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Follow us on TwitterBack in November 2008, before we even launched this blog, Lenovo announced a remote SMS kill switch feature. The long and short of it is that if your machine is equipped with the right combination of software and 3G hardware, you can text a message to your ThinkPad and it will lock down. Pretty cool.
Apparently that wasn’t enough for Lenovo, as the feature also disintegrates the thief.
Silly “viral” ad aside, there IS a video of ThinkPad director Tom Ribble demonstrating the remote disable feature. Ignoring the video cut-over, it looks like a pretty straight forward process. The big thing here is that the machine must have a 3G connection to receive the text. You do also receive a confirmation when the machine is actually locked, a nice feature considering the laptop may not be immediately connected to 3G.
Note to self: disable wireless radios before stealing new ThinkPad.
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Sounds double edged. Imagine you’re an Iranian blogger at this particularly tense time, and the Iranian government sends that SMS message to your Thinkpad. Oops.
Interesting point, and good to see that reference in this crowd. However you have to know the phone number to send it to, which is unique to every card, and I believe the owner can unlock it upon retrieval anyway…
This is an extremely dangerous feature.
In California, “deadbeat dads” have their professional licenses suspended. Under Clinton administration, deadbeat dads were to be registered nationally in the same fashion as sex offenders. Put the two together, and half of the men in America would find their laptops disabled “for non-payment”.
The new administration has already stated its desire to tax us for what, where, when, and how we drive, even what color of vehicle (cap and trade). They’ve proposed (hackable!) not-very-”smart meters” for our power consumption, and want to install remote controls on our home thermostats, so as to set the “proper” temperature for us.
The potential for abuse knows no bounds.
The only saving grace, is that our government is typically too incompetent to really screw all of us so deliberately, but tell that to Archebald Tuttle (in “Brazil”).
That is all certainly…ugh…something to be concerned about. I’m less worried about the government getting the individual phone number for the SIM card in my laptop and turning it off because I didn’t pay child support…unfortunately there are *other* things I’m worried about.
Hey all, regarding the cut in the video–the service where we were was terrible (it was a big casino actually). There was a delay to the SMS, maybe 45 seconds, but then everything worked as planned.
As for a clever criminal flipping the radio on/off switch, you can configure BIOS so that the radio stays on (and so does Remote Disable) regardless of the position of the switch. But yea, it’s something to configure.
As other people noted, this does open up some serious questions about control over the computer. You can always opt not to get the mobile broadband I suppose…
it’s something to *consider*
[...] week we reported on a Lenovo “viral” video showcasing, albeit fictionally, their “SMS kill switch” functionality, which is officially named Lenovo Constant Secure. It works by disabling your [...]