Protecting My Daughter's Notebook? 181
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."
Wrong priorities (Score:4, Funny)
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)
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.
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
There's no curl in Windows, but there IS FTP. That should do the trick - you just need to have a script that it autolaunches that has "GET
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:2)
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:3, Informative)
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
A lot of the other *nix tools are there too...
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's stolen, it probably won't get connected to the Internet...
Also because of the logon passwords, probably the first thing that'll happen to it is it'll be reinstalled off a pirated copy of Windows and it'll no longer have the software to phone home.
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:2)
My best advice would be to install a drivelock password, which will render the laptop useless to anyone who d
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:4, Informative)
The best thing to do would be to make sure that the MAC address of every single networking device in the system is written down where you can find it and again where she can find it (and registered with the university if they offer). The university knows its own network and has managed networking hardware so if you can provide the MAC address of the system, they can monitor it and know exactly what port it is connected to (or hotspot it is in). It is simple from that point to send in the campus police to knock on the door of Room 302 of McThiefy Hall. The added bonus of this plan is that it still works when the first thing done to it is a reformat.
Thats the best I can provide (as another student entering the class of 2009) so I hope it isnt hidden to deep in the comments to be seen.
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:3, Funny)
"Dear, I think I found out where your laptop thief is!!!"
"Where dad?"
"From his IP, it looks like he is at the University of BigState"
"Dad..."
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:2)
At my school, you have to log in with a valid username and password via 802.1x before packets will be routed for you (be it wired, wireless, or in the dorm room). They would have the name of the person who took it. That's probably enough to get it back
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:2)
Another smart thing to do is engrave your name and a drivers license number or something else identifiable and traceable into all electronics. Severely scratched out rectangles are usually a sure sign of stolen goods.
Re:mod parent up! (Score:2, Interesting)
Then set a BIOS password and set a hard drive password to block access to the configuration, and make the CD-ROM non-bootable... nope, no pirate copies of XP here.
For bonus points, set a hard drive password and/or put a boot image on the network card itself that silently connects to the network, phones home _And THEN_ boots the OS.
re: bios passwd (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to discourage theft I reckon the grunge look (ie case mod it to hell, as others suggest) is the only way.
If you want to inhibit theft a cable lock is a good idea.
If you want to reduce financial loss then get insurance.
If you want to reduce data loss, get backing up.
Re: bios passwd (Score:2, Informative)
Putting it in a laptop bag is equivalent wearing a neon sign that says "I have a laptop. Please steal it." Especially if it has the manufacturer on the site just to clear any doubts any potential thief has about the contents.
Some better ideas are:
- Get a briefcase and fill it with foam padding
- There are laptop rucksacks you can get, which are less obvious
Re: bios passwd (Score:2)
Re: bios passwd (Score:2)
In polar coordinates: r = C (Score:2)
Ultra secure and grunge - a ball and chain
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:2)
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
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:2)
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
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:2)
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:2)
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 ;)
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:2)
Oh no, she was doing homework with a guy friend. Maybe even her BOYFRIEND! Heaven forbid!!!!
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:2)
Virgin Alarm (Score:2)
Lone Star: What the hell was that noise?
Dot Matrix: That was my virgin-alarm. It's programmed to go off before you do!
Re:Wrong priorities (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:Insurance (Score:2, Informative)
Tell you daughter the tale of Libby Hoeler. http://www.google.com/search?biw=1331&hl=en&q=lib
subject goes here (Score:1)
Not caring if it gets stolen... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Not caring == effective backups (Score:2)
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
Re:Not caring if it gets stolen... (Score:2)
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
Re:Not caring if it gets stolen... (Score:2)
Buy someone else's machine, no Creighton network or internet for you!
Re:Not caring if it gets stolen... (Score:2)
If you use their system, you will match the schools requirements for recieving kickbacks from the hardware vendor.
Re:Not caring if it gets stolen... (Score:2)
Remember - ownership = buy-in = taking care of said item
OS X solution (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:OS X solution (Score:4, Informative)
alternatively, you can install cygwin and cron as a service; it works well for me
Re:OS X solution (Score:2)
Re:OS X solution (Score:3, Informative)
(a command that sucks to use, by the way)
Can you program? (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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)
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)
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
Re:Really Simple Idea (Score:2)
Second of all, it really doesn't matter if google finds the URL. When the laptop is stolen, it's pretty trivial to filter out "googlebot" from the browser strings. Or do you really think people are going to google for "... I really can't imagine any search terms to put here" and then follow the link, causing false positives at just the time the laptop is stolen?
Nope, that won't do it (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Stealing information (Score:2)
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
Re:Nope, that won't do it (Score:2)
(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)
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.
Re:Try a boot-up password (Score:2)
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
Re:Try a boot-up password (Score:2)
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".
CMOS (Score:2)
Passwords don't help. (Score:2)
Responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Responsibility (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:MOD DOWN! (Score:2)
You, AC, are an idiot and a troll. My point is that you need to have multiple levels of security in place, because there will come a time when you take "non-optimal conditions" into account, use good judgment, and you still won't have perfect security.
For example, th
Re:MOD DOWN! (Score:2)
Well then, that person can definately go the extra mile and live like a sherpa, carrying everything they value on their back, because they don't trust anyone with their stuff. Or they can lock themselves in their room to keep an eye on everything, for the same reason. That level of de
Re:MOD DOWN! (Score:2)
you need to find a balance between the two, which is why teaching her to be responsible is Step One, and Step Two is have a backup plan.
Yes, being responsible entails everything you mentioned. But being just being responsible for your property is not the end of the line - finding solutions and shooting down problems before/during/after they occur is necessary too.
Re:Responsibility (Score:2)
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
Re:Responsibility (Score:2)
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.
Re:Responsibility (Score:2)
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'
Re:Responsibility (Score:2)
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
Re:Responsibility (Score:2)
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
Re:Responsibility (Score:2)
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)
Stickers (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re:offtopic?! (Score:2)
A couple of options.... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:A couple of options.... (Score:2)
Re:A couple of options.... (Score:2)
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
Re:A couple of options.... (Score:2)
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)
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)
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.
Re:slow down people (Score:2)
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)
Locks (Score:2)
dyndns! (Score:2)
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
Lock the BIOS boot up order. (Score:2)
*Not* a real problem... (Score:2)
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
keep in mind... (Score:2)
Laptop Protection (Score:2)
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
Re:Laptop Protection (Score:2)
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)
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!
staticcling.org (Score:2)
An Interesting Fortune. (Score:3, Funny)
"A girl's conscience doesn't really keep her from doing anything wrong-- it merely keeps her from enjoying it. "
Physical Protection+Crypto+Backups (Score:2)
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
Habit (Score:2)
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
More practical approach... (Score:2)
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,
how I did it (Score:2)
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
Next, I wrote a batch file like this
date
time
tracert www.
oh yeah.. locking down the machine (Score:2)
Re:how I did it (Score:2)
Unless you want to overwrite the log each time, you probably mean:
, and similarly for the other lines.
Re:So lemme get this straight. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pardon my rough language but it was no more then your attitude deserved.
Re:So lemme get this straight. (Score:2)
Re:So lemme get this straight. (Score:2)
What I am is a fellow who was in college only three years ago. If you doubt the existence of predatory males who target naive females on college campuses, you have your head up you
Re:So lemme get this straight. (Score:2)
Re:So lemme get this straight. (Score:2)
You're right, it's been a few years. But even when I was there, they had these things called "computer labs." Are you saying these are now obsolete?
Re:Cron and Curl (Score:2)
Yeah, 'cause I'm sure his daughter's Math 101 class will be using software written for use with Ubuntu. Face it
Re:Cron and Curl (Score:2)
Re:Cron and Curl (Score:2)
So far, I've never had an issue with using Linux in any class I've had. In fact, having LaTeX has massively helped me with some of my classes.