Ask Slashdot: Anti-Theft Products For the Over-Equipped Household? 408
First time accepted submitter Dufflepod (3656815) writes "After yet another hardware purchase last week, I realized with some alarm just how drastically an enterprising burglar could increase the crapulence quotient of my life if they ever made off with my hardware. The house is alarmed, but much to my annoyance it isn't always set when people go out for any length of time. Ideally I want to 'alarm' the expensive items among my various PCs, UPS, NAS box, test equipment, and some of the sundry other gadgets & gizmos I require to stroke my inner geek. Over the past few days I have spent hours Googling for every combination of "anti-theft perimeter alarm radius motion detector vibration wireless" etc etc.. I have found various possible solutions, though the cost of some of them does make my eyes water (eg SonicShock @ €150/box). Has anyone out there decided to bite-the-bullet and protect their kit with decent alarms, and do you have any suggested 'do's & don'ts'?" So how would you secure valuable items, as opposed to securing the entire place?
Re:Don't. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't. (Score:5, Funny)
You gotta watch out for that Doug.
The other decal seems to indicate that Doug does have a Glock...
Emu (Score:5, Funny)
Not too sure about this. I do not know the statistics, but all competent thieves know how to handle dogs, even packs of big dogs are no trouble for the determined thief. Sometimes in fact is is better to go with the tiny loud ones.
But I hear people really interested in protecting their shit are getting Emus, Emus are very territorial, and no one comes prepared to fight off a hyper aggressive 200 pound turkey (which can outrun them 3 times over). They also survive very well after getting shot, apparently, for some reason.
One partial solution (Score:4, Funny)
the house is alarmed, but much to my annoyance it isn't always set when people go out for any length of time.
Shock therapy ought to solve this.
You just have to remember to shock them right after they fail to set the alarm, or they won't make the connection between the unwanted behavior and the punishment.
Re:DIY? (Score:2, Funny)
No, much too simple..
Set up webcams all around the house, each tied to a raspberry pi, with wired interconnects (bad guys might have jammers), and battery backups. Run all the images to a central image processing facility where you do image recognition and recognize the pieces of equipment, and calculate their exact position by comparing among multiple views. Develop an algorithm that looks for "theft" type movement of the device (as opposed to dog pulling it off the shelf or earthquakes), and when that algorithm detects a potential theft, you retrieve the previous history of images from within your abode and apply another feature extraction algorithm to find all the people, do facial and/or gait recognition against a database to identify the perpetrator. Since you already have a complete RF monitoring system set up (I assume), you can go and figure out what the cellphone number of the perp is by looking at the IMEI in the messages it sends and cross referencing it. Then, you can send the police the GPS coordinates of the perp's cellphone.
There *Is* a fair amount of computation required here, so some sort of UPS operated beowulf cluster will probably be required to do the image processing (or you could purchase cloud services).
All of the software needed is available as open source, although it is likely you'll have to do a bit of configuration (not all of it is for the same distros.. you might need to run a bunch of VMs, or fix the build files appropriately), and there's probably some minor bugs in the software you'll need to fix (curse those grad students who do 95% of the work, get their thesis approved, and then abandon their software, leaving the 5% which is inevitably the part you need to have working). You might need to write some glue scripts and some simple bash, perl, awk, and sed scripts. But hey, if you were some lame script kiddy or wanted a turnkey solution, you'd be looking for a MS product, and we know better. You want to get down and dirty with the metal of the system.
Yeah,that's great until.... (Score:4, Funny)
....your intruder is a deaf guy!