Sensing laptop theft

Caveo Anti-Theft is a standard PC card, a small piece of hardware with a motion sensor at its core that is inserted into notebook computers. Anti-Theft can be programmed to emit a sound as loud as a jackhammer or a recorded warning in the user's voice when a laptop is picked up.

A thief stealing a laptop equipped with the system is in for a nasty surprise. Users can set a perimeter from 3 to 30 feet and, if a thief carries the purloined computer farther, Anti-Theft renders it inoperable. "We nearly turn the laptop into a brick," says W. David Lee, CEO and founder of Caveo. A laptop owner can recover data from a returned laptop by entering a 16-digit alphanumeric password into the computer. Passwords this long are hard to crack.

Laptop owners can arm and disarm the system by using a personal identification number. Caveo also has invented a motion-based password-a certain pattern of movements that will activate and deactivate the system. Caveo expects Anti-Theft to be available in early 2002 for less than $100 each.