Just recently installed some interesting software to track down the PC, lest it should get stolen... http://preyproject.com/ There is a free version and also a pro (paid for) version. Not sure, but it may be possible to upgrade to pro version after PC is stolen! When the PC is stolen you log onto a website and mark the PC as stolen. It will automatically send location information at preset intervals and, if a webcam is available, a photo of the thief! It can also be configured to take a screenshot, sound an alarm or lock down the computer. It works on Windows, Mac or Linux and even on Android phones. If you are paranoid about security, monitoring can be done on your own server, rather than Prey's own website. Geo-location is done via wi-fi triangulation and it was accurate to within 100 metres on first test. On another occasion, accuracy was much worse, indicating I was about 2 miles from my actual location, so screenshot capture could be vitally important; just pray (sorry) that the screenshot is of the thief writing a letter or of his/hers Facebook page! Just imagine being able to locate your PC when you are still in the Philippines! For this reason, the pro version may be worthwhile as it can monitor your PC constantly, whereas the free version will only start to monitor once you mark it as stolen. Of course, this software will not help to locate your PC if the hard disk is re-formatted or if the thief cannot bypass any security you have on the PC, in order to boot it up. Some similar (paid for) software actually modifies the BIOS of your PC, meaning it may still work after a hard disk format or even if your PC is not fully booted. If you use automatic disk-backup-to-the-cloud software (such as idrive) you could also use that, instead of, or in addition to, Prey software. You can read idrive backup files on the idrive website.
I installed the free version some time ago on Mrs T's laptop and flagged it as stolen as a test. Quite impressed that it managed to triangulate me using it with admirable precision. Not impressed with the revolting pic it took of me via the webcam though (Where are you from in North Lincs, btw - not near beautiful Brigg, by any chance...? )
The population density is so high in Manila that with a 100 metre radius circle you could be talking hundreds of homes, I would be more interested in wiping my intellectual property if the machine if it were stolen. All of my existing email data and program code on my PC in Manila is in a Truecrypt Volume that I only activate when I am there and signed into my user account on the machine. The paging file is set to wipe on every shutdown so no chance of passwords lying around decrypted in the memory image after I come back to the UK. The rest of the time Ana is just using the OS to basically access the net, we have family photos stored on it as well but I have them all backed up elsewhere so no big loss if we were burgled. Saying that our computer is 6 years old, I built it out of parts I brought over from the UK and it is getting very long in the tooth we really need a new one, the biggest loss would be if we lost the monitor, it's a reasonably high res thing and that kind of kit is still much cheaper here than in the Phils, I wouldn't want to have to replace it over there (I got it there when the exchange rate was really good). I would also be upset at losing my UK keyboard, hard to get those over there In 2010 I took a second hand laptop over, it died a couple of days before I left, hard disk controller failure, I brought it back to the UK but never managed to fix it problem is on the motherboard and not really fixable, point is even in the Phils theft is not the biggest issue. I am working on a personal project to develop a piece of software that will secure personal information on a laptop automatically on the fly in the background, if I am not present for a pre determined period of time, I'm about 70% of the way through.
There's an HTC Android app that does something similar for mobile phones, but it only either locks it, or erases all data if its stolen. Had this phone for nearly 10 months, and as yet, it's not able to pinpoint the exact location, closest I got was 100 metres, furthest was 6 miles away.
Could not actually get it to get a picture of me - only the ceiling light. I guess it was operating the webcam is some sort of 'stealth' mode so the little red light would not come on. Not too far from there - a nice place to walk around, without traffic in the centre, but I only go to there to do mystery shopping work (which is much less these days).
I'm writing my own actually I should say I have written my own but not turned it into an unattended service yet.
A problem arises when someone does not power up your PC but connects your disk drive as a 'slave' to another PC in order to read your valuable data. I think those Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs) have great promise here - your encryption key cannot get lost (as it could with TrueCrypt) and as long as the user authentication is robust it makes the drive virtually unreadable.
Yeah I am well aware of these issues but I tend to encrypt the important stuff prior to any likely exposure to theft, i.e. when travelling and then decrypt when I am safe, I much prefer selective control over this than any blanket solution as I am not relying on software that may have failed at a critical moment without my knowledge. The SED's worry me because any kind of encrypted data is very hard to recover if you get a couple of bit errors, a little bit of corruption in a text based code file will break your program compilation but will not destroy the entire file, there is usually enough that is readable that you can recover enough to rewrite just the little bit that got damaged, only ever had to do this about twice in my programming career. I don't even trust my own encryption code which is why I would not keep stuff encrypted for any real length of time, it's much more exposed to disk damage while it is encrypted.
I know you are very well aware of the issues - as many on here seem to be! Is it just coincidence that so many on here have such an interest? Does being interested in computers attract the European male to the Filipina? Anyway, I digress... You obviously have very good back-up systems, OSS, would that not get you out of most problems with 'bit errors'? The same problem must exist for software encryption methods too, I am sure but, as you say, you only use encryption when needed. The real problem with software methods though, is losing the encryption key - lose that and you lose ALL your encrypted data. I recently read an explanation as to why Google does not use encryption-at-rest - not even for its own purposes - it made quite interesting reading. They use very secure locations and fragment the files across those secure physical locations instead.
I think we are all just old fogies here Howerd In my case my need to hire cheap programmers attracted me to the Philippines while it changed my life I do not regret it Regards my approach, there are times where I have come close to losing something important, as I support a lot of systems and have written a lot of code over the years it is very hard sometimes when migrating from one computer to another to make sure the development environments are identical on each machine. As I mentioned before (maybe not on this thread) the real motto is keep your data moving, the hardware is not infallible so the only safe approach is to keep stuff moving and moving in multiple locations, I used to use RAID 1 on my desktop systems and that certainly made me feel a lot more comfortable, not so practical on laptops though and does not protect against logical damage, viruses etc. The occasions where I nearly lost stuff have been when the multiple copies get out of hand and you can't remember exactly what is current, my new encryption code and current approach take this into account but I did not always manage it well in the past. Yesterday for example I had to recompile a program that I wrote donkeys years ago, it's a Radio Frequency Barcode gun control system for narrow band long range (as in distance from base station) barcode scanners, used for stock control, logistics etc. Anyway the point was that my Object Pascal code relies on a set of personal code libraries that I built up over 16 years and I have developed these on many different physical machines over the years probably about 12 or so machines. The problem was that I knew I had the small possibility of slight discrepancies between versions and I had not compiled (built) this program in about 4 years and I just could not remember exactly what the dependencies were. This was a program that just runs, I have not looked at it for years as I never get complaints about it but we had an odd situation that required me to add some diagnostics and I was just scared that I might break it by compiling against the wrong set of libraries, in the event it all worked so now I am happy and can confidently assume that my build environment is now correct. I have however finally adopted proper source control this last few years, not something a solo developer really needed but it does make life a bit easier so I don't expect quite so many issues in the future. A bigger issue for me is moving from Delphi 7 to Delphi XE2 as this starts the whole version management thing all over again after I manage to port the code from one platform to the other All of this is legacy stuff as I don't really code in Object pascal any more it's mostly C# these days. Regards the Google thing I would guess that they are worried about their electric bill, encryption is processor intensive and with data centres the size they have encryption would, quite seriously, be a massive overhead. Also Google does not use a conventional relational database architecture as RDBMS's are simply not up to the job of managing that amount of search data. They use an in house solution called BigTable which is one of a class of DB systems known as NoSQL, it's obviously very powerful not so sure the structure has anything to do with security rather than performance, when you have multiple petabytes of data like Google you need performance and the best performance possible in electrical terms as their electric bill is really horrendous
I think Google is trying to be Carbon neutral, so anything to reduce carbon emissions would help in that quest, OSS! That is just reason Google mentions for reducing electricity consumption - I think they chose to omit the cost element! Apparently, they also use a cut down version of Linux (I think) to write their own back-up software - claiming this also reduced carbon emissions! I think that in addition to the processor overhead, the encrypted files may well be bigger than their unencrypted versions. You are obviously a computer professional - I only do it as a hobby now - I suffered from multiple migraine headaches each week, when working as a programmer for a short while nearly 30 years ago, I really became rather ill.
Google will be very very lucky if they ever get carbon neutral, not sure anyone anywhere is measuring that correctly The Linux thing is very likely true, it's fairly easy to use the Linux Kernel for custom solutions, it was designed for that, it is really just the basic structure of an operating system, it's all the contributors over the years that turned it into a real OS. I had a good friend that went from a maths degree into computing working on military applications about 25 years back, it was the wrong thing for him whether it was the job or the day to day work he ended up developing a severe schizophrenic psychosis and eventually committed suicide about 10 years ago. I also had many school friends that went into software and worked on really challenging military software projects that never had any problems but it can be really hard for some, drives me round the bend sometimes and I do occasionally wish I could quit and go back to a different kind of creative industry like my photography
