[FDE] SETI finally finds something!

[Crispin Cowan]

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
>
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-- 
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"