From Boing Boing and Blast Radius Professor Jasper Rine lectures at UC Berkeley. Recently his laptop was stolen by a thief who was after exam data. Unfortunately for the thief, Professor Rine had some important stuff on that laptop. The webcast of last Friday's Biology 1A lecture gets very interesting at timecode 48:50. "Thanks Gary. I have a message for one person in this audience - I'm sorry the rest of you have to sit through this. As you know, my computer was stolen in my last lecture. The thief apparently wanted to betray everybody's trust, and was after the exam. The thief was smart not to plug the computer into the campus network, but the thief was not smart enough to do three things: he was not smart enough to immediately remove Windows. I installed the same version of Windows on another computer - within fifteen minutes the people in Redmond Washington were very interested to know why it was that the same version of Windows was being signalled to them from two different computers. The thief also did not inactivate either the wireless card or the transponder that's in that computer. Within about an hour, there was a signal from various places on campus that's allowed us to track exactly where that computer went every time that it was turned on. I'm not particularly concerned about the computer. But the thief, who thought he was only stealing an exam, is presently - we think - is probably still in possession of three kinds of data, any one of which can send this man, this young boy, actually, to federal prison. Not a good place for a young boy to be. You are in possession of data from a hundred million dollar trial, sponsored by the NIH, for which I'm a consultant. This involves some of the largest companies on the planet, the NIH investigates these things through the FBI, they have been notified about this problem. You are in possession of trade secrets from a Fortune 1000 biotech company, the largest one in the country, which I consult for. The Federal Trade Communication is very interested in this. Federal Marshals are the people who handle that. You are in possession of proprietary data from a pre-public company planning an IPO. The Securities and Exchange Commission is very interested in this and I don't even know what branch of law enforcement they use. Your academic career is about to come to an end. You are facing very serious charges, with a probability of very serious time. At this point, there's very little that anybody can do for you. One thing that you can do for yourself is to somehow prove that the integrity of the data which you possess has not been corrupted or copied. Ironically, I am the only person on the planet that can come to your aid, because I am the only person that can tell whether the data that was on that computer are still on that computer. You will have to find a way of hoping that if you've copied anything that you can prove you only have one copy of whatever was made. I am tied up all this afternoon; I am out of town all of next week. You have until 11:55 to return the computer, and whatever copies you've made, to my office, because I'm the only hope you've got of staying out of deeper trouble than you or any student I've ever known has ever been in. I apologise to the rest of you for having to bring up this distasteful matter, but I will point out that we have a partial image of this person, we have two eyewitnesses, with the transponder data we're going to get this person." Webcast Torrent
OK, he said the thief was not smart enough to do three things. I got 1) Remove Windows 2) deactivate the wireless card or transponder...or maybe this counts at two things?
The wireless card only works if it is within the radius of selected auto connection. Otherwise, you have to connect manually. The student should just call his bluff
I never got to try my school's wireless network before I gave my sister my laptop, but wouldn't you need only one autoconnection to access Berkley's wireless network at any of the places on campus where it's accessible?
that prof is so full of it - pure scare tatics - lets see how many scary govt agency names I can throw out if they really had a bead on the thief, they would be no need for the speech my guess is the prof is in deep doo-doo for leaving his laptop in a postion where it could be easily stolen with all the senstive data on it - he is scared of getting sued
The perp is probably busy d/l-ing as much as he can from www.Pedo.com before turning it in to the proper authorities anonymously.
Dear Professor Blah blah blah: Suck it. I just made you spend an extra day of your life making up stories of how important you think you are. Ha. Ha. Ha. Sincerely, Guy who stole your laptop.
I watched the last 4 minutes, which is the speech from the prof. He sounds very nervous. As others have said, if he knows who stole his laptop, why not just go get it back, or publish the guys name. Would it be that hard to look at the ID pictures of all of the students in his class and identify the theif?
I could be wrong (please tell me if I am), but since when do you get a call from Microsoft Corporate when you install Windows on more than one computer? It might be illegal, but I don't think they are hunting down people that fast for it, geez. If I was the person who took it, I'd just trash it in the bottom of a lake or something.
First of all, the MS Windows activation would only capture the IP of the NEW install of windows... the original copy has long been activated and only communicates with MS when you update Windows, not to mention the fact that it takes 10+ activations of Windows for it to find the activation invalid. Secondly, you can't track where the PC is just by it's wireless network card. Lastly... if the laptop had a GPS transponder why in the hell would he need the thief to come forward? Obviously this was silly tactic to try and scare the thief out of hiding...
yeah I've installed both windows 2000 and xp and my computers using the same disc and havent gotten any calls or emails or death threats of the sort. getting one within 15mins? uhmm yeah........
