I think "remote wipe software" is a scam. There is no way to know that the system will ever be remotely accessible[1]; there is no way to know that it will be booted into the operating system that was installed; there is no way to know that the storage media will even be in the same system when it's accessed; there is no way to know that the wiping software will run before storage media are accessed; there is no way to know that the wiping software will finish running; there is no way (in general) to know that the wiping software will do a thorough enough job.
Yes, you might accidentally defend against a common thief who doesn't know any of this and boots your laptop into your OS on their network without a sensibly-configured firewall in the data path. But most of them will learn, soon enough, not to do that -- it'll probably just take a few high-profile cases that attract enough media attention. Use encryption -- so that your storage media are functionally pre-wiped, so to speak, all the time. ---rsk [1] A Faraday cage should suffice to prevent wireless communication. -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected] or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
