Finding a stolen PowerBook/iBook
Tuesday, June 28th, 2005I made a post on Slashdot last night in response to a question about laptop security. The question was about Windows XP and I was only able to shared what I do on my UNIX based laptops (My PowerBook) — some how that got marked as a Troll. In any event, I got an eMail about my post:
I am curious, i’m soon to buy a Powerbook with interest of delving deeper into OSX than what the iMacs and Powermacs on my campus (www.purdue.edu) will allow me to do, and saw your blurb on the laptop security. I was hoping you’d give me a brief explaination of what’s goign on there, i understand you’re quietly appending a text file, but not sure with what and to what end. I would like to employ a similar setup with my system, that’s why i’m asking
![]()
Here’s what I had to share:
I got this running a few years ago, but I saw it in 2600 Magazine about 3 issues ago. The basic idea os your machine automatically calls up a web site with a unique name every hour. If your Laptop gets nicked you can hopefully check the logs on your server and trace it back to an ISP and hopefully they can tell you who has your laptop. That might not work so well, so what I would do is try to regain control over it while it’s online — I may not be able to get it come back to me like professor Frink’s autodialer, but I can at-least erase my files (another tip – turn on filevault) and use the say command to taunt the guy (you can type ‘ say go to hell ‘ in the terminal and the Mac will say whatever you tell it to).