Sad times, everybody…

My baby has just been swiped out of a locked hotel room in London under mysterious circumstances. This hits me hard as there was a lot of data on the HDD that was hard to replace, but I try to be positive and see it as an excuse to buy myself a new TR5MP for Christmas. Until then, I suck it up in Cybercafes… Oh well…

The thing I was wondering about is, since I have a boot pw on the
machine, whoever took it basically got himself little more than a shiny
doorstop, right? I mean, the machine is hard to open, and I think
resetting the CMOS battery is probably nothing accomplished too easily.
Or are there backdoors to disable the boot password that fences know
about?

ttyl,

  - Stefan

did you hear that dbs… :shock:  :ph34r:

sorry to hear that The Mechanic.. resetting the cmos battery is the only way to reset the pw that i’m aware of..

[quote author=“MegaManXcalibur”]Honestly unless you encrypt the whole drive nothing can stop somebody from just popping in a Linux Live-On-CD (this is a distrobution of Linux and loads into RAM so nothing has to be physically installed.  All that’s needed is a CD-ROM drive) and looking at everything you’ve got (yes since Linux doesn’t understand Window’s security setup it is completly bipassed and everything is accessable).  The problem is it’s almost impossible to encypt an entire harddrive.  On the other hand you can encrypt certain files and folder.

Here is a massive article on how encryption works and how to do it in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003…

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/deploy/cryptfs.mspx

Mechanic-

I feel for you dued.  That sucks.  I wish you had theft insurance. :(  Well maybe when you buy one for christmas they’ll have a new design of the picturebook/tr. 

I dont know how your funds are but I’ve seen some good deals of used TR on ebay…

Or you could always by one like I did with 0 apr for 2 years.  The payments would be hella lot cheaper than Cyber Cafes.

My .02

You live life and sometimes sh*t happens. I don’t leave my car in the garage and take the bus because I’m afraid someone will run into it.

Sorry for your troubles, Mechanic. Any recourse with the hotel?

You live life and sometimes sh*t happens. I don’t leave my car in the garage and take the bus because I’m afraid someone will run into it.

very true. that’s why we take precautions like putting alarms in our cars.. i’ve gotten alot of shit stolen when i was in the navy.. :shock: by the same people that you are suspose to depend your life on.. even DIRTY laundry.  that doesn’t mean i’m not going to change my underwear anymore..just means i got to make it inaccessible and not leave shit out.

Mechanic - Sorry to hear about your loss. The odds are that the person who stole your notebook doesn’t know too much about computers…since it was most likely a cleaning lady, its not like she has the money/time to learn how to crack passwords. However, if the TR fell into the hands of a more experienced user it shouldn’t be too hard to crack a password given the length of time they have with the notebook. Even if they don’t crack it outright there are usually ways around it.

Without being encrypted, your data is pretty much unsecure. If you had any CC #s or passwords to other important things I would have them changed ASAP.

Again, very sorry about your loss.

Erik

So sorry to hear that.. hmm
Hopefully while s/he was trying to get away with your TR drop it on their way somehow..

[quote author=“invisiblefly”]So sorry to hear that.. hmm
Hopefully while s/he was trying to get away with your TR drop it on their way somehow..

laptops are made to last these days..

Question: did you invest in an anti-theft solution for your laptop? IE: Kensington Laptop lock or something? Or did you just leave it in your room w/o anything?

~nox

theres been reports of laptop locks easily picked using ordinary materials. ie pen.  :shock:

[quote author=“linc”]theres been reports of laptop locks easily picked using ordinary materials. ie pen.  :shock:

Yeah, it was on /. which doesn’t help any. It was never meant to be a full solution anyway, it was meant for someone not to be able to casually walk off with it. Anyone with a decent cutter could get it off in 30 seconds anyway.

Erik

yeah. if someone really wants to take it..there’s really not much you can do. 

Thanks everybody for the overwhelming compassion and support. You guys rock. Losing my TR1MP has been like losing a friend—my heart still aches thinking about it.

Luckily, my employer has been understanding that I make extensive personal use of my work computer now until I can replace the TR. It’s a small comfort in shitty times…

All the best, I hope I can soon rejoin the group of actual TR owners…  :oops:

for comfort,

i’d suggest reporting the loss to sony.

if the password is locked to the bios, i would imagine that you would have to get the pass-key from sony.  And if it’s reported stolen, sometimes, it can be recovered

i wouldn’t bet my shoes on that, but atleast it’s an effort to possibly recovering your pc. 

best of luck

sorry buddy…

since we are on the subject of stolen laptops here I would like to ask one ques…might have asked this b4 but dont remember.

on the net, is the mac address thats associated with a certain ip also available for tracking down someone?