Blast Radius: A World of Pain — I found this tale, transcribed here, to be hilarious. Videos are posted here. Essentially it’s a professor going on an on about how a specific laptop needs to be returned or the culprit will be sent to prison for stealing state secrets. My question is how can the professor be so careless as to leave a laptop with all these state secrets unsecured and laying around. I would assume it was all a bluff. A good read however you interpret it.
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On the other hand the terror tactics might work – if the thieve was indeed a student, then most likely he’ll be terrified and
a) just dump the laptop somewhere and hope the heat goes away
b) turn himself in and be expelled or worse
Terror is a proven techinique in the classroom, and this guy is obviously no newbie dealing with kids.
Let’s see what happens now!
And BTW, Microsoft doesn’t get ‘signalled’ every time a PC starts Windows. The guy says he installed the same version of Windows on another PC ‘and within fifteen minutes the people in Redmond Washington were very interested to know why it was that the same version of Windows was being signalled to them from two different computers.’.
BTW, in my work I routinely install the same version of Windows on hundreds of PCs – if the licensing is OK so is the rest, as far as MS is concerned – they just want their money, and that’s OK with me. Redmond never got in touch with me or the companies I work for for doing this, and it would be pretty naive to believe this… But then again, he’s dealing with a kid, he must know what he’s doing.
So it seems to me there’s a lot of bluff involved here.
Sorry for speaking so much, I really liked this one!
Well?
Did he get it back?
It doesn’t really matter that (I should say “if”) this lecturer is a stuffed cabbage of a human being, without any real dignity or empathy or whatever.
The guy – young man, actually – that stole the computer is just a simple thief. And we’ve all felt the frustration of having things stolen. He’s done the wrong, committed the tort.
All I would care about is getting my property back.
Make sure we find out what happens, even if it’s nothing.
“–“
Does this guy want his computer back? I got a bit confused once he told everyone the person would go to jail :rollseyes:
I suppose he could find it in a dumpster smashed to pieces.
“My question is how can the professor be so careless as to leave a laptop with all these state secrets unsecured and laying around. I would assume it was all a bluff.” -JCD
He’d better hope that it is all bluff, else his lecture is one of the biggest self-indictments I have ever seen. It is the thief who is the only one who can come to his aid, not the other way round.
Seems to be a pattern here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/03/28/financial/f151143S80.DTL
“This is the second time in six months that UC Berkeley has been involved in a theft of personal information. Last September, a computer hacker gained access to UC Berkeley research being done for the state Department of Social Services. The files contained personal information of about 600,000 people.”
Lastly, I’d like to know more about the European Union’s policies on privacy protections.
“The European Union’s 1998 European Data Privacy Directive prohibits transfer of personal data to any country that does not have adequate privacy protection. The United States’ approach to privacy has been considered inadequate by the EU.”
http://www.consumerreports.org/main/content/display_report.jsp?WebLogicSession=QmgZC4k3XQ2TcM02Stc3LDICYf1Fe3eJgXYSq01PLt27Ij1c3MIh|9052752088981312882/169937909/6/7005/7005/7002/7002/7005/-1|-889250934640863726/169937913/6/7005/7005/7002/7002/7005/-1&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=348199&ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=333147&bmUID=1114118411857
Gee, what in the news lately would make the EU think that we don’t take privacy and security seriously? The Consumer Reports article is actually from 2003; of course, things are even worse now….
Wow! This is great! This kid must be either shaking in his boots or splitting his side laughing. I can’t wait to hear what happens next.
It reminds me of that old skit about the kid in shop class who throws firecrackers into the forge. Bam! The Instructor starts in “You know, it reflects on your family, if you do something like that! – A kid who would do that, his parents are probably pretty ignorant…” then the kids in the class start , “Hey Mario, he’s talking about your mother…” “Mario, are you going to let him talk about your Mom that way?”
Where was that skit? Was that SNL about a million years ago, or what?
For some reason after reading what that guy said I do not feel one bit sorry for him. He seems like a blowhard and an idiot. If I had the laptop I would post all of the information from it on a web server somewhere and tell the guy to go screw himself. If the guy who stole it was halfway computer savvy it could be done without too much bother. Then, of course, I would return the laptop safe and sound.
Something inside me just seems to think that this guy deserves that.
PS: who the hell does leave such an important peice of equipment lying around? or unencrypted? If he’s so special and his data is so special he should have taken due care with it. Laptops are stolen every day.
I now have the video in my site at http://miklops.redirectme.net/HUMOR/default.htm (scroll down a little)
Some of you guys tried to download it earlier but it wasn’t working – still trying to find out why.
It’s a 10 meg file, and it’s on my home server connected to broadband cable – it’s not the fastest thing on earth.
Any more news about this jackass’ computer?