The Embarrassing Naked Photos On Your Stolen Laptop May Not Belong To The Thief

Re:The Embarrassing Naked Photos On Your Stolen Laptop May N... by ams6110 on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @11:19PM (#2944122)

Anyone who buys a used laptop should immediately dban it and set it up clean from bare metal. But it's not realistic to expect that everyone knows this, and it requires the OS install media which is often not included with used machines.

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Re:The Embarrassing Naked Photos On Your Stolen Laptop May N... by LogicX on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @01:05AM (#2944405)

This is irrelevant. LoJack (by Absolute) is in the BIOS. If you reformat, it reinstalls itself.

Numerous sources can attest to this, but here's a generic reference: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/LoJack#LoJack...

As you mentioned, not everyone would know, nor have the capability to reformat. This is doubly so for steps I take with administrative passwords, firmware passwords, hard drive passwords, etc. to make it further difficult for the thief to reformat the machine.

Pro-Tip: Leave a guest account, and have everything else encrypted.

(Looking forward to OSX Lion's upcoming support for a browse-only guest account on the unencrypted boot partition when using filevault2)

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Re:The Embarrassing Naked Photos On Your Stolen Laptop May N... by shard on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @02:49AM (#2944598)

From looking at the description on Wikipedia, installing Linux would also bypass LoJack, as the software that's reinstalled is a Windows service.

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Re:The Embarrassing Naked Photos On Your Stolen Laptop May N... by hartror on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @11:21PM (#2944126)

Also advisable if you steal a laptop.

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