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Lenovo Lets You Disable Your Stolen Laptop With a Stern Text Message
Posted by John Herrman at 8:40 PM on November 25, 2008
In the next couple months Lenovo will be rolling out a BIOS update for its Montevina laptop users which enables remote shutdown and subsequent encryption via text message. The tech relies on the laptop having a WWAN connection and activates when a custom string, defined by the user and sent from a single, paired phone, is received. In other words, you can choose whatever you want as the shutdown signal, from a cool "Kill" or "Self-Destruct" to a long, patronising multi-part message about the thieving youth of today.
Transportation Security Administration baggage screener Pythias Brown is the reason you hate flying with expensive gear in your bag, especially if you ever flew out of Newark airport. Over the last few years, 
If you're working at Dunder-Mifflin and you're lifting a highlighter or two every now and then, Michael may feign disapproval, but that's about it. On the other side of the coin is Victor Papagno, a sysadmin for the US Naval Research Laboratory, who was recently busted for jacking over 20,000 pieces of gear worth $US120,000--from ink cartridges to hard drives to software--over the course of 10 years.
What if all of the cars in a parking lot were wirelessly keeping an eye on one another just in case a member of the "herd" was damaged or stolen? Sencun Zhu, an assistant professor at Penn State University, wants to make this concept a reality with his new Sensor Vehicle Anti-Theft System (SVATS). This is how it works: each car is given a coin-sized sensor that wirelessly calls roll with other cars inside a certain range. If one of these cars fails to respond to the roll or issues a "goodbye" signal when it is unlocked, the system will assume that the car has been stolen and would respond by alerting a base station.
Bike theft is a pretty sizable problem in cities, with only the most industrial-strength locks keeping nimble-fingered thieves from taking off with your two-wheeler. This Bike Tree concept helps alleviate this problem by raising bikes up and out of reach of bike thieves. It also helps save space, allowing more bikes to be parked in a smaller area. I like it; let's see some of these installed in NYC, eh? [
A White Plains, NY woman who was the victim of burglary, including her MacBook, used the Back To My Mac screen sharing feature to turn on her webcam and capture images of the unwitting culprits using the computer. As a result, police were able to arrest the thieves and recover most of the stolen goods, which included two laptops, two flat-screen televisions, two iPods, gaming consoles, DVDs and computer games.
Intel is currently hard at work on its new Anti-Theft Technology (ATT), a relatively vague new project that would help prevent theft by making a computer inoperable without the owners permission. It differs from disc encryption methods of protection by rendering the computer inoperable even if the drive has been swapped out. Intel's currently working with a number of other companies on the project, but don't expect to see the fruits of their labour until the fourth quarter of this year or later. [
While hotels are used to catering to the shady sides of society—there's good reason that rooms are void of blacklight fixtures and stocked to the gills with plenty of cheap towels—they are not used to appeasing eco-conscious thieves. According to Montana's page on energy efficient CFLs, "building owners, hotel operators and office managers complain about people stealing the CFL bulbs right out of the fixtures." 
Sorry, dudes—I just had to write that headline. But it's true: the 2009 OnStar systems in about 20 GM models will be able to access the brakes to stop a perp in his tracks. First, there would be a verbal warning, where the car, hopefully voiced by William Daniels, will tell the thief that it will slow to a stop. The thief has the option of pulling over to the side, or of course wheeling into oncoming traffic to go down in a blaze of glory. OnStar will also pop on the hazard lights and call the fuzz to report the car's whereabouts. Owners can opt out of the feature, presumably in the fear that cops or an angry spouse could use it on them. [
