[OLUG] Program idea.

[Vincent Raffensberger]

Tim Russell wrote:
> 
> It's been done, but it's a commercial product - a Google search (I /highly/
> recommend Google!) for "stolen laptop modem" came up with a story on
> www.thetrip.com that mentions it - CyberAngel by Sentry Software
> (www.sentryinc.com).  Of course, it's for Windows machines...

I've seen that and it looks pretty lame.  Any software which depends on
vendor participation to operate can't be seriously considered as an
option.  Besides, dialing out and locking the keyboard are hardly
actions I would call silent or transparent.  You should have the police
make an appointment before they bring a search warrant too!

> 
> I would imagine that this /could/ be useful on a Linux box, but I would also
> imagine that anyone who stole a linux laptop would boot it, see the login
> prompt, then shut it down and wipe the hard drive.  The chances that they
> would hook the modem to a phone line on the first bootup are about nil, I'd
> say.

Well, do you know of many places where the majority of the
users/computers are running an OS with login security?  Using the
college as an example, out of 500 computers, less than 15 are running
unix or NT.

> 
> The other problem, of course, is that this would just about /have/ to be
> commercialware - you'd need an 800 number for it to call, and you'd have to
> have realtime- or near-realtime ANI services on that 800 number to get the
> phone number it called from - else how would you know where it was located?
> Those kind of services don't come cheap, and you'd need CPE to support it as
> well.
> 
> I suppose West Interactive, where I used to work, would be the cheapest
> place to contract to implement it - dunno if they'd have modem support, but
> the app could dial them, pause a few seconds, then DTMF an identification
> number for the laptop in question.

Who said anything about modems dialing anywhere?  It could simply wait
for a network connection before sending anything to the server app. 
Again, much the same way the distributed.net clients work.  Once the
connection is made, the server app will have the ip address and that
should be enough to track down either a location or a responsible
person.  There's no need to make anything more complicated than
necessary...  sheesh.

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