
Re:User input could solve problems
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 2
Better yet, have 'moderator groups', where you can choose to trust the opinion of a moderator or team of moderators.
For example, I can choose to trust the opinions of the 'There is no god' moderation group, ensuring that any page that suggests otherwise has a negative weight attached.
There is a commercial solution for KVM-over-IP,
Raritan Paragon Telereach. We just bought a small installation recently, and it was not anywhere near cheap... but it does work.
This isn't just the 'Cat5 Video extender' product which has been around for years, this is something entirely new, with frame grabber and video compression, SSL, RADIUS authentication, etc.
The client runs only on MS-Windows 98+, at a minumum of 20Kbps. The server to be remotely controlled can be anything that supports VGA and PS/2 keyboards, including some Sun products.
So far, I have no complaints. We haven't tried all of the advanced features yet.
We have a happy medium here in Chicago at the ISPFH co-op.
While we offer DSL (and allow running servers on DSL, with static IPs), many members choose to colocate 1U or 2U servers to run their own web site(s).
This approach eliminates the reliability, latency and bandwidth issues that come from locating the server in your home, at the tail end of a DSL circuit. You get the same high-availability power, cooling, and connectivity as the managed services customers in the next room, at a fraction of the cost.
The biggest difference is that unlike hosting at home via DSL, turning up the bandwidth from 384K to X megabits is simply a matter of a cutting a larger check to the association, and a simple configuration change at the gateway router.
Each member gets a subnet (usually a/29) on a VLAN dedicated to their machine(s), with hard and soft bandwidth limits courtesy of Cisco's Rate Limit IOS Commands. This ensures that no one user can eclipse another, nor steal/spoof their IP addresses.
There are two major drawbacks -- This approach isn't cheap, and hardware upgrades and related repairs take some coordination for physical access to the shared rack space.
Re:Underclock your fans...
on
Mini-PC w/o Fans?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Good point -- also, a big slow fan will move as much air as a small fast fan, at lower decibels.
As a cheap alternative to a fan controller, I've been using these
PCB thermostats to control fans.
For a buck you get a little four-legged chip (fits standard 8-pin-DIP sockets) that closes a circuit when the temperature rises to around 75-80C.
Rated for 1A and 120VAC, more than enough for your average PC cooling fan. Just tack to the hottest chip(s) on your board with heatsink epoxy.
There are a number of drawbacks to using a laptop as a MiniPC:
No chance of ever installing a faster CPU.
Expensive and limited RAM options.
You're pretty much limited to the built-in hardware and what you can find/afford in PCMCIA cards. No PCI support.
Difficult and expensive to replace worn out parts (floppy, hard drive, etc).
The battery is probably dead, costly to replace, and some systems won't run without a battery installed.
I originally considered using a laptop in a MiniPC application, but I wasn't able to find any really good prices on a working laptop with a broken display, and was concerned that a laptop is much more likely to be stolen than a small beige PC box.
We ended up using the old DEC 'Multia' (Intel P100, not Alpha) due to the built-in SCSI and PCI bus. These are showing up cheap in bulk lots, and unlike the Alpha Multias, the Intel models do not need/have fans.
I have enough digital stuff, for various reasons, some not easily put into words, I prefer an analog watch.
I second the recommendation for a mid-price ($200-$400) titanium-cased watch with a kinetic, solar, or other self-powered mechanism.
I want a good-looking watch that would hold up to abuse, not too heavy, and nothing as flashy and expensive as a Rolex or Omega. I considered
both Seiko and Citizen, they each produce quality watches in titanium, with a variety of features and appearances.
My only regret is not upgrading to a model with the 'automatic calendar' feature, that automatically sets the day-of-month correctly.
All I'm saying is that somebody who really really wants to can fuck with a radio broadcast.
We've considered this, and done what we can to minimize the risks. While the WWIV transmission would be relatively easy to mess with (powerful directional transmitter aimed at my receiving antenna).
A GPS installation with the receiving antenna shielded from terrestial transmitters but with a clear view of the sky would be much more difficult to successfully attack without physical access directly to the antenna. You might be able to block my reception of the time code, but not spoof the wrong time with any degree of success.
While I'm not aware of any non-military receivers taking advatange of the feature, DoD receivers have anti-spoofing protection specifically designed to safe-guard against interference, jamming and falsified signals.
In our case, we have two GPS receivers, one in the central US, one on the west coast, they communicate with each other using authenticated NTP on a private WAN.
I'm no stranger to bootstrapping OSes on odd hardware (primarily NetBSD), and I have some experience with Linux, but it does seem that getting Linux working on an iPaq is particularly difficulty/tricky/risky/ill-documented.
For me to even be willing to try out Linux on any platform (after my many bad experiences with Linux over the past several years) is a stretch. Being able to 'dual boot' would go a long way toward making me (and probably many others) more comfortable with this experiment, reducing the perceived risk of turning the handheld into a very expensive brick.
It'd be great to have better mechanisms for configurations, particularly some means for handling inheiritance of default values, parsing for correctness, and change management.
There are are certain advantages to the current general way Unix software configuration files are handled. I'd hate to see these advantages lost in the name of making things 'easier' or 'more centralized'. Some of these advantages include:
Storage of configuration data in flat files, without the need to compile to another format before use.
Each independent application generally has just one or two configuration files, and settings for just that one application are thus easily migrated to another host/platform/etc.
Being decentralized, an error on automatic or manual editing of configurations for one application doesn't corrupt the configuration for all.
Most configuration file formats are both easily human-readable and machine-readable.
Configuration parsing does not rely on linking against a large, potentially insecure configuration file handler library.
Some of these strengths are also weaknesses- for example, having each programmer write his own configuration parser leads to many disparate security flaws as each author makes their own unique mistakes.
I've rescued a number of systems from otherwise-fatal low-level configuration errors by manuaully correcting the configration, either by mounting the drive on another system, or simply hex-editing the raw partition to replace the first character of the offending line with a '#'. I'd hate to lose this last-ditch rescue option.
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The difficult choice is what do do when having a couple of drinks with dinner...
If it wasn't so tragic, I'd make some quip about how London deserves this sort of result after turning themselves into a nation of disarmed victims. But no city 'deserves' a high crime rate, even if they have instituted the equivalent of "OSHA for criminals"
Compare your london carjacking story with the stories about this Louisiana law, where even the staunchest oppponents of the change admit that it has a deterrant effect. If things are that bad, why not leave? Why stay in a country where self-defense is a criminal act?There is some CPU overhead, but otherwise the mechanism is well-tested, stable, and secure.
For some real enlightenment, check out the statistics on the percentage of murder victims with cocaine in their bloodstream.
The unpopular inference is that firearms restrictions may actually increase the number of victims injured in these crimes. According to the cops, such crimes are acts of desparation by addicts in withdrawal, so they are not entirely rational... but they also want an easy quiet crime that won't make the newspapers.Laptops are a popular target because they are easy to turn into cash, and often left unattended. This makes them more attractive than say, a purse, which may or may not contain items of value.
Agreed.
An interesting statistic -- generally an attacker with a knife is much more likely to cut a victim to 'show he means business' than an attacker with a gun. Generally, people attacked by a gun-wielding assaliant are less likely to be injured.
That is bullshit. I used to hang out with Chicago cops -- "mugger shoots victim" is a rare story, and the truth is usually "mob hit disguised as mugging misreported by media".
Shooting people is noisy, messy, and tends to get a lot of investigative attention.
The average thief is some crackhead looking for an easy score so he can get his next fix, or the twichty low-level manager in the next cubicle over funding his cocaine habit (or covering his E-trade margin account losses).
In either case, snatch-and-grab robbers tend to be unarmed, and even armed robbers don't want to shoot you, they want an easy quiet getaway from a 'property crime' that likely won't even result in a police report.
It's a big step from "burglar" or "mugger" to "murderer". Even in the worst of the projects, few people are so far out of it that they will take that step for the hundred bucks your laptop will gain them.
The thief isn't going to care about the BIOS password, he just wants to hand it off to his fence for fifty or a hundred bucks. The fence will see that it powers up, then add it to a bulk lot of other laptops, which will go to a wholesaler that knows how to get around BIOS passwords.Don't believe me? Buy your local beat cop a pint and ask him yourself.
Computer stores learned this the hard way. Used to be, when you went to the CDW showroom half the floor model laptops (locked down with a cable lock) would have been stripped of every removeable part, from hard drives to taking a screwdriver to the bottom access panel and stripping out the RAM.
Lately CDW locks the laptops up with this wire bondage cage that makes component removal more difficult, but you still see the occasional machine where a small hand has managed to wiggle out the 2.5 hard drive, etc.
My oldest laptop is designed so when the cable lock is in the 'security slot', you cannot remove the hard drive.
Some Toshiba models have two points to attach a cable lock, the second being below the (plastic) door that covers the PCMCIA slots. Attach a physically large security lock, and you block access to the eject button and/or the cards.Make sure you control all access, including the potential for intrusion from above and below -- dropped ceilings and raised floors often make an easy path for a skinny crook to get from a public area to a controlled location.
For around $1K in equipment you can set up four cameras, a quad combiner, and a time-lapse VCR system to provide a video record of everybody entering and leaving the room.
We've examined many different options to handle the camera monitoring and recording with a digital system, but there is no PC solution that comes close to the good old $200 surveillance VCR. Plus, videotape is going to be more acceptable when you need to involve law enforcement.
One last note -- make sure the VCR itself is in a seperate controlled access location. Not much point in a videotape record when the thief can simply eject your tape and walk off with the evidence.
These are more limited in what you can mount, though with the right shelves they can fit some pretty big PCs.
I'm very very happy with Targus -- not just the quality, but also the support (broke the strap two years after getting the bag, they sent a new, improved strap, for free).
The big drawback to Targus bags is that they are heavy. That is also their strength, as the bag takes a lot of abuse, saving the laptop inside from harm.
Speaking of a good way to keep a laptop from being stolen is to not put it in a bag that screams, "There's a laptop in this bag!" , I have a pile of clean old Compaq laptop bags without the laptops...
These bags scream "There is a Compaq Laptop in this bag!", though there isn't -- I give them to family members to use as briefcases, lunch bags, and even keep one in the back of my truck to hold my jumper cables.
Nobody has stolen my jumper cables or my nieces schoolbooks... yet.
Make sure everything is to CAT-5E specs!
Install a 24-port patch panel in each rack. Consider punching down at least 12 ports in each, if not all 24.
Run all of these connections back to a 'patch rack' or 'patch wall' and make all of your inter-rack and rack-to-desktop connections at this central location. Document all changes, and you are golden.
We run a pair of 20-amp circuits to hardwired 'plugmold' power outlet strips mounted to each rack, with the 'left' and 'right' side being fed from a distinct UPS and battery (two giant UPS systems, one giant diesel generator).
Thus every power strip has it's own circuit breaker, overloading any one will only take out half of the equipment in one rack.
Any bets on how long before Microsoft issues a press release noting that this is yet another risk of using evil open source and open standards?
The Internet did not 'cause' the consumer to start buying hack hardware for the pay services, it just accelerates the process and makes it easier for consumers to find the piracy hardware and purchase it without having to deal with their local mafia franchisee.
For example, I can choose to trust the opinions of the 'There is no god' moderation group, ensuring that any page that suggests otherwise has a negative weight attached.
This isn't just the 'Cat5 Video extender' product which has been around for years, this is something entirely new, with frame grabber and video compression, SSL, RADIUS authentication, etc.
The client runs only on MS-Windows 98+, at a minumum of 20Kbps. The server to be remotely controlled can be anything that supports VGA and PS/2 keyboards, including some Sun products.
So far, I have no complaints. We haven't tried all of the advanced features yet.
Oxygen has a higher boiling point (-183 C) than nitrogen (-196 C), and forms highly explosive mixtures with many organic materials.
While we offer DSL (and allow running servers on DSL, with static IPs), many members choose to colocate 1U or 2U servers to run their own web site(s).
This approach eliminates the reliability, latency and bandwidth issues that come from locating the server in your home, at the tail end of a DSL circuit. You get the same high-availability power, cooling, and connectivity as the managed services customers in the next room, at a fraction of the cost.
The biggest difference is that unlike hosting at home via DSL, turning up the bandwidth from 384K to X megabits is simply a matter of a cutting a larger check to the association, and a simple configuration change at the gateway router.
Each member gets a subnet (usually a /29) on a VLAN dedicated to their machine(s), with hard and soft bandwidth limits courtesy of Cisco's Rate Limit IOS Commands. This ensures that no one user can eclipse another, nor steal/spoof their IP addresses.
There are two major drawbacks -- This approach isn't cheap, and hardware upgrades and related repairs take some coordination for physical access to the shared rack space.
As a cheap alternative to a fan controller, I've been using these PCB thermostats to control fans.
For a buck you get a little four-legged chip (fits standard 8-pin-DIP sockets) that closes a circuit when the temperature rises to around 75-80C.
Rated for 1A and 120VAC, more than enough for your average PC cooling fan. Just tack to the hottest chip(s) on your board with heatsink epoxy.
I originally considered using a laptop in a MiniPC application, but I wasn't able to find any really good prices on a working laptop with a broken display, and was concerned that a laptop is much more likely to be stolen than a small beige PC box.
We ended up using the old DEC 'Multia' (Intel P100, not Alpha) due to the built-in SCSI and PCI bus. These are showing up cheap in bulk lots, and unlike the Alpha Multias, the Intel models do not need/have fans.
I second the recommendation for a mid-price ($200-$400) titanium-cased watch with a kinetic, solar, or other self-powered mechanism.
I want a good-looking watch that would hold up to abuse, not too heavy, and nothing as flashy and expensive as a Rolex or Omega. I considered both Seiko and Citizen, they each produce quality watches in titanium, with a variety of features and appearances.
My only regret is not upgrading to a model with the 'automatic calendar' feature, that automatically sets the day-of-month correctly.
A GPS installation with the receiving antenna shielded from terrestial transmitters but with a clear view of the sky would be much more difficult to successfully attack without physical access directly to the antenna. You might be able to block my reception of the time code, but not spoof the wrong time with any degree of success.
While I'm not aware of any non-military receivers taking advatange of the feature, DoD receivers have anti-spoofing protection specifically designed to safe-guard against interference, jamming and falsified signals.
In our case, we have two GPS receivers, one in the central US, one on the west coast, they communicate with each other using authenticated NTP on a private WAN.
For me to even be willing to try out Linux on any platform (after my many bad experiences with Linux over the past several years) is a stretch. Being able to 'dual boot' would go a long way toward making me (and probably many others) more comfortable with this experiment, reducing the perceived risk of turning the handheld into a very expensive brick.
There are are certain advantages to the current general way Unix software configuration files are handled. I'd hate to see these advantages lost in the name of making things 'easier' or 'more centralized'. Some of these advantages include:
Some of these strengths are also weaknesses- for example, having each programmer write his own configuration parser leads to many disparate security flaws as each author makes their own unique mistakes.
I've rescued a number of systems from otherwise-fatal low-level configuration errors by manuaully correcting the configration, either by mounting the drive on another system, or simply hex-editing the raw partition to replace the first character of the offending line with a '#'. I'd hate to lose this last-ditch rescue option.