Our house was burglarized last week sometime within a two-hour window from the time I left and Susana came home. While I’ve been the victim of nearly every other type of property crime—four cars broken into, lawnmowers, grills and bicycles stolen—this one is the most disturbing. It’s not that we had much that the bad guys could make away with, it’s the thought of being home when someone kicks down the door.
Feelings of, “we’re moving out of this house,” quickly turned to, “were not going to let this happen again,” and thoughts of midieval booby traps and razor wire danced in my head. We settled on more practical measures—doors have been reinforced, a security system is nearly place, and sadly, we now have less that a burglar would want. The most valuable item was a laptop. Fortunately I keep all my data on a file server (if that had been stolen, good lord…)
When I came upstairs that night and saw the LEDs on the wireless hub, I got to wondering if there was some way to see if the burglar was in range and still using the connection. Chances were slim that it was someone living within 500ft of our house since I know and trust most of my immediate neighbors. I’m not enough of a hacker to figure that out anyway. Then it occurred to me what I should have done.
If I had set my browser to automatically load my homepage with a secret code, say, http://contactsheet.org/?k38sj2, every time it started up, I could trace my way back to the thief’s physical location. I could wait until that code appeared in my site’s logs, trace their IP address and get a subpoena for their ISP to provide the name and address of the user connecting via that IP address at that particular time. The computer would, in effect, send a beacon back to its owner after being stolen.
I don’t know how difficult it would be to carry out the legal work (proving to authorities that your method is 99.9% likely to find the right person), and may require a lawyer, but the plan seems like it could catch most crooks. What amateur burglar—someone desperate enough to risk time behind bars, or in this country, the wrath of an armed homeowner—is going to be keen enough to go to the trouble of reformatting your laptop’s harddrive before its very first use?
Other homing pigeon software could be made to automatically connect to a web site or web service every time it finds a connection to the Internet, like a lo-jack for your laptop (lapjack?), even before the user is prompted for a password (my plan above would require no username/password login). There’s a good chance the laptop would be in someone else’s hands by the time it actually connected to the Internet, but then you’d at least get the computer back, and have a starting point in which to catch the thief, or catch someone trafficking in stolen goods.
I just saw My Architect: A Son’s Journey, a documentary by Nathaniel Kahn on his quest to learn about his father, the master architect Louis Kahn.
The movie goes back and forth between Kahn’s mysterious personal life and his public greatness. After becoming arguably the nation’s most influential architect of the 20th century, Louis Kahn died bankrupt and alone in a bathroom stall at Penn Station in 1973, his body not identified for three days. During the latter part of his life he spent his time between his three families — Nathaniel was his “illegitimate” son. The women in Kahn’s life seemed to excuse his lack of decency for his genius. Nathaniel’s mother, who met Kahn after taking a job in his office, holds no grudges. She continued to believe Lou was going to leave his wife and move in until the day he died. His other mistress interviewed in the film, Harriet, also held a reverence for Kahn that blinded any ill-feelings she might have for him.
The black turtlenecks in the audience tripped over each other to whisper the name of each famous architect being interviewed before his name and title appeared on screen, to prove their architecture-smarts. The interviews with the testaments of architecture were great, especially with Philip Johnson at his Glass House. “Corbusier was a jerk, Mies… you just couldn’t talk to him, but Kahn was just a nice guy.”