Date: April 22nd, 2008

Author: Susan Harkins

Nick Heath

15 Apr 2008 09:14 BST

Computers that 'phone home' after being stolen are guiding police to the doorsteps of thieves across the world.

Tracking technology has helped police sniff out thousands of stolen machines, uncovering UK computers as far away as Argentina, Macedonia and Saudi Arabia.

West Midlands Police recently used the technology to make arrests and recover more than 30 laptops.

Alan McInnes, general manager with the Association of Chief Police Officers crime prevention initiatives, told ZDNet.co.uk's sister site, silicon.com, that the technology will help stamp out computer theft.

McInnes said: "The more widely this technology is used, the more the risk goes up and the more it will devalue the attractiveness of computer theft. This tracking technology has already proven itself useful for recovering large numbers of cars, its success rate is about 95 percent, and we hope it will do the same for computers. You not only recover the stolen property you are looking for, you often will uncover more stolen property and other related crimes."

The most effective type of tracking software is buried within the bios of a computer's motherboard during manufacture, making it resistant to hard disk wiping or removal.

When a stolen machine is connected to the internet it will contact a monitoring centre to report its IP address, allowing police to trace its location through the internet service provider.

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Absolute Software claims its tracking and recovery software solution, ComputraceOne, has recovered more than 5,000 stolen computers worldwide.

I’ve just about had it with telemarketers! They’re calling more frequently and at inappropriate times. Plus, with the idea they're trying to scam me looming in the back of my mind, I'm about ready to stop answering the phone!

But now, there is something we all can do about it: complain! Not only can you vent your frustrations about a specific company calling your house or cell phone, but you can research the number and see what other people have to say about them as well.

In the middle of the page, you’ll see a search field. Just type in the number you want to look up online cheap viagra and click Search. That will bring up a page that displays the number of times it has been searched, the complaints for the number, as well as, a complaint form for you to fill out.

Beneath the search field, you will see columns for recently searched numbers divided up by the last seven days, the last 30 days and all the time. Below the columns, you’ll see the color code for the bullets by the numbers.

On the side menu, you will find three sections:

File a Complaint – This one will take you directly to the complaint form. If you scroll past the form, you will find helpful tips about how to give the best detail in your complaint.

Stop Telemarketers – Here you will find five articles that will not only make you more aware of what is going on, but also how you can fight back. I am incredibly sick of spoof numbers! 000-000-0000 is what will show up on your caller ID, which is simply an attempt to hide the caller’s identity. I get anywhere from three to six of those kinds of calls a day. Talk about annoying! I highly recommend reading the second article in this section, as it explains in more detail how spoof IDs work.

About Caller Complaints – Here you will learn all about why this Web site was started and what it does.

I hope this site helps you out with your telemarketer problem as much as it did for me!

http://www.callercomplaints.com/

I can’t begin to tell you how frustrated generic viagra pharmacy I am! There is a number that calls my house several times a day and when I pick up, there is never anyone there. If I let it ring through to my answering machine, they never leave a message either. It is beyond annoying! So, I went on a hunt to find out who it is and to see if anyone else is having the same problem. That's when I found this Web site!

Here's how it works: If you receive a call from a phone number that comes up as unavailable, you can come here and search for some information about it.

There are some calls coming from these sorts of numbers that are trying to scam you for your personal information. Many of them are fake debt collectors as well. Several of the companies who are running these scams are also breaking the rules that debt collection companies have to follow, such as calling after restricted hours. Click here and you will find a .PDF document of the FDCPA (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act). That way, you will know what guidelines they are supposed to follow and who is disobeying them.

You can also check out the most recent additions to the site by looking through the Latest Additions section, located below the search engine. If you do a search and nothing comes up for the number you're looking for, you can also file a report of your experience with that number here. Just fill out the form that comes up, leave your commentary and then press the Submit button.

Remember, you can never be too careful with your personal information. It pays to double check these types of things and this Web site can help you do just that!

http://800notes.com/

U.S. Agents Seize Travelers' Devices  

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 7, 2008; A01

Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter's calls had been erased.

A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. "This laptop doesn't belong to me," he remembers protesting. "It belongs to my company." Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself.

Maria Udy, a marketing executive with a global travel management firm in Bethesda, said her company laptop was seized by a federal agent as she was flying from Dulles International Airport to London in December 2006. Udy, a British citizen, said the agent told her he had "a security concern" with her. "I was basically given the option of handing over my laptop or not getting on that flight," she said.

The seizure of electronics at U.S. borders has prompted protests from travelers who say they now weigh the risk of traveling with sensitive or personal information on their laptops, cameras or cellphones. In some cases, companies have altered their policies to require employees to safeguard corporate secrets by clearing laptop hard drives before international travel.

Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Asian Law Caucus, two civil liberties groups in San Francisco, plan to file a lawsuit to force the government to disclose its policies on border searches, including which rules govern the seizing and copying of the contents of electronic devices. They also want to know the boundaries for asking travelers about their political views, religious practices and other activities potentially protected by the First Amendment. The question of whether border agents have a right to search electronic devices at all without suspicion of a crime is already under review in the federal courts.

The lawsuit was inspired by two dozen cases, 15 of which involved searches of cellphones, laptops, MP3 players and other electronics. Almost all involved travelers of Muslim, Middle Eastern or South Asian background, many of whom, including Mango and the tech engineer, said they are concerned they were singled out because of racial or religious profiling.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman, Lynn Hollinger, said officers do not engage in racial profiling "in any way, shape or form." She said that "it is not CBP's intent to subject travelers to unwarranted scrutiny" and that a laptop may be seized if it contains information possibly tied to terrorism, narcotics smuggling, child pornography or other criminal activity.

The reason for a search is not always made clear. The Association of Corporate Travel Executives, which represents 2,500 business executives in the United States and abroad, said it has tracked complaints from several members, including Udy, whose laptops have been seized and their contents copied before usually being returned days later, said Susan Gurley, executive director of ACTE. Gurley said none of the travelers who have complained to the ACTE raised concerns about racial or ethnic profiling. Gurley said none of the travelers were charged with a crime.

"I was assured that my laptop would be given back to me in 10 or 15 days," said Udy, who continues to fly into and out of the United States. She said the federal agent copied her log-on and password, and asked her to show him a recent document and how she gains access to Microsoft Word. She was asked to pull up her e-mail but could not because of lack of Internet access. With ACTE's help, she pressed for relief. More than a year later, Udy has received neither her laptop nor an explanation.

ACTE last year filed a Freedom of Information Act request to press the government for information on what happens to data seized from laptops and other electronic devices. "Is it destroyed right then and there if the person is in fact just a regular business traveler?" Gurley asked. "People are quite concerned. They don't want proprietary business information floating, not knowing where it has landed or where it is going. It increases the anxiety level."

Udy has changed all her work passwords and no longer banks online. Her company, Radius, has tightened its data policies so that traveling employees must access company information remotely via an encrypted channel, and their laptops must contain no company information.

At least two major global corporations, one American and one Dutch, have told their executives not to carry confidential business material on laptops on overseas trips, Gurley said. In Canada, one law firm has instructed its lawyers to travel to the United States with "blank laptops" whose hard drives contain no data. "We just access our information through the Internet," said Lou Brzezinski, a partner at Blaney McMurtry, a major Toronto law firm. That approach also holds risks, but "those are hacking risks as opposed to search risks," he said.

The U.S. government has argued in a pending court case that its authority to protect the country's border extends to looking at information stored in electronic devices such as laptops without any suspicion of a crime. In border searches, it regards a laptop the same as a suitcase.

"It should not matter . . . whether documents and pictures are kept in 'hard copy' form in an executive's briefcase or stored digitally in a computer. The authority of customs officials to search the former should extend equally to searches of the latter," the government argued in the child pornography case being heard by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco.

As more and more people travel with laptops, BlackBerrys and cellphones, the government's laptop-equals-suitcase position is raising red flags.

"It's one thing to say it's reasonable for government agents to open your luggage," said David D. Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University. "It's another thing to say it's reasonable for them to read your mind and everything you have thought over the last year. What a laptop records is as personal as a diary but much more extensive. It records every Web site you have searched. Every e-mail you have sent. It's as if you're crossing the border with your home in your suitcase."

If the government's position on searches of electronic files is upheld, new risks will confront anyone who crosses the border with a laptop or other device, said Mark Rasch, a technology security expert with FTI Consulting and a former federal prosecutor. "Your kid can be arrested because they can't prove the songs they downloaded to their iPod were legally downloaded," he said. "Lawyers run the risk of exposing sensitive information about their client. Trade secrets can be exposed to customs agents with no limit on what they can do with it. Journalists can expose sources, all because they have the audacity to cross an invisible line."

Hollinger said customs officers "are trained to protect confidential information."

Shirin Sinnar, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, said that by scrutinizing the Web sites people search and the phone numbers they've stored on their cellphones, "the government is going well beyond its traditional role of looking for contraband and really is looking into the content of people's thoughts and ideas and their lawful political activities."

If conducted inside the country, such searches would require a warrant and probable cause, legal experts said.

Customs sometimes singles out passengers for extensive questioning and searches based on "information from various systems and specific techniques for selecting passengers," including the Interagency Border Inspection System, according to female version of viagra a statement on the CBP Web site. "CBP officers may, unfortunately, inconvenience law-abiding citizens in order to detect those involved in illicit activities," the statement said. But the factors agents use to single out passengers are not transparent, and travelers generally have little access to the data to see whether there are errors.

Although Customs said it does not profile by race or ethnicity, an officers' training guide states that "it is permissible and indeed advisable to consider an individual's connections to countries that are associated with significant terrorist activity."

"What's the difference between that and targeting people because they are Arab or Muslim?" Cole said, noting that the countries the government focuses on are generally predominantly Arab or Muslim.

It is the lack of clarity about the rules that has confounded travelers and raised concerns from groups such as the Asian Law Caucus, which said that as a result, their lawyers cannot fully advise people how they may exercise their rights during a border search. The lawsuit says a Freedom of Information Act request was filed with Customs last fall but that no information has been received.

Kamran Habib, a software engineer with Cisco Systems, has had his laptop and cellphone searched three times in the past year. Once, in San Francisco, an officer "went through every number and text message on my cellphone and took out my SIM card in the back," said Habib, a permanent U.S. resident. "So now, every time I travel, I basically clean out my phone. It's better for me to keep my colleagues and friends safe than to get them on the list as well."

Udy's company, Radius, organizes business trips for 100,000 travelers a day, from companies around the world. She says her firm supports strong security measures. "Where we get angry is when we don't know what they're for."

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report