...after the professor lays the smackdown. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3761454824743281650 Now was he bluffing?
If they haven't got him all he has to do now is basically dispose of the harddrive and he's pretty much off scott-free, no? -Having one copy of windows installed and operating on more than one computer is pretty common. I have, currently, the same copy of windows running on 4 computers, all of which I own, running at the same time for about 3 years now. No problems from people in "Washington". -Having a transponder to track the computer as it logs into the campus wireless network is no big deal. I doubt it updates in real enough time for them to actually pinpoint and catch him. Plus telling him that just lets him know to not use the wireless card on campus anymore. Sounds like a bunch of hot air to me. Professor is just embarassed that his laptop got jacked, he was careless, now he's trying to scare him into getting it back.
i read at another place that they did recover the laptop, but it had the harddrive reformatted and the professor was BSing. EDIT: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=22762 Redfaced professor made up scary story Laptop thief called his bluff By Nick Farrell: Monday 25 April 2005, 05:58 A BIOLOGY professor who attempted to scare the student who nicked his laptop into giving himself up may have exaggerated his story a tad. Last week we told how University of California, Berkeley, professor, Jasper Rine tried to put the fear of god into the student who nicked his laptop by claiming it had all sorts of top secret government data on it. He warned that almost every James Bond in the world was hunting that laptop. He also said he knew who the thief was. Since we ran that story, it has been picked up by ABC News in the States and debated on bog sites across the world. Most techies consider that anyone could see that the Rine was telling porkies. One of the ways that Rine claimed he identified the tea leaf was by installing the same version of Windows on another computer. If the professor had attempted to use the same key to activate a copy of Windows, the activation servers would have denied him access. Some of the technobabble that the professor spouted to out the thief was impressive, but has not been found to work well yet. He claimed that there were passive trackers embedded in the bezel of laptop screens beside the wireless transmitters. Technology like this does sort of exist, but is rare and not used by anyone outside the Department of Energy. He also claimed that the wireless card in the laptop triggered some location data. This is possible, but pretty unlikely. In fact a University spokesman told ABC that Rine had indeed made the whole thing up to scare the student into handing over the laptop. The story has for some reason now been pulled from the ABC site, but can be found here. There might be a bit of a clue as to the way Rine operates in an article here, in which he says: "Although I have unlimited respect for facts, and delight in their discovery and appreciation, I have come to the obvious yet almost blasphemous view that, with respect to teaching, the facts just aren't that important." Despite all the exaggeration, and threats, the thief has ignored Rine and has kept his laptop. Still it was worth a crack. µ
There's only one man that needs to be called when there's a missing laptop full of government secrets, and his name's not James Bond.
Yeah that was a bunch of crap. If he had all that sensitive data on it, he would be the one in hot crap since he exposed the data. You don't put sensitive top secret data on a windows notebook with wireless card. You're just asking to get hacked.
