A Little Local Color

The below-linked video is a great find from BoingBoing. Apparently, a student in a UC Berkeley biology class stole the professor's laptop (in order to gain access to the exam, allegedly... quite a clever method). In addition to scaring the crap out of the entire class (and now, the entire blogosphere), there are a few fun tidbits that I thought the bIPlog readers would appreciate.

The professor says that the guilty student is in deep, deep trouble because he is "presently, uh, we think, probably still in posession of three different kinds of data" that could send him to federal prison (which is "not a good place for a young boy to be"). These kinds of data are listed below, along with the various entities which really, probably are going to come after this "young boy" at any minute:

(1) The FBI will get him for the "data" from a $100,000,000 trial "sponsored by" the NIH and "one of the largest companies on the planet"
(2) The FTC AND the Federal Marshalls will be on his track for trade secrets from a Fortune 1000 biotech company, "the largest one in the country"
(3) The SEC will hunt him down for proprietary data from a pre-public company planning an IPO

It's actually also quite fascinating to note the way the professor claims to be able to track the guy... "through wireless access points on campus. Can AirBears really track me this way? Also he may have had some help from "the people in Redmond, Washington" who are very interested to know why 2 computers are running the same version of Windows (the professor went home and installed his copy of Windows on another computer, although, wouldn't that presumably label him as the pirate?).

Although it stinks that a professor can't even trust his own students with his laptop, maybe we should all think twice about keeping sensitive data on our portable devices. After all, UC Berkeley has already learned its lesson about storing important data on laptops. As laptops get more powerful, more people are starting to use them for their regular computers, storing all their data on them. My cohort Brian Carver points out the real lesson we should be learning:

...the value of encrypted filesystems and password-protected files generally. Although, ultimately anyone with physical access and a little know-how can circumvent those too, unless one encrypts every sensitive file with a strong PGP key and keeps the secret key off that computer, on a CD-Rom or USB key, for instance. Few people are consistently that careful because the tools to make working like that practical for the non-guru don't really exist yet.

Original BoingBoing post here.
Link to mp3 of the most interesting bit here.

Posted by Tara Wheatland at April 21, 2005 11:41 AM | TrackBack