SPUG: Security through insecurity...

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Feb 01, 2006, Tim Maher wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 08:43:10AM -0800, Atom Powers wrote:
>> On 1/31/06, Ryan T. Kosai <rkosai at u.washington.edu> wrote:
>> >
>> > Now, to send this e-mail, I would have to log into a SMTP relay.  This
>> > would require a password; which I don't want plaintext or easily
>> > recoverable (such as ROT13 or such) in a Perl script.  So, in this case,
>> > an open SMTP relay seems best.
>> >
>> 
>> If you have an account on the SMTP server dedicated to this purpose,
>> with a very secure (long random string) password then I think you
>> would be fine putting the password in your script. Under these
>> circumstances the only time that password could get compromised would
>> be if your laptop was stolen, and then it may even be to your
>> advantage to see what the perpetrator is sending.
>
>I really like this idea of configuring a laptop to send a
>"message in a bottle" after the thief boots it. But (although I
>haven't checked) I'd be surprised if there weren't some prefab
>Open Source solutions of this type out there already; can
>somebody familiar with the offerings make recommendations?

It would be very easy to have a cron job that e-mailed a message
periodically if the computer were off its home network.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Systems, Inc.
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