

Ask HN: Stolen Laptop - ekal

Hello HN. I'm a long time lurker and the time has come for me to ask a question.<p>I woke on December 22, 2010 and found that the passenger window of my car was broken. The laptop and Christmas presents that were in the car were all gone! And, wow, that left me with quite a sinking feeling.<p>I have filed a report with the local police, but have not heard anything back yet. I would like to try to recover the item by sharing details of the laptop on various websites. My hope is that someone out there will realize that it is a stolen item. I plan on submitting detailed information (serial number, make, model, etc) on the local craigslist and stolencomputers.org.<p>Are there specific sites that HN users could recommend to post this information on?<p>I would love ANY general advice on the matter and any encouragment that this great community could offer in this tough time. I will be happy to answer any follow up questions if anyone would like more information.<p>Thank you, HN, and happy holidays!<p>ps. Here is a funny quote about stealing:<p>“In West Virginia yesterday, a man was arrested for stealing several blow-up dolls. Reportedly, police didn't have any trouble catching the man because he was completely out of breath.” - Conan
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mixmax
Since this is HN a better question would be: How can I communicate with my
laptop if when and if it goes online again? Can I SSH into it? Is there some
program running at startup that would allow me to control it remotely?

Best of luck with getting it back.

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ekal
The laptop runs Ubuntu Linux 10.10 and it uses a password protected log in
screen. SSH is enabled.

I have thought about the questions you raise but I do not have any answer for
that. Thanks for your reply.

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wwortiz
Well you need some kind of service that updates your laptop's ip address like
dyndns and the computer would have to log in automatically to an open network
or another saved network in order for you to log in.

Given that it is password protected even if you had those I would suspect that
the window would be extremely short to login if any and the most likely event
is your laptop being formatted.

Best of luck, hope your christmas wasn't ruined because of some asshole.

