That is good news indeed.

I hope the remote commands are strongly authenticated else there will be lots of hacker fun with remote wiping of your drive while the laptop is still in your possession.

I assume Toshiba would also find a way to reverse the process. For the times a stolen/lost laptop is recovered/found, you'd probably want a working system with all your data back.

Giving customers the tools to remotely brick their mobile system is just asking for costly and proprietary methods of undoing said bricking. I am sure Toshiba has not overlooked the profitability of this, especially if they are the *only* one who can provide the service.

People should have a really long cord attach to them and a laptop (problem solved). Have ya heard of a smartphone?

This old key and lock approach is a definitely a step up from traditional "careful" approach. However, assuming key, cell phone or whatever the remote device, is portable, if key is stolen it could easily turn into hostage situation quickly at ease.

it's a double edge sword.

what if you get jumped and lose your phone too?

what if someone steals the laptop that can turn off other laptops? 0_0

I never leave my laptop unatended, even around friends at school.

If i have to pee, I pack up and take it with me. At the airport, i wouldn't even trust my family to watch it carefully unless they sat on it (and then then I doubt I would leave it.)

If u dont want to loose ur laptop, take it with u, and ducttape it to your ass.

If you're the thief bypassing this would be as simple as immediately removing the battery or hard drive from the laptop.

@akoegle That's not bypassing it from a security standpoint. You couldn't rip the data due to the encryption on the drive. and as soon as you DID plug it in, the kill command would be received. Not much of a way around that.

i was hopping for a self-destruct button, you press it and BOOM!!! and you literally destroy your data.

....Where's the embedded c4 located...?

since the encryption keys is stored on the chip it self it may render the hardrive useless, no matter what you can do, someone looking for personal data can always take the hd out put it on an enclosure and voila! they have acces to your drive.

This unless the owner "wipes" it from a cellphone? But what if they don't in hopes of retrieving the laptop back with "precious" data? It's a risk, besides who's smart enough to always back-up every important info? only then wiping the drive makes more sense.

I don't believe that this technology wipes the drive by writing 0's or something along those lines. I'd imagine its more along the lines of since everything is encrypted, once the key is erased - none of the data can be decrypted. In the case that the portable device is recovered, the key could be reprogrammed into the chip and viola! You'd have instant access to your data. So if they used a simple method such as plugging in a flash drive with the key after the laptop is recovered to restore the key to the laptop's chip, I don't think anyone would have any reluctance at all to immediately locking down their laptop the moment its stolen.

This is great!

I have noticed that the first comment is always from the author and has the first line of the story now. Why does it do this, because it is annoying the heck out of me.

the question is whether the user will have access to the information when the user is in an area where the signal does not reach.

what if the laptop is turned on in an environment outside the range of the signal. so when you steal it you remove the battery, then you disable the antenna or place the laptop in a place where the signal is not in reach and then you turn on the laptop.

I like this! I just wish they made this standard.

I hope microsoft does not get in on this. Your activation key is wrong, shut down their computer. All your base belong to us.

I think a self destruct would be the shit.. The thief steals you laptop and you send a signal and cause it to burst into flames and burn the thief to death... Ok went to far but it would be cool.... I bet it would cut down on laptop crooks...

"This laptop will self destruct in 5 seconds..."

*cue Mission Impossible music*

I think that if the information on a laptop was important enough and was stolen by a government agency, a powerful company or an organized crime group, they would easily have the resources to quickly crack the encryption on the drive.

Take a really good system loaded with at least four of nVidia's most powerful graphics cards in SLI mode and use that Russian decryption program which uses the nVidia GPUs and the encryption would be cracked with less than a day or at the most, within a few days.

I think encryption is sufficient in and of itself, as the article states, usually the company is more concerned about the hardware. This is pretty much using the same TPM backdoor that are already on pretty much every modern laptop, but with additional functionality for the end user/adminstrator.

Everybody is discussing of what the implications are of sending a kill signal. Are you not seeing the obvious, block the signal. I would doubt that this signal can not be blocked or interfered with.

What happens if they remove the HDD before you lock it? .... or after you lock it for that matter.

What if you go to a place that no signal can reach? Or there's no PHS network?

I would have loved to have had this already... my 3 week old laptop got stolen pretty recently... I lost important data. I was pissed. I think this should be a standard feature on ALL laptops.

-mcg

I would think you could simply cut the antenna. But, no security system on earth is fool proof....and this system like most other systems seems to be designed to work against smash and grabbers rather than Hollywood crime heroes.