Teenagers! Bah! Humbug!

Install DYNDNS client software, you get one free account. can be useful for other things too. dyndns.com

Maybe I am blind (have a really bad cold right now) but I didn't see anything about secret "call home" services on their site under "Services".

It's not specifically intended to be secret, it calls them, you can then get the IP address from them.

if the laptop goes missing set something up to ask them for its IP address every few minutes

if OTOH you really do want secret call home stuff I's sure there's some russian p*rn sites that can provide it for you :)

Maybe Back Orifice (BO2K) could do it for free.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

If it ain't secret it's not going to work well as a retriever because organized theft rings will know and disable it right away.

Almost all I can find in Google about that is in Russian. Can't read it. Na'starovje, tovarishin.

This would be a IMHO perfectly legit application for spyware, where you make your own laptop call home.

Passwords are usefull for protection as long as there is no physical access to the machine itself. A Linux bootable CD (like Knoppix

...but doesn't help the would-be information theif much if you've used an encrypting file system (or just encrypted important directories) on your hard drive.

They can't break it! :-) That's probably why central computing (Citrix, Microsoft terminal server, server virtualisation) are becoming popular again. Besides, some computer cases come with a lockable door in front of the drive bays (even my own server resides in such a case). Still, it won't prevent opening it with a screw driver.

Hmm, not in the US. People like me want to be able to do autonomous computing. Especially since security regs force us to show up a couple hours early at the airport and out here flying is like riding a train in Europe, you do it all the time. Usually there is only a rather expensive web access at airports which would make central computing really expensive. And I don't want my confidential schematics to cross the air waves anyhow.

Come to think of it, my first real computer had a key. A real key, almost of the quality of a house key. Embedded in that lock was some kind of chip and I guess trying to force that lock would have destroyed it.

If you visit a few good-sized libraries I suspect you'll find some that use terminals (running WinCE or similar) as front-ends to a Windows Terminal Server to do the card catalog look-up and similar activities.

That's about the only public place I've seen a significant wholesale return to "centralized computing," although if you think about it an awful lot of people now use centralized computers for their e-mail, calendars, etc. (MSN, Yahoo! mail, g-mail, etc.). Google is pushing this even further, with their "Google Docs & Spreadsheets" -- centralized work processing & spreadsheets, accessible from anywhere with Internet access.

I think the visoin is that, given another decade, most people will have reasonably high-speed Internet access through their cell phones (or at least the networks put in place by the cell phone service providers). You can get an EVDO card for your laptop from Sprint for ~$50/month, and in almost all airports it'll provide upwards of a megabit per second in throughput. For business people who travel a lot that's an incredible cheap way to stay well-connected. (In parts of the country where Sprint hasn't rolled out EVDO it drops to more like "upwards of a hundred *kilobits* per second," but hey, in podunk nowhere that's not half-bad either...)

---Joel

That, plus many of the self check-in terminals and ATMs. Although I vividly remember a photo Jack Ganssle took of an ATM in Munich: "The program has generated errors and is terminated" or something like that. It was running on plain old Windows with the "usual" problems.

Don't know if that'll ever fly in the biz world. Certainly not for things like that jumbo-sized 3D CAD file. Just imagine arriving at a meeting empty-handed. "Oh, ahm, ahum, the cell network went down..."

It'll be ok for mundane work. But for CAD I can already feel the difference when accessing libraries over WLAN versus from hard drive. Ok, the WLAN is protected but that doesn't make it very slow. It's the response times that matter most, no the transfer rate.