At 3:41 AM 3/14/96, Jim McCoy wrote:

A few questions:

1- How does the PC know where it is? 2- How does the PC know it has been stolen?

The Web reveals all: 1. If the PC has been _reported_ stolen by the owner, any call from that PC triggers a phone trace, says the company. 2. See #1 (the key is that owner must call and report a particular PC 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. 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...

Obvious solution for potential thieves: wipe the disks and reinstall an OS once you steal a PC. This should be done anyway to remove any bits of data which might identify the original owner.

These points assume the thief is relatively sophisticated and that the thief is aware that the CompuTrace system is installed. I suspect that neither is likely, at least not until the system gets sufficient publicity so that the first thing thieves and purchasers of suspected-to-be-hot PCs do is to make plans to avoid this (reformat disks, etc.). I think the scenario I described in my earlier post on this topic covers about 97% of all PC thefts: relatively unsophisticated thieves who warehouse the merchandise until buyers are found. The buyers, in turn, are also relatively unsophisticated. They may be immigrant businesses looking for a really good deal on PCs, they may be school systems strapped for cash, they may be your mother buying her first PC at a flea market. And they may be any of us, buying a surplus PC. In none of these cases is the user likely to take steps to disable Caller ID (and the company may actually do old-fashioned tracing).

Conclusion: Yet another useless piece of software riding the computer security bandwagon.

I'm not convinced it's software I would want to buy, but it fills a niche, I think. And it's definitely not the snake oil we've seen recently, as it makes no outrageous technical claims and seems to be going after a limited market. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."