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Portables Security Hardware

Protecting My Daughter's Notebook? 181

Posted by Cliff from the quick-phone-home-with-IP-scripts dept.
ctwxman asks: "My daughter enters college in the fall. This past week she spent three days on campus for orientation... and had her iPod stolen! That got me to thinking about protecting her brand new laptop. I'll physically lock it to something immovable -- that's simple. However, I've got a website and it's got a log. Is there a way to make her laptop quietly 'phone home' every time it boots so I can get the IP address and always see where it is? Her machine runs XP, but knowing Slashdot, suggestions for all OSes will be appreciated."
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Protecting My Daughter's Notebook? More

Protecting My Daughter's Notebook?

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  • Wrong priorities (Score:4, Funny)

    by Little Pink Bunny ( 881651 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @06:33PM (#12926110)
    That got me to thinking about protecting her brand new laptop.

    You have a naive daughter (who let her iPod get stolen) and you're worried about her laptop computer? You need to be worried about her other laptop unless you want some worse surprises a few months from now ("Him? That's going to be the father of my grandchild?!?").

    Good luck, man.

    Signed,
    Father of two daughters approaching college faster than he wants to admit.

    • Re:Wrong priorities (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slughead ( 592713 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @06:38PM (#12926164) Homepage Journal
      You have a naive daughter (who let her iPod get stolen)

      I agree but I'll keep it on topic: The best way to prevent theft is to sit her down and tell her to be more careful!

      If you think about it, a couple days for orientation is a very short period of time for something to get stolen. Hopefully this iPod thing will get her head straight.
      • Also if you bought her that ipod, don't buy her another one. Let her learn the lesson of keeping an eye on stuff all the time (Unless it was pried from her hands by a ruthless thug).

    • Re:Wrong priorities (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Monday June 27, 2005 @06:38PM (#12926165) Homepage Journal
      Father of two daughters approaching college faster than he wants to admit.

      Same boat - I am so not looking forward to that day.

      OP: Got a webserver of your own? Why not put the Windows equivalent of "curl http://myserver.example.com/secretpage [example.com]" in autoexec.bat or whatever passes for a bootup script these days? If the laptop goes missing, watch your server logs like a hawk and get ready to call the police the instant a geographically-identifiable IP makes a request.

      • Re:Wrong priorities (Score:4, Informative)

        by bhtooefr ( 649901 ) <bhtooefr@bhtooefr. o r g> on Monday June 27, 2005 @06:44PM (#12926234) Homepage Journal
        HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Run?

        There's no curl in Windows, but there IS FTP.
        Transfers files to and from a computer running an FTP server service
        (sometimes called a daemon). Ftp can be used interactively.

        FTP [-v] [-d] [-i] [-n] [-g] [-s:filename] [-a] [-w:windowsize] [-A] [host]

        -v Suppresses display of remote server responses.
        -n Suppresses auto-login upon initial connection.
        -i Turns off interactive prompting during multiple file
        transfers.
        -d Enables debugging.
        -g Disables filename globbing (see GLOB command).
        -s:filename Specifies a text file containing FTP commands; the
        commands will automatically run after FTP starts.
        -a Use any local interface when binding data connection.
        -A login as anonymous.
        -w:buffersize Overrides the default transfer buffer size of 4096.
        host Specifies the host name or IP address of the remote
        host to connect to.

        Notes:
        - mget and mput commands take y/n/q for yes/no/quit.
        - Use Control-C to abort commands.
        That should do the trick - you just need to have a script that it autolaunches that has "GET .secretfile.txt" and "BYE" in it. Then, you can log all attempts to grab .secretfile.txt, and grap IPs.
        • Or he could just install curl or wget.
      • get ready to call the police the instant a geographically-identifiable IP makes a request

        Yeah, I can see that now:
        You: "I'd like to report a stolen laptop."
        Police: "What for?"
        You: "Well, it's stolen and I know where it is."
        Police: "So?"
        You: "So I want to report this and then you can retrieve the stolen property."
        Police: "Do you have evidence for that?"
        You: "I've got logs on my webserver and I've related the IP address to a particular location."
        Police: *whimpers* "Yeah, well, have you talked to the

        • that totally happened to me - not with a computer, but with a guitar. Our house got broken into, but thanks to some observant neighbours who noticed the broken window, the cops were there ~30 minutes after my roommate had left.

          Now...it's the middle of the day, and with only 30 minutes to spare, you have GOT to figure that someone was waiting for everyone to leave. Well...the neighbours kids were hanging around the front of the house before my roommate left, and one of the neighbours had noticed them ru
    • Maybe he's trying to kill two birds with one stone. You know - "I see that the IP address you had all last weekend belongs to the netblock assigned to the men's dorm. Is there something we should talk about?"

      More seriously, there's not much you can do about your concerns, other than hope that you've given them the tools to make good decisions on their own. Of course, that's easy for me to say - my daughter is only six ;)

      • Most people aren't concerned about using their computer when they can be having sex instead.

        Oh no, she was doing homework with a guy friend. Maybe even her BOYFRIEND! Heaven forbid!!!!
    • Perhaps those are his priorities. Rather than detecting stolen laptop, he will more likely detect his daughter using her laptop from her boyfriend's apartment at 2 am.
    • What you need is the Virgin Alarm from SpaceBalls.

      Lone Star: What the hell was that noise?
      Dot Matrix: That was my virgin-alarm. It's programmed to go off before you do!
    • That's kind of silly. If you sequestered your daughter away through her teenage years, keeping a tight lock and key on her, then yes, you should be worried about her cutting loose and setting up patterns in college that might be hard to break through the rest of the life.

      On the other hand, if you let your daughter be herself and didn't just say "Don't do that," but actually took time to explain why - then you have nothing to worry about. She's an adult and will make adult decisions about the things she w

  • Insurance (Score:4, Informative)

    by Profane MuthaFucka ( 574406 ) * <busheatskok@gmail.com> on Monday June 27, 2005 @06:35PM (#12926122) Homepage Journal
    You can't prevent theft, and you might not be able to track it down.

    But, you *can* get a rider on your insurance that will cover theft of the laptop.

    That, and backups of whatever term paper she's currently working on kept in a separate place, is what you need.
  • uh, you want your daughter's laptop to "phone home". Are you not just a jealous dad?

  • Not caring if it gets stolen... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by david.given ( 6740 ) <dg@cowlark.com> on Monday June 27, 2005 @06:37PM (#12926149) Homepage Journal
    ...is the simplest solution. I mean, these are students. She's in the highest risk category for having electronic devices stolen. Giving her a brand new, high-spec laptop is madness.

    What does she want it for? Could she, for example, make do with a low-spec laptop worth a few hundred currency units of your choice, rigged up as a thin terminal to a higher-spec but secure machine somewhere else? This would be ideal for doing actual work; small and portable at the human end, large and capable (and backed up) at the machine end.

    This way, the human end is undesireable and unlikely to be stolen. And if it is stolen, it's cheap to replace and all documents will be preserved.

    • ..and we have a winner!

      The best bet is to avoid getting it stolen, not to try to recover it after the fact. If you care, personalize it a lot! Etch her full name into the cover, along with a message saying that it's stolen if not in her posession. Add a URL or phone number for anonymous tips. Maybe mention a reward. Make it value-less to steal.

      You can get usable Windows laptops cheap. Just make sure that she has an effective backup solution. It would really suck losing a quarter's worth of homework
    • What does she want it for? Could she, for example, make do with a low-spec laptop worth a few hundred currency units of your choice, rigged up as a thin terminal to a higher-spec but secure machine somewhere else? This would be ideal for doing actual work; small and portable at the human end, large and capable (and backed up) at the machine end.

      You're joking, right? You actaully expect this guy to set his daughter's laptop that she's going to have at school as a thin client? That may be great for a local
    • Many decent schools now require a laptop for all students. My niece is going to study medicine at Creighton University this fall, and they have a standard system with pre-configured software that they want their students to use. If you use their system, you will match the schools requirements for firewall, virus detection, etc... and therefore be a trusted agent on the college Wifi.

      Buy someone else's machine, no Creighton network or internet for you!

    • Another trick = 'It's your laptop - it gets stolen YOU are going to replace it out of your money, not mine"

      Remember - ownership = buy-in = taking care of said item

  • OS X solution (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Matt Clare ( 692178 )
    I've got this on my PowerBook
    % crontab -l
    1 * * * * nice -n 19 curl -sfA 'PowerMatt' -o /dev/null <a href="http://www.mattclare.ca/the_url_i_chose/">ht tp://www.mattclare.ca/the_url_i_chose/</a>
    But, where's the cron system in XP????????

  • Can you program? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wishus ( 174405 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @06:37PM (#12926157) Journal
    It should be fairly trivial if you can program. You can even get a free perl interpreter (ActivePerl or something) if you don't have VisualC++ or somesuch. Put your program in the startup folder, or as a scheduled task.

    The simplest would be to make a secret webpage for her and set that as her homepage in IE. Although that is trivial to change, whoever steals it (or buys the stolen thing) will probably boot it up and start IE, hitting your web page.

    • Re:Can you program? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Jjeff1 ( 636051 )
      Heck, you don't even need to program.

      Get a copy of Wget for windows [interlog.com] and put it in the startup group with the address of your web site, like so...
      wget http:/// [http] mysite.com/laptop.htm
      that should hit your site and download the file whenever the system is booted.
      For more fun, use Srvany and run the little script above as a service. This way the crooks don't even need to login for it to work.

  • Really Simple Idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by buelba ( 701300 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @06:38PM (#12926169)
    This is simple but eventually they can hack around it:

    1. Set up a subdirectory on your Web page, say "foo.com/google/" that directs to google.com.

    2. Set up her homepage as foo.com/google. Don't tell anyone else about foo.com/google.

    3. When the thieves boot up the PC and get on the Web, they'll automatically go to foo.com/google and, hopefully, won't even notice the redirect. You'll get at least one hit and maybe more.

    The down side is that your daughter will trigger these logs too. (That'll happen with pretty much any technique you use, though.) Promise us that you won't go checking on her surfing times.

    • Re:Really Simple Idea (Score:3, Interesting)

      by menscher ( 597856 )
      I've done basically the same thing for some customers -- I set their browser homepage to my site, which just instantly redirects them to their desired homepage. The user doesn't notice any delay, or even remember I'm doing this. But if his laptop is ever stolen, I can start watching logs for connections.

      On the linux side I have it wget that page as part of the init scripts. So if it boots when attached to the network, it will phone home.

      Obviously this doesn't protect against thieves that wipe the dri

  • Nope, that won't do it (Score:3, Insightful)

    by paranoos ( 612285 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @06:38PM (#12926170)
    People who steal laptops know enough not to boot them up. A lot of people's computers have MSN and AIM and what have you running on startup.

    A friend of mine had their laptop stolen once, and I saw them come on MSN. I wrote down the IP address, only to find out that it was my friend logging in from their home PC.

    In short, if you steal a laptop, you either wipe the hard drive, or bypass the boot process with a CD to snoop around at data.

    Get your daughter a proximity alarm, so if she walks away from the laptop, or if it's grabbed from her, a loud alarm sounds.

    • Not entirely true. Some of the people who steal laptops often find that stealing information (such as saved passwords/etc for banking info, financial spreadsheets, etc) can be more profitable than stealing the laptop itself.

      Of course, they can initially unplug the ethernet... but if you were to leave a desktop link that said "banking and financials" which actually linked to an IP-logging website, you might be good. Or perhaps a Dial-up-network connection for "banking" that called your cellphone (then you
    • And how did you get their IP address using MSN? AFAIK, all connections except voice, video and file transfer go through MSN's servers.

      (This would actually be useful for me as well as interesting as I sometimes have to help friends with their computers, and a lot of semi-computer literate people are far too sure that their IP address is whatever ipconfig or whatismyip.com says it is).

      P.S. Seems whatismyip.com has started detecting proxies sensibly, so maybe that's a bit more usefull now.

  • Try a boot-up password (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Trepalium ( 109107 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @06:40PM (#12926181)
    Most boot-up passwords on notebook computers can not be cleared except by the manufacturer (or by highly motivated thieves who know an awful lot about electronics). There's no CMOS battery to pull to wipe out the password, and even if you could, there's still the password on the hard drive. This simple measure means getting the laptop into good enough shape to sell is more effort than it's worth.

    My other suggestion is insurance. It shouldn't cost too much ($50/yr) and it'll cover theft. I had my laptop stolen once, and it was insured, so I replaced it easily. Not only that, it was quite easy to deal with the insurance folks (no horror stories here!).

    Besides, even if you know what IP it's coming from, what goes does that do you? Are you going to go vigilante on them? The police aren't likely to care much -- they don't usually give such thefts very high priority.

    • This simple measure means getting the laptop into good enough shape to sell is more effort than it's worth.

      I've thought about this with regards to my own laptop(s), but there's just one problem: How do the thieves know about the passwords in advance? Anyone looking for a quick buck will just take the laptop, then curse the password protection later. In other words, I don't think it gives any protection against theft.

      On the other hand, it's a nice layer of security when talking about data privacy. Unt

      • How do the thieves know about the passwords in advance?

        Handheld label printers are pretty cheap now... Then again, so is "tell your daughter that she needs to pay attention to the expensive, easy to steal items".
    • Every laptop I've ever had has a CMOS battery in it. I've even pulled a couple of them out when the BIOS froze. (Don't tell Compaq!)
    • Laptops do have CMOS batteries, some are hidden away, but they are there. And thieves can just chuck the hard drive and put in a new one, this doesn't deter theft at all. There's more effort involved in stealing the laptop than getting it ready to sell.

  • Responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @06:40PM (#12926182) Homepage Journal
    Teach your daughter to be responsible. I can tell you every laptop stolen in college was someone being irresponsible. They left their dorm rooms unlocked with laptops out on desks not locked to anything. They would leave laptops unattended in the library for a few minutes while they went to get coffee. Nobody is going to steal her laptop out of her hands or out of her backpack while she's wearing it. If your daughter was more responsible with her belongings they wont get stolen. Any tech solution you have to find it after it gets stolen is unecessary if your daughter takes care of her things.

    • Re:Responsibility (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mad_Rain ( 674268 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @06:44PM (#12926224) Journal
      Teach your daughter to be responsible. I can tell you every laptop stolen in college was someone being irresponsible.

      That's all well and good to teach your child to be responsible - but good luck having a college roommate who is also responsible. It's good to have that extra layer of security anyway. :)
    • As a college student, here is my advise.

      1. Make a habit of locking your door. Even if you are only going down the hall to the bathroom.

      2. Do not keep valuable items out in the open.

      3. You are responsible for your property; not your room mate, not your RA.

      4. Do not lend expensive and/or hard to replace property. It is amazing how fast someone can disappear on campus.

      With that being said, your daughter needs to learn how to keep track of her own property. It is not your responsibility as her fathe
      • "4. Do not lend expensive and/or hard to replace property. It is amazing how fast someone can disappear on campus."

        Don't lend anything you want back. Period. Assume that that anything you loaned you actually gave away. Do not expect to be pleasantly surprised.

      • 1. Make a habit of locking your door. Even if you are only going down the hall to the bathroom.

        It's no good to live scared.

        If you're really concerned, for $40 you can get an NTSC color video surveillance camera at Sam's. Hook it to your computer if you're geeky enough or a discarded VCR from a yardsale.

        Now you can go sit on the pot without having to bring you keys. If you find something is stolen you'll have evidence and you can either a) kick the shit out of the thief or b) turn him in.

        Plus you don'
        • It's no good to live scared.
          Hah - that's funny.*

          Get one of those cable locks with the dongle that goes into the 'lock hole' in the laptop and tell her that if she isn't actively transporting it between places, it is to be securely fastened to something too big to move. Library, friends's house, in the dorm, wherever - if she isn't carrying it somewhere it gets secured. She doesn't have to make it unstealable, just harder to steal than someone else's laptop. (That was the 'informative' part of this post
          • And a little 'scared' goes a long way towards living a very healthy, secure life.

            Secure, probably. Hypertensive? - maybe.

            Look, I've got a conceal/carry permit myself, I'm all for defending your family and property, but I think the difference is I don't assume a knock on the door is someone who's there to kill me - it's probably my neighbor seeing if he can borrow a tool. If the guy through the peephole is unknown my ears may go up, but it might be the UPS guy or a Mormon. If the guy is ramming the doo
    • They would leave laptops unattended in the library for a few minutes while they went to get coffee.

      Right, because you should have to shutdown your machine and chain it to a wall if you have to go pee. Let's try using the community rather than running scared from it.

      Since this is a girl we're talking about she can go up to any guy at a nearby table and say, "hey, keep an eye on my laptop, K?," with a nice smile and there won't be any trouble.

  • Timbuktu (Score:2, Informative)

    by Hungus ( 585181 )
    Since you asked about something that would phone home I would suggest Timbuktu [netopia.com] from Netopia [netopia.com]. There was a story a few years ago about how a brother recovered his sister's stolen computer [wired.com] by using its phone home functionality.

  • Stickers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @07:02PM (#12926412)
    Seriously. If you don't have a need to worry about appearances (i.e., she's not taking it to corporate meetings), stickers (lots of them) go a long way. Thieves who aren't just stealing it for their own personal use will think twice about stealing anything that is easily identifiable because it would be easy to pick out at a pawn shop, and black-market type folks aren't going to want something that stands out so much. Thieves are generally looking for a quick buck, so they generally aren't going to be interested in scraping all those stickers off, either.

    Also, in addition to writing down serial numbers, write down her MAC address (both the ethernet and the wireless if she has both). If it does get stolen, hand them off to the school's computer center. I know of two separate cases where students stole school computers, and were caught within a day the moment they plugged the thing into the network and turned it on. Hopefully they would be willing to do such a thing for your daughter in the event that such a thing happens.

    But the single most important thing you can do is make sure that she locks her door and, if she has a ground floor room, keeps the windows closed when she's out. A lot of people I knew at college thought they didn't need to because folks around the dorm would keep an eye on things or something like that, but it just isn't true. There were several cases at my school (which only had 1,100 students) where someone from outside the college just walked into the dorms while classes were in session, tried doors, and walked out with the expensive stuff from the rooms with unlocked doors. If they walked in on someone, they would just make an excuse to the effect of, "Sorry, wrong room." And act like they were visiting someone and don't really know their way around very well yet.

    And it's not exactly related to electronics, but, if she uses a purse, get her to quit. Otherwise, she's going to get sick of lugging it around at a party or while she's hunting for books at the library and she'll leave it next to the coat pile or in her study cubby, only to come back and find it gone.

  • offtopic?! (Score:3, Informative)

    by corpsiclex ( 735510 ) <dark.logic@comcast.net> on Monday June 27, 2005 @07:05PM (#12926450) Homepage
    Most of the posts I see so far are offtopic, insulting, and unhelpful. The guy asked for a tech solution, we're tech people! Help him out. I had a laptop stolen from my dorm a couple years ago, it sucked. I say just write a nice little program that hides itself and gives you a remote shell. Then have it 'phone home' just by updating its IP with a free dynamic dns service. When you need to get into the box, just ssh to the hostname. Call up the school and tell them the IP/MAC, and they will be able to help you if it is on the campus network. Avoid 'locking down' the box, as this will just encourage the theif to format the drive before you have a chance to find it (which he may do anyway). Perhaps other /.ers can elaborate. Good luck!
    • "You can't solve this problem with technology; here's how you have to do it," is a perfectly valid and helpful answer to, "What technology can I use to solve this problem?"

  • A couple of options.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kefaa ( 76147 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @07:08PM (#12926478)
    Kim Komando [detnews.com] has a reference to several companies that do what you ask.

    Dear Kim: I bought my son a laptop. Is there a way it can be tracked if it is stolen?

    Dear Reader: Yes. There is software that works over the Internet to report the location of a stolen laptop. When a thief connects the laptop to the Internet, the software reports its location to a special Web site. CyberAngel (www.sentryinc.com, $60 annually), CompuTracePlus (www.computrace. com, $50 annually) and zTrace (www. ztrace.com, $50 annually) are three companies that offer laptop locator software and services.

    For MACs you might also try LapCop [geek.com] which emails you when the computer "disappears."

    In addition, as literally anything could be on the drive, encrypt it. The translation slowdown will be barely noticeable and will save you if your child decided to put your VISA card in plain text files. Also, while a hardware password may seem like a great idea, if someone does steal the machine, it will never call home because they cannot get past the password.

    I would then add a real easy to use laptop lock. If it is hard to use, it will not be used. No one wants to try and grab eight books from the library while lugging around their laptop. So they set it down for "just a minute."

    Finally, for the "team her to be responsible" crowd: a college is about the least secure environment to which we will ever expose ourselves. People are free to come and go in most dorms, doors are secure as your least responsible roommate. College is also where more growing up occurs. Lighten up.
    • Here [detnews.com] she has an update written this month on some other ideas for protecting a mobile machine.
    • obviously more growing up occurs in college -- though i fear too much. not because growing up is bad, but because it indicates very little of it happened in high school.

      i was dealt with a lot of reality in high school and before and benefited from it. i'm not saying force them to work all their freetime away -- but get them out of the circle of high school cliques and give them some freedom so they can start making responsible decisions and dealing with the consuqences so they aren't totally unprepared for
    • Also: consider adding a limited user to the machine with a "null" password. A thief who tries to use the machine won't be able to use her account, but will be able to get in easily via the limited user. This way, not only is her stuff better protected if you use encryption (since the thief won't log in as her), but you'll have a very specific logon to put in all of the "phone home" action you want.

      Also: consider installing a few apps like VNC, and dyndns on the box, making it easier to jump on it when yo

  • Personalize the hell out of it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Deagol ( 323173 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @07:22PM (#12926587) Homepage
    I agree with the guy who said to personalize it.

    Some people etch the VIN of their vehicle on every window.

    I had a roomie in college who spray-painted his shiny new HP48-SX (circa 1991) flourescent safety orange. It looked god-awful, but I doubt anyone considered it a target. :)

    Buy some 2nd-hand laptop and do a creative case mod on it. Wire her or initials in bright purple LEDs on the top cover or something. It'll stand out like a sore thumb, easy to spot if she's looking for it, and it'll be a bitch to fence to someone else.

  • slow down people (Score:5, Informative)

    by nuggetman ( 242645 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @07:33PM (#12926667) Homepage
    What's all this poppycock about phone home software and remote logins and thin clients? This is rather simple...

    1a. Buy a MicroSaver [kensington.com] with guaranteed replacement from Kensington. As long as you file police report in X number of hours, Kensington will give you up to $1500 of the total cost if it was stolen while on the lock. Make sure she uses it. If it's on her desk, it's tethered.

    1a corollary. When she's out, the dorm is locked.

    1b. When it's not on her dorm desk, it is either in her hands, on a table or in front of her, or within arms reach. No exceptions. No "I just left it for a minute".

    2. As another poster said, make it identifiable easily. Put a ton of stickers on it. Get your dremel out and carve in a name, address, phone number, and mention of reward.

    3. Write down serial #s and MAC addresses, keep them on file. Report them to all the nessecary authorities if it's stolen. This includes the campus IT staff - when it comes to finding it by MAC address they can be your best friends. Unlike trying to trace an IP address over the net, they should be able to track the laptop to a physical location quickly if it's plugged into the campus network.

    4. Backup. Backup. Backup. Nuff said.

    5. If you're really paranoid, get a proximity alarm. Small device attaches to laptop, other device attaches to daughter. She goes too far, it goes off and draws attention.
    • 1b. When it's not on her dorm desk, it is either in her hands, on a table or in front of her, or within arms reach. No exceptions. No "I just left it for a minute".

      I totally agree. Furthermore, make it EASY for her to do this. I bought an IBM X31 last year and it's a dream to carry - it suspends within just a second or two, resumes within 4 seconds or so, and is so light and compact that taking it with me "just for a minute" isn't a big deal.

      My last laptop was a Dell C810. While being a great desktop

  • The only real solution: incentives (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @07:54PM (#12926838)
    Make her pay for the laptop out of her own pocket. I guarantee she'll take a LOT better care of it if it's HER money that paid for it.
  • Make sure she always locks her door. Buy her a dockign station with a physical lock for when she's leaving it in the dorm. That and not being stupid and leaving it anywhere is about all she needs.
  • Its free and its for directing a domain name to your changing IP address. Several clients are available for XP... and its only too easy to download, install and setup.

    Come to think of it, the campus should keep a list of all known MAC addresses, and they can then trace a stolen one REAL fast to the dorm or library. This is re-install proof, and only a smart thief could force on a new MAC address on the thing.

    Even better, put some radioactive material on your daughters laptop and walk around with a geiger
  • This thread got me thinking about how to (try) to get the thief to boot the PC so that you have a chance of tracing it. Most pro's would probably avoid booting from the hard drive and boot from a CD to format the drive. If you lock the boot order to boot from HD first, you would get a _slightly_ better chance of recovery - particularly w/integrated WiFi. Though, the real pro's would probably take the HD out and reformat on another machine...
  • You have access to a website, including its logs?

    Pick a fictional page. Any page. Set up a cron job/scheduled task to wget that page every hour.

    There ya go. You have an hourly log of the laptop's IP address, along with (possibly) a referrer, a user agent (probably whater it has on it now), and if you go all out, you can make the request encode just about as much info as you want (last few files opened? Last email sent? Address book?).


    As an aside, I've submitted a hell of a lot better Ask Slashdo
  • that universities often NAT their network, and the most likely thief is another student, so if you do have it 'phoning home' you need to capture the local LAN IP address and package it up to actually send to the log server, not just ping the server and record the origin of the ping.
  • OK. This is from someone who's main job is to repair Laptops in a College Student Laptop Program. I won't say which college because I like to keep my job separated from myself, but we deal with 1000 laptops and just had to deal with this last week.

    First off, Laptop locks are useless. I can pick most of them in less than 2 minutes, and can crack most of the combination locks in about the same time. Now imagine a pro doing it. Also in most cases, They'll just break the laptop case to get it off the lock. You
    • First off, Laptop locks are useless. I can pick most of them in less than 2 minutes, and can crack most of the combination locks in about the same time. Now imagine a pro doing it. Also in most cases, They'll just break the laptop case to get it off the lock. You would be surprised what little most laptop lock points are protected with.

      Laptop locks are not supposed to stand up to much abuse. They are just a deterrent to casual theft. If there's a locked laptop and an unlocked laptop sitting unattended mom

  • Ok, here's what I'd do... (Score:4, Informative)

    by crazyphilman ( 609923 ) on Monday June 27, 2005 @10:23PM (#12927887) Journal
    First, I'd try to find a programmer, because this is going to take a little bit of coding. I'm going to give you a sort of spec; you can hire a starving college kid to hook this up for you on the cheap. OK? Here goes:

    1. Locate a simple, downloadable SMTP library. You want this to be something that can be used within a piece of software to generate and send an email. VB, for example, has a Sendmail.dll file you can download somewhere, with a simple interface for creating and sending email. It's worth googling for (I don't remember it offhand).

    2. Have your coder write some code that gets back the results of ipconfig (is it still called ipconfig on XP? I think that's the one for Windows 2000) and stuffs it in the body of an email. That'll give you what you need. Make sure the email also contains a timestamp, because you'll want to see who had that IP address at that time.

    3. If you want to get really fancy, you can have your developer use whois (if the system has that; have to check) to find out who owns the subnet the laptop is on. That'll tell you whether its her university or a private ISP. If you can find a whois server on the web that'll let you do an automated check, that'll work too, just open a brief http connection. Netsol won't do it; they make you enter text from an image every time. Grumble...

    4. You want the program to run very quietly without output on startup. You'll want to call it something innocuous, like SYSverCHK.exe, something people will figure is system related.

    That's all I can think of off the top of my head... Good luck!
  • Here's another thing you could add. Go to staticcling.org and get a free domain name for the machine. Install a script to run the updater every day, it will work up to a month offline. This will register the current IP address of the machine to a dynamic IP provider and if you had a GPS in it you could even find the machine.. or get a photo of the user from the webcam maybe. Or erase everything remotely over vnc, etc.

  • An Interesting Fortune. (Score:3, Funny)

    by themassiah ( 80330 ) <scooper@coopster.net> on Tuesday June 28, 2005 @11:05AM (#12931587) Homepage Journal
    An interesting fortune from Slashdot at the bottom of my page in this story:

    "A girl's conscience doesn't really keep her from doing anything wrong-- it merely keeps her from enjoying it. "
  • I'd recommend a cable-together with a lock. Not perfect security, but it helps, especially if / when she takes the notebook anywhere to work on it. All notebooks pretty much support a universal notebook-lock system.

    Get a seperate external USB drive (or other device) to copy her files to. Should the machine go missing (and its not kept with the USB drive), she will have her data - this may be worth more to her than the $1000 that "commodity" notebooks are going for ...
    She can move data off of the noteboo
  • When I was in university, a lot of people just left their stuff lying around assuming no one would care to touch what is not theirs. Generally, jail is a deterrent. However, it is quite easy to mistakenly sit down at the wrong seat and gather up something not yours - who would know the difference?

    I travel with my computer and I don't want to forget it anywhere so I carry it with me at all times no matter how inconvenient it is. In other words I develop a habit of knowing that my computer has to be with me
  • I work at a major East-Coast university in IT security. I have seen students with a wide range of computer-related problems, and while theft can happen if she's careless, your daughter's data is probably more valuable.

    Make sure it's running anti-virus and anti-spyware programs, and that they're set to automatically update often (NOT once a week). Install a personal firewall, AND use a hardware firewall (router) in the dorm room. Defense in depth. She'll be out on the campus using wireless or whatever,
  • After a few thefts at the non profit I was working for, this is how I did it.

    Created a text file called log.html that had at the top <html> <body background="red"><font face="verdana" size="3">

    When you append to the file, some browsers will still read the HTML even though you'll never close the html and body tags :) Ok, this isn't strictle needed, but it makes the output a little prettier.

    Next, I wrote a batch file like this

    date /t >log.html
    time /t >log.html
    tracert www.
    • By the way, if sticker shock on those brand name wire locking devices is troubling you, another way to do it is to buy a length of vinyl coated steel cord at the hardware store.. get whatever diameter you can find or make a hole for on your computer.. then just loop it around a hole in the furniture and bolt the ends together with a series of u-bolts. Get the right size for your cord- too big and they will actually be looser. Tighten the hell out of them. Sure the potential thief could take the time unbol
    • date /t >log.html
      ???
      Unless you want to overwrite the log each time, you probably mean:
      date /t >>log.html
      , and similarly for the other lines.

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