With Gadget-Tracks system your stolen gadgets phone home.
The system is very simple, the gadget has a small program which calls Gadget-Tracks server when activated. When your gadget is stolen you log into Gadget-Tracks website and report it stolen. After that all you have to do is wait, and if the theif plug in your gadget, and without knowing it, activates the program, you will recieve an email containing things like internal and external IP address of the theif.
I tried it, and it worked like a charm. I added my ipod to my profile, dropped the files on to it, and reported it stolen. Within second after clicking its icon in explorer I had an email with my IP address, and other details. It did not even trigger my Zone Alarm firewall. Very impressive!
However you need a bit of luck for it to work. The theif needs to activate it on a windows pc with a internet connection. This also means, that if this is succesfull, the people who steal gadgets might be prepared. Anyhow I really like this system even if it is not fool proof - it improves the odds.
Now I just need something like this for my laptop to make it phone home, maybe I could just make it execute the program when initiating windows.
March 8th, 2007
Losing a laptop can cause a lot of grief, the lost photos from the holiday in Swiss Alps is ofton the smallest problem, private information in the wrong hands can be a lot bigger, especially when it is not only your own information.
With a standard Windows XP installation the protection is very poor, even when using boot up bios passwords and a password protected account. There are many ways to crack a laptop.
The main problem is, that most data on the harddrive is in unencrypted form - making it possible for anyone with physical access to the drive to read the data of the drive.
How to protect the sensitive data
There are some different ways to keep your sensitive data safe
1)Keep the data completely of the hard drive.
Use the laptop as terminal. Boot from a live-cdrom or the image of one. But don’t keep the data of the hard drive. Access the data via an encrypted network connection like ssh or vpn. The advantage is that if the file data is only stored in the ram it should be completely of once the laptop is restarted.
One efficient way to this is to use remote access protocols (VNC, Windows Terminal Service…etc), in this case the data will never be on the local laptop since everything will be going on on the server.
2)Keep the data on the hard drive but encrypted
Encrypt a partition: an encrypted drive can be an efficient protection. Just be carefull that backups or other copies of the data are not saved outside the encrypted partion.
You can use a encrypted data partition, along an unencrypted system partition for
Truecrypt is efficient for this. Read an overview here or a howto in encrypting a drive here.
Encrypt the data file by file:Possible, and maybe a solution if it is very few files which is only accessed rarely. This can be done by GnuPG or similar.
Conclusion
As a ordinary home user, with mostly none-sensible data I find an encrypted partition to be the the obvios choice, since it requires no server and use free software (truecrypt) it is very cheap. The data can still be compromised, but it is difficult and requires time and resources.
UPDATE
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A great article about how easy it is to break in to a mac, if you have physical access.
September 21st, 2006
