After don Crabb had his pricy portable stolen at O'hare three weeks ago,
I am less inclined to draw intrest in these fabolous toys.
kelly
Mar. 2--If there's one growth industry keeping up with the '90s boom in
laptop
computers, it's stealing the pricey portables from business travelers. Once
stolen, the FBI says, portable PCs are rarely recovered.
But that may change. A Canadian software company has introduced a
computer-tracing program that lets purloined laptops -- to borrow a phrase
from
ET -- ``phone home.''
Once installed on a laptop, the program instructs the laptop to call a
toll-free
number into a monitoring center on a regular basis whenever the PC is
attached
to a telephone. The laptop silently transmits the phone number of its
location
without alerting its user.
If the computer has not been reported stolen, nothing happens. But once a
report
of theft has been made to Absolute Software, the program's developer, a
caller-ID feature lets the monitoring center know the offender's phone number
and address -- even if that number is unlisted or ID-blocked.
The program, called CompuTrace, became available last fall but soon will be
launched formally, says Peter Smyth, spokesman for Vancouver, British
Columbia-based Absolute Software. The program costs $29.95, while the annual
monitoring fee costs $60.
CompuTrace could become the LoJack of laptops. The program's PC-tracing
capability resembles the idea pioneered by a company called LoJack, which
tracks
stolen cars with a wireless beacon.
The PC program may have hit on a hot market. According to Safeware, a
computer
insurer based in Columbus, Ohio, about $1.4-billion worth of PCs were
stolen in
1996, up 20 percent from the previous year. The FBI notes that 90 percent of
stolen computer equipment is never recovered.
CompuTrace works, but the growing list of corporate clients -- including
some in
Florida, says Smyth -- that use the laptop tracing system don't usually
want to
talk about it publicly.
``All of our clients have a theft problem they are trying to eliminate,''
Smyth
says. ``So they do not want employees or investors to know. It's sensitive.''
In one example, though, CompuTrace helped recover Bea Lorimer's Toshiba
laptop
after it was taken backstage at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto during a
concert
by the band Tragically Hip.
The theft occurred in November, and the tracking program called into the
monitoring center on Jan. 17. The center called Lorimer's business, In Focus
Tour Consultants, then contacted the police. With the laptop sending a phone
number of its location, the PC was tracked to an automotive service company
in
Woodstock, Ontario, where the thief had taken the laptop to use in his
workplace.
The bad news: The tracking software calls in only if the laptop eventually is
connected by modem to a telephone line.
The good news: Once the program is installed on a PC, it cannot be erased
without using a password and the original computer disc used to install the
software.
``It's stealth technology,'' says Smyth.
According to Bruce Nunn, Absolute's marketing vice president, corporations
are
the product's biggest clients. Internal theft, Nunn reports, turns out to
be the
companies' biggest problem.
In one case, an employee arranged to have a ``pizza party'' at his company
every
Friday. All the workers would gather in the cafeteria, leaving their laptops
unguarded. It turned out the pizza delivery man was the accomplice, Nunn says.
``He'd arrive carrying the pizzas in one of those multilayered pizza warmers,
then go through the building and fill it with laptops.''
Once plugged in, the computers ``called'' the monitoring center and
indicated a
phone number the modem was using.
``That number was checked against the employee home-phone list, and the thief
was identified,'' says Nunn.
More information on the CompuTrace program is available from Absolute
Software
at (800) 220-0733 or the company's Web site: http://www.computrace.com --
Information from Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News was used in this story.
-----
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Times,
at http://www.sptimes.com
-----
(c) 1997, St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. Distributed by Knight-Ridder/Tribune
Business News.
END!A$3?PT-THEFT
AP-NY-03-02-97 1333EST
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