Andrew Brown squawked out on Thursday 15-Nov-2012@05:41:38
> A few months ago, someone helped themselves to a Mini sitting on a shelf in
> my office. Yesterday, thanks to Dropbox, I saw that it was on line on the
> other side of Geneva, in the Haute-Savoie. I went up the the local
> gendarmerie and reported the theft, and the IP being used. The computers in
> the gendarmerie were not allowed to go to dropbox.com to confirm the IP --
> rural France welcomes cyber criminals with open arms -- and they will send
> the papers off to a judge somewhere who may or may not act at some point to
> demand that SFR reveal the identity of the then user of the machine.
>
> I could leave a message in the DB folder suggesting that the user deliver the
> machine anonymously back to my office but I have no way of knowing that he or
> she will read it. Is there any better way of getting a message through? The
> machine has not been on line for a couple of days now.
If the machine is online, and if you had “Remote login” enabled, you can ssh to
the machine and when logged in, do something like this:
ssh -t remote.ip.address screen -DRRS stolen
This will logout in, and will start a screens session (so that when you login
in the future, you keep the same history).
sudo osascript -e "set Volume 10”
Turn up the system volume to maximum
while true; do
say “This computer is stolen and the IP has been reported to the authorities.”;
say ”Return computer to {my address} and no further actions will be taken.”;
sleep 60;
done
Broadcast the fact the computer is stolen and where it was stolen from. Chances
are good the person using the computer does not know it was stolen.
After broadcasting this, wait a minute before doing it again.
You could also create a Textedit file with contact information in a large font
and 1) open it on screen and 2) set it to open on the login screen.
Simply create the file and copy it to the machine, then:
sudo mv myfile.rtf to /Library/Security/PolicyBanner.rtf
sudo chmod o+r /Library/Security/PolicyBanner.rtf
Try not to be accusatory in the file. As I said, the chances are good the
person using the computer has no idea it was stolen.
--
'I'll see you all tomorrow. If there is one.'
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