There have been 2 or 3 companies started whose security product was an agent that "phoned home" so you could track it down if it was stolen. Some of these products also have disk encryption features so that you can remotely disable the computer. Such a feature has even been built into the OLPC http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/07/02/19/1654231.shtml
IIRC, long before such products, stolen computers have been recovered because of similar accidental network activity that was programmed into them. And come to think of it, why would any sane person run the SETI client on a mobile laptop? It would just suck battery life by keeping the CPU hot ... Crispin Scott S wrote: > There is an article today by AP about a stolen computer that had valuable > personal information on the harddrive. The interesting part is that because > laptop had the SETI(at)home client install on it, the law enforcements were > able to track it down using the IP address that was being reported back to > the > SETI server. This leads to the idea of a hidden agent (much like spyware) > that > companies or individuals can use on their computer to track their location. > Full article here: > http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/TECHBIT_ALIENS_LAPTOP?SITE=FLDAY&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT > > _______________________________________________ > FDE mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.xml-dev.com/mailman/listinfo/fde > -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com Hacking is exploiting the gap between "intent" and "implementation" _______________________________________________ FDE mailing list [email protected] http://www.xml-dev.com/mailman/listinfo/fde
