At 07:41 PM 3/13/96 -0800, Jim McCoy wrote:
Dennis Hilliard writes:
"Software to the rescue: If somoeone steals your PC, you may be able to get it back because of software that acts as a kind of tracking device. Home Office Computing magazine reports that the software CompuTrace TRS will automatically dial the office of its creator, Absolute Software, if a thief hooks up a stolen PC's modem to a phone line. The software reveals the location of the PC and Absolute Software will call the police" - Providence Journal-Bulletin - March 12, 1996.
1- How does the PC know where it is? 2- How does the PC know it has been stolen?
Since this is a software product I am assuming that the answer to #1 is the use of CallerID on the line when the software calls, which is defeated by the use of line blocking by the thief.
I think that 1-800 services provide caller ID information to the company or organization that pays for the service. Whether or not this is blocked by standard caller-ID I don't know. Nevertheless, like you, I am not impressed with the likelihood of success of this system.
The obvious answer to #2 seems to me to have the system call the CompuTrace office at odd intervals to see if it has been reported stolen yet...
One thing that might be useful would be a OTP (one-time programmable) EPROM chip installed on all major system components (monitor, HD, motherboard, CDROM drive, maybe even DRAM SIMMs). It would be a serial device for low cost, such as a 3-pin TO-92 chip, which would have a capacity of about 4k bits, enough to store a hash of the owner-history (at about 100 bits per owner) for any owner that decided to leave a record. Like an EPROM, bits could only be written once; the chip itself would prevent write-overs previous to the last-written bit. Subsequent owners could read the history and publish the hash codes; anyone looking for such a stolen product could have their losses checked automatically, and perhaps semi-anonymously or anonymously, by a service set up to do this. Innocent owners could be adequately compensated for finding a piece of stolen hardware, to the extent that nobody is deterred about reporting a find. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com