As if you didn't have enough reason to never lose your laptop

[JustAskJulie]

This "recovery" service helps find the owners of lost laptops by sharing the private info recovered from the laptop,publicly....

Computer Shopper: News: We've got your laptop, we'll post your files online, pay up now, says recovery service

More shocking is that if nobody claims the laptop, Lost Laptop will start making private files from the missing notebook available online. Having a quick look through the site we found one unlucky customer from Hastings with some nude pictures of whom we assume is his girlfriend, some files containing information on swingers clubs and details of some quite horrific sounding adult toys.

[PB&J]

Oh. My. God. The nightmare....
even with NOTHING swinging stored on it, the thought of my poor dear Dell exposed to the world like that....

[CXXC]

Wow! thats just wrong in so many ways! There are ways to protect the sytstem form being screwed with like that. Just remember to back everything up once a week! That is the biggest issue I have with my laptop. GOODNESS! All that mission critical crap I have on it! EEK!!!! Forget pictures!

[ncmd_couple]

I would call it blackmail and file charges.

S

[Additude]

I would call it that Laptops never really "Get Lost"...they get stolen unless they are turned into the authorities or the police. Seriously, do you know anyone who "Lost" their laptop? I don't. I'm not saying that it could never happen, but it would have to be rare and even then most likely happen in a public venue because someone has to find it.

Say for example someone accidentially left it in the lobby of a hotel. What happened to it? Did someone find it and turn it in to the front desk or the police? or ummmm, take it for themselves? and steal it? And just exactly how did this "Service" come into possession of it? They purchased stolen property.

It's not difficult to figure this out and steal laptops for the purpose of selling them to this company for money.

Even if this company "unknowingly" purchased the stolen laptop they are still in possession of "stolen property" and are now using it as a tool for extortion. I am sure just about any DA in the country would love to have a case like this.

I guess I feel that there are just so many things wrong with that type of operation, both morally and legally. I think whatever they do they would be skirting the law.

[fun4Ds]

Americans aren't allowed.

Dammit, I would have turned in one of my clunkers for 3000 euros. Well, thats the hook anyhow as I see it....

Following the links on one page it looks like (turn one in for 3000), Then on the next link it says 3.000 and on another its .3000 ?

Scam.

[JustAskJulie]

Originally Posted by Additude

I would call it that Laptops never really "Get Lost"...they get stolen unless they are turned into the authorities or the police. Seriously, do you know anyone who "Lost" their laptop? I don't. I'm not saying that it could never happen, but it would have to be rare and even then most likely happen in a public venue because someone has to find it.

Say for example someone accidentially left it in the lobby of a hotel. What happened to it? Did someone find it and turn it in to the front desk or the police? or ummmm, take it for themselves? and steal it? And just exactly how did this "Service" come into possession of it? They purchased stolen property.

Those thoughts were crossing my mind as well... Kinda makes you wonder if this "service" is just a new way of distributing stolen goods for money.

[Alura]

In my opinion this is, without question, extortion. The perpetrators need to be prosecuted.

Mr. Alura

[SecretAsianMan]

Reasons why I tear out the hard-drives and memory chips to old computers before "disposing" of them... no "recovery program" in the universe beats Black-n-Decker when it comes to making sure they're gone.

[warrencouple]

Originally Posted by SecretAsianMan

Reasons why I tear out the hard-drives and memory chips to old computers before "disposing" of them... no "recovery program" in the universe beats Black-n-Decker when it comes to making sure they're gone.

There have been cases where data has been recovered from hard drives that have been shot with guns to try to destroy the data. Even drilling holes through the platters, in several different places, won't destroy all the data.

Now, shredding the drive, that's going to make it tough to recover anything. Of course, now you're shipping your drive to a company, and trusting that they won't plug it in to see what they can see...

The RAM, I'd not worry about, myself, as while it has been shown to be possible to recover data from RAM (which clears after powering off,) it required *immediately* pulling the RAM, and sticking it in a reader in a supercooled environment, to get anything...

Jason

[SecretAsianMan]

Originally Posted by warrencouple

There have been cases where data has been recovered from hard drives that have been shot with guns to try to destroy the data. Even drilling holes through the platters, in several different places, won't destroy all the data.

Now, shredding the drive, that's going to make it tough to recover anything. Of course, now you're shipping your drive to a company, and trusting that they won't plug it in to see what they can see...

The RAM, I'd not worry about, myself, as while it has been shown to be possible to recover data from RAM (which clears after powering off,) it required *immediately* pulling the RAM, and sticking it in a reader in a supercooled environment, to get anything...

Jason

Yeah ... shredding works really well. So does tossing it in a compactor and compressing it to the size of a postage stamp. If it didn't produce a toxic cloud - I'd say throw 'em in a steel can and set the whole bloody thing on fire and melt it to slag!

[slevin]

This is a good reason to use a Windows feature called Bitlocker. It encrypts the drive so if someone steals your laptop they can't access any of your data without your password or encryption key.

[dlflorida]

Originally Posted by slevin

This is a good reason to use a Windows feature called Bitlocker. It encrypts the drive so if someone steals your laptop they can't access any of your data without your password or encryption key.

More info on this??

Sounds like a great feature

[slevin]

Originally Posted by dlflorida

More info on this??

Sounds like a great feature

Sure; it's a Windows Vista and Windows 7 feature that is built into the Ultimate and Enterprise versions of the product. If you're semi technical here are a few links that describe the feature; if not technical there is a step by step to configure it. In descending order of likely usefulness to you

Description of the BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool
Explore the features: BitLocker Drive Encryption
BitLocker Drive Encryption Step-by-Step Guide
Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption Frequently Asked Questions
BitLocker Drive Encryption | Data Protection & Security | Windows Vista

[warrencouple]

If you don't have Win Vista Business / Ultimate or Win7 Ultimate, you can also look at using Truecrypt which can do much the same, including encrypting your boot partition. Best part, Truecrypt is free / open source, and available for Win2000 through Win7, as well as Mac OSX, Ubuntu and Red Hat Linuxes.

Although, Truecrypt is primarily password based, and if you lose / forget your password, you're pretty much SOL...

One plus point to Truecrypt over Bitlocker (geek hat on) is that Bitlocker requires you to have a system with a "Trusted Platform Module" which handles much of the encryption tasks, while Truecrypt does not require such a module. If your system (laptop or desktop) does not have a TPM, you can't use bitlocker...
(geek hat off)

Jason