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 Thursday, August 18, 2005

« Bluetooth Headsets | Main | Saving Lives? »

USB PC Lock

We have this problem in Hotmail. If you walk away from your desk, even for a brief moment, and your PC is left unlocked, someone will walk in, and send mail to a broad distribution list with something silly. Like “I like oranges”, or worse things. Some of them even down right embarrasing.

For some reason this is called “Goating”. Anyway, I find it incredibly annoying. My office has a lock on the door, so I am just in the habbit of keeping my door locked when I walk away.Wirelesspclock

When I saw Scott’s article I was intrigued. I orderd one of these gizmo’s from ThinkGeek and it arrived tonight. I installed .NET Framework 2.0 and Scott’s software, plugged in the device (no drivers required) and it worked. I walked away from my PC and it locked itself.

One thing I’ve noticed is that this device is a bit sensitive to some kind of interference as my PC will think it’s out of range when I haven’t even moved the dongle.

I think this has amazing potential. I’m bringing it to work tomorrow so I can rig my PC to be “Goat Proof”. Try and mess with my machine now Hotmail people!

Gear | Software
Posted Friday, August 19, 2005    Permalink    Comments [8]  View blog reactions

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Friday, August 19, 2005 2:33:09 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
That used to happen in the London MSFT offices a lot too (since we don't have offices, just open plan), but I believe "Goating" is a sackable offence nowadays!
Paul Hammond
Friday, August 19, 2005 5:59:15 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Paul's right: even though the person who leaves his computer unlocked is in violation of our security policies, the person who sends the mail is violating it even more by using your machine (and your account) without your permission.
Tommy Williams
Friday, August 19, 2005 6:26:46 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I have one of these too, I just installed it last week and also noticed I got occasional 'flashes' when the screen would lock for a second or so. I just dropped the sensitivity in the option and it's been fine since.

However, beware! the next trick will be for someone to 'hide' the USB key that is left plugged in your machine, leaving you locked out of it unless you keep putting a password in over and over and over again!
Barry Wainwright
Friday, August 19, 2005 7:28:26 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Increase the "Presence Window" setting. This is basically the number of seconds since the last heartbeat was detected. Since the device sends a heartbeat every 2 seconds, I felt that 5 seconds was a good default. You may want to try upping it to 7-8 seconds.

Also, hiding the key fob will not make you have to enter a password over and over again.
Bryan Batchelder
Saturday, August 20, 2005 9:36:14 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Just get into the habit of pressing Win+L whenever you leave your desk. Soon it'll become second nature
Sriram
Tuesday, August 30, 2005 9:37:18 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
i use this pretty cool software called floats mobile agent on sourceforge. it was initially designed to sync contacts/etc with SE phones with bluetooth, but they added this cool feature that has the computer lock and media player pause when you walkaway.
the awesome one though is that you can use you SE phone to also control you powerpoint presentations through BT. i love that feature!
here's a link to sourceforge - http://sourceforge.net/projects/fma
karan mavai
Tuesday, September 06, 2005 9:53:58 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
It seems like every group at MS has this tradition, but uses their own name for it.

In one group I worked in it was called "tea cupping" because the email sent out always had the nursery rhyme "I'm a little teacup, short and...."

My current group calls it "dump-sausaging." I honestly don't know how or where that came from...and I don't know that I want too. :-O

I'm just in the habit of hitting Windows+L every time I walk away. For those few times I do forget, I have my screensaver set to 5 minutes and enabled password protect.
tod
Thursday, November 15, 2007 3:27:43 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Here's what I used do. Since we all usually carry mobile phone all the times , iI use "Float MobileAgent" along with it which locks my machine whenever my mobile phone moves beyond a certain range. Further i can use the same application to control my machine using Phone's HID Interface.
Neat isn't it.
rajeev singh
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