It’s Friday and I’m feeling fairly non-technical after a call earlier today with actual end users (I’d forgotten we had those). So I’m going to talk about Lo/Jack. Tangent time: One of the great parts about being involved with MacWorld is the schwag. The speaker bags are full of stuff that, to be quite honest, I would almost never think to buy myself. Not that the vendors who throw crap in there don’t get me hooked on their phonics. But one of the few things that have caused me to think about security strategies from that bag is LoJack for Laptops. The thing is, I don’t really need it for my machine. I am full disk encrypted and so if someone got their grubby little mits on my boxen they’d have to blast it to make it useful. But Lo/Jack has a different audience in my opinion. It’s the people who really just want their computer back.
It is kinda’ funny, after doing a lot of security work you start to think that everyone would freak out if computer thief/johnny hacker/whoever went through all their stuff. But that just isn’t the case. It seems like the majority of non-IT professionals actually don’t care if someone sifts though their iTunes library (most seem to think that shouldn’t be DRM’d in the first place), their photos (plenty of people post those up to flickr anyway) or any of that stuff. What they’d like at the end of the day is to just have their laptop returned to them if it were to get ripped off.
And you know what, I have to respect that. And after having tested Lo/Jack, I have to give them my seal of approval. If you’re after protecting your data I still suggest encryption (be it PGP, CheckPoint or plain old vanilla FileVault) – but if you’re not worried about the data then Lo/Jack might be for you.
Now, you might ask why I’m not down with Full Disk Encrypting (FDE) a laptop and running Lo/Jack on it. Well, it would be highly unlikely that the laptop would every become recoverable through Lo/Jack if someone can’t actually boot it up… Maybe FileVault, but definitely not FDE…
Note: I am in no way affiliated with Lo/Jack other than getting a free year of their subscription service while at MacWorld. We’re not resellers for them at 318 and they have no influence on me other than making a nice product.
