Had a couple of hours to kill, so I looked into a new project. I had a conversation where people were talking about what they would do if their house was broken into (what was actually valuable, what would be replaceable, what wouldn't, etc.). Computers were pretty high on the list of "things that were valuable," for the reason that they often stored things like tax information, usernames and passwords, etc.
As usual with conversations, if I find something computationally interesting, my inner programmer surfaces and pushes my higher functions to a lower priority.
I started thinking about what it would take to deter theft of computers. Or, well, not so much deter, but give the possibility of reclamation in the event that somebody steals your devices. This essentially means programming intelligence into your computers for them to realize:
In any of these events, it's relatively trivial to have your computer do things like dial into a server on the Internet, feed it information necessary to a) locate its current network, b) give information on what the computer is connected to, and c) give information on the internals of the network. You could even go so far as to ask the computer to tell you what wireless networks are available. And all of this information would be able to be collected in seconds, and would be barely noticeable in terms of bandwidth used.
The prototype I have drawn up works only on Mac/Linux, but could pretty easily be drawn up on the Windows side of things.
Does anybody have experience with this? Or, have you had your computer stolen, and wished there was something on your computer that would have been able to react accordingly?
In addition, does anybody have any thoughts on how to thwart theft if the thief is savvy, and they are aware that the computer might try to dial out and contact somebody? Nothing is stopping somebody from just ripping out the hard drive. I'm just curious, past maybe a BIOS password, what one could do in this case.
/thinking aloud
