General Discussions

**Truly** · 02-05-2008, 12:53 PM

I had my car robbed the other day. Someone smashed the window and took everything inside. Luckily my laptop wasnt in there but I came to think, what if it was.

So heres my plan, tell me what you guys think.

I was thinking of writing a program that is hidden in either the windows system files or possible a seperate (very small) partition. Basically this program would sit in the background and would wait for me to come find it either every time the computer is turned on or every 12 hours and then I would type in a password and if I didnt do this the program would start sending out (assuming there is internet access) a message to a ftp server with the ip address that it is connected to.

Now obviously a complete harddrive cleanup could make this completely useless and knowing me I wont actually make this program, and even with the ip it would still be difficult to trace it, not to mention that knowing me Ill forget about this in a day or 2, but still. Any thoughts?

**Learning Newbie** · 02-05-2008, 03:51 PM

Sorry about your car.

What you're talking about is doable. You might even want to forget the hunting it down and putting in a password part - if you have a web host and coding skills, storage and bandwidth are cheap. You can just let the thing log your IP and any other data that might be useful, once an hour. You could even have the thing spool messages when it's offline and send them as a batch when it regains internet access.

That's how a lot of software activation works, more or less. But they all have an easier job than finding out where a computer is physically located. An IP address won't tell you that, that I know of. Unless you have GPS built into your laptop, I don't thik there's anything your code would have access to that could help recover a machine.

Still if you found it through other means, the data might help you in court?

**NullPointer** · 02-05-2008, 07:01 PM

If you wanted to figure out who someone was or where they lived based on their IP address, most likely you would have to go through their ISP, they most likely wouldn't just give that information to just anyone. Even then an IP address doesn't guarantee that you can determine who someone is or where they live.

If you had the ability to write code to deliver their IP address to you remotely you might as well take it a step further and try to farm some personal info from them.

Also if you wanted to get their IP all you would really have to do is set your homepage to a simple site coded in php that records IP addresses of visitors (just make sure its not a page just anyone is likely to stumble upon). Whenever they loaded up IE or whatever you are using then they would just be posting their IP in your SQL database.

Sorry about the car. The day before yesterday my roomates came home to find some guy sitting in their car smoking. Nothing was stolen but when they asked him what he was doing his reply was "Oh I thought it was my car"... That sounds crazy enough as it is... but the car was really old and bright yellow. Completely unmistakable and the only one in the whole complex.

**Truly** · 02-05-2008, 08:17 PM

Ya I know the most I would be able to do is narrow it down to city and the ISP, not really that much help, I was more just thinking outloud then anything :P

Nice story about your friend Nullpointer, the guy was probably so high he though it was a new green truck.

**ForrestCroce** · 02-05-2008, 11:05 PM

If you have an IP and timestamp - with an accurate clock, of course - you can subpeona the customer's name and contact info from their ISP. I don't know whether a court would actually issue one or not, but there's some value at least...

It would be better if you could get more info about the network it's connected to and send that out as an xml message. Machine names, mac IDs - especially of the router if possible, stuff like that; it won't help you find anything, but might help with the law.

Personally, I'd just never leave my laptop in the car unattended, unless I was in the family's driveway, or whatever.