The thief who went overboard

Professor Jasper Rine
lectures at UC Berkeley. Recently his laptop was stolen by a thief who
was after exam data. Unfortunately for the thief, Professor Rine had
some important stuff on that laptop.

The webcast of last Friday’s Biology 1A lecture gets very interesting at timecode 48:50. I’ve transcribed Prof Rine’s comments here, so you can see what a world of shit the thief is in:

"Thanks
Gary. I have a message for one person in this audience – I’m sorry the
rest of you have to sit through this. As you know, my computer was
stolen in my last lecture. The thief apparently wanted to betray
everybody’s trust, and was after the exam.

The thief was smart
not to plug the computer into the campus network, but the thief was not
smart enough to do three things: he was not smart enough to immediately
remove Windows. I installed the same version of Windows on another
computer – within fifteen minutes the people in Redmond Washington were
very interested to know why it was that the same version of Windows was
being signalled to them from two different computers.

The thief
also did not inactivate either the wireless card or the transponder
that’s in that computer. Within about an hour, there was a signal from
various places on campus that’s allowed us to track exactly where that
computer went every time that it was turned on.

I’m not
particularly concerned about the computer. But the thief, who thought
he was only stealing an exam, is presently – we think – is probably
still in possession of three kinds of data, any one of which can send
this man, this young boy, actually, to federal prison. Not a good place
for a young boy to be.

Yeah, I am pretty interested in the outcome of this one.

(via Boing Boing)