Macs Aren’t So Secure, After All!
Well, what’s to stop someone from picking up your PowerBook or MacBook Pro and running away? Macs aren’t really secure now, are they? ;-)
Given that I’ll soon be moving cross-country to work at Google, I felt a little insecure about my laptop: the many ways in which it could be stolen. I’m not the kind who would use one of those chain-locks at all times, so I devised a software solution.
I wrote up a combination of two scripts, a shell script to run on your laptop, and a script to put on a web server somewhere else. The idea is that the laptop will keep informing the server about itself, and a stolen laptop may thus be recovered. It reports back the obvious stuff such as network names, what ISP it’s connecting to, and a traceroute to Google (so you can look it up backwards to see where it went.) It also sends back screenshots of the current user — so you can see what the thief has been upto! Perhaps you could catch a glimpse of an email account, an IM window, a website — something that can help you track down the thief.
Go check it out, it’s in my list of projects as Laptop Theft Protector. As usual, free as in beer, free as in freedom. In this case, it’s also free as in puppy (meaning you will have to spend some time with it.) And, as I’ve come to believe, the best things in life run only on a Mac. Don’t try this on Windows. Or Linux.
How about if thief formats the hard drive? If I steal somebody’s laptop, I would do that as the first thing.
Anurag — May 16, 2006 @ 10:52 am
It’s a Mac! It doesn’t need as much formatting as a Windows box does, ;-). And because you’re technically savvy, I wouldn’t expect you to steal a laptop after all, so the profile of the thief (“target audience”) of this utility is quite different really. There are a lot many things that could thwart this scheme: no network, router firewall blocking connections, good timing, etc.
Manas — May 18, 2006 @ 9:03 pm