Sandy says:
POISON PILL--What, if anything, can be done to booby-trap a computer? Once the cops have a machine, one would expect that they will paw through everything in it. In addition, they will probably use the stolen computer for their own data processing needs. What could be done have the computer screw up the cop's data days, weeks or months after the seizure? Of course, I would never do such a thing myself, nor would I advise anyone else to do so.
Why wouldn't you? Its your machine, so what you do to it is perfectly legal. You are under no obligation to make your equipment suitable for people who wish to steal it. Nothing you can do in software will actually work, because people can always boot off a fresh disk and start from scratch. I suggest that the best way, which is not easy, is to alter the roms on the disk controllers so they will only work properly with a special version of the operating system. Then, run the special version of the operating system, which should require that you do something periodically or it will self destruct. Even if they reformat the disk, they still won't have the proper information to feed the controller so that it doesn't do unfortunate things. Perry