Burglarized!

16 Dec 2005 I get up this morning and go downstairs. Even before I noticed the window was open, I noticed my laptop is missing (how could I not ? It had 2 cool stickers on it, one from 21c3 "Usual Suspect" and one from Microsoft "Trained in the art of network defense")

As it turns out, we've been burglarized. Some turd broke into the back of our house and took my laptop (complete with backpack and power adapter), my digital camera (which was in my jacket in the hallway) and 10 euro from Noot's wallet. I must admit they were really quiet and they at least didn't wake us up in the middle of the night (which would have pissed me off), but they didn't even bother to wipe their feet when they entered, and didn't even do the dishes. Bah!

This all reminds me of a story of maddox where he warns burglars what will happen to them if he meets them ;)

So anyway, the police was patrolling in the street, so I ran after them. They took notes and said they would call when they knew more. I still have to send them the serial number of the laptop and the camera. While they were taking notes, other calls came in of burglaries in our street. As far as I know there have been at least 3 burglaries in our street this night.

Besides securing data I should maybe look into securing my home aswell. I plan to install a couple of nightvision webcams that detect movement at night and take pictures which are sent to a secure location.

As always, it pays of to know things about computers. I've been able to dig up from the logs when my computer was unplugged from the network. Somewhere around 4.48 and 4.53am (DHCP renew is set to 5 minutes and the last entry is at 4.48am). I'm not sure how this can help the police, but I will inform them of this when I send my serial numbers.

I consider my possessions lost, including all my data. It's a sad thing that I was not prepared for this. Backup facilities are free at work, I could have easily taken a backup. My employer (KULeuven) has insurance for this kind of thing and (according to my boss) they will take care of it. When I think of it, I didn't pay for either my laptop (from work) or my camera (bought with the money I got from doing volunteer work for Ekonomika). The only thing I paid for were the rechargable batteries and the 256MB SD-card in my camera.

Going to 22c3 suddenly lost some of its magic since I will probably not have a laptop with me then.
But I guess I'll manage. Last year I didn't have a laptop either, and I listened to a lot of talks instead of working on some cool projects or wargames :)

Oh! Speaking of wargames. I solved the nemo1.c challenge and wrote a solution for it. Luckily, I finished and submitted it last, before my laptop got stolen.

I wonder what a builtin (in the laptop) GPS-system with GPRS or similar costs...