Non furtum facies (You shall not steal)

Two people I know have had their MacBooks stolen this month from customarily safe locations (a church campus and a small rural college library), and I’ve received a couple of suspicious phone calls and emails from purported prospective clients who want help with issues like “lost passwords.”

While the advice I offer here is too late for my recently bereaved friends, given the possible connection between the recession and these crimes, I want to emphasize at least four specific things (in addition to the need to back up!) you can do to discourage theft and minimize the possibility that your personal and sensitive data will be compromised.

1. Use a steel, keyed lock. I recommend the Kensington Microsaver DS. It’s clear that you shouldn’t leave your equipment alone for a minute in public these days.

2. Use strong passwords [tips]. On a Mac, this entails at least three more things:
   
   (a) do not leave any user accounts without a password;
   (b) disable automatic login, and
   (c) require a password to wake the computer from sleep or screen saver.
   
   The latter two settings are found in the Security preference pane. Note, however, that anyone with physical access to the MacBook’s drive can pull the drive or use Target Disk Mode to freely read its contents, so passwords can only be considered a minor deterrent, effective only against casual thieves.

3. Use encryption. The set-it-and-forget-it encryption method built into OS X is called FileVault. The chief disadvantage to using FileVault is that it is not fully compatible with Time Machine (whose virtues I extolled in a previous post), but the point is that it makes it near impossible for a thief to read the contents of your home directory (and unlike the scenarios in #2, access to the drive is no practical advantage to the thief). In practice, it will come down to the tradeoff between the security FileVault offers and convenience of Time Machine.

4. If you want to stage a Hollywood thriller, you need to maximize the remote (both senses of the word!) possibility of recovering data from and otherwise manipulating a stolen computer. One good bet is to have a MobileMe account registered on the machine with Back to My Mac enabled (requires Leopard), which can allow remote control and file access when the computer surfaces on the internet.
   
   A free solution involves rigging iChat to automatically accept screen-sharing requests (I can verify this works, but it does require iChat to be logged in).
   
   Commercial solutions to aid in laptop recovery (with which I have no personal experience) include Orbicule’s Undercover and Computrace’s LoJack for Laptops.

These are just four things you can do. Other helpful suggestions can be found at a similarly motivated post by Brian at FreeMacBlog.com. Caveat lector!

p.s. I leave you with this quote from Georges Bernanos, which I read in Jacques Ellul’s Reason for Being: A Meditation on Ecclesiastes:

In order to be prepared to hope in what does not deceive,
we must first lose hope in everything that deceives.

Technorati Tags: Mac, Time Machine, FileVault, Apple, Tips, Security, Antitheft, Encryption