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New Anti-Theft Technology to Make Stolen Computers Unbootable

by Terrence O'Brien on April 4, 2008 at 01:11 PM

Intel Working on Anti-Theft Technology for Laptops
Intel is joining forces with a bunch of other heavy weights in the computer industry, including Absolute Software Corporation (a data protection and hardware tracking company), BIOS maker Phoenix, Utimaco (a data security company), and McAfee, along with manufacturers Lenovo and Fujitsu, to create ATT (Anti-Theft Technology).

Company representatives were short on details about the technology, only saying that it would go further than just hard disk encryption, which makes your personal data unreadable, but leaves the rest of the laptop intact. ATT will supposedly make the entire laptop a useless hunk of plastic and metal if someone tried to boot the laptop with out the owners permission.

Intel is hoping that ATT will deter thieves from even bothering to steal your laptop since it would render the computer un-bootable, even a new hard drive was installed. But just in case the company is also looking into incorporating tracking technology to help users locate and reclaim their hardware.

The coalition is hoping to debut the technology by the end of the year, but don't expect to see it in consumer level products until well after that.

From Ars Technica

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Tags: anti-theft technology, Anti-theftTechnology, att, encryption, intel, laptop news, LaptopNews, security, theft, tracking

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