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Comment by gfunk911 | Hacker News Reader

This seems insecure. If I leave my phone by my computer, or if my bag gets stolen with my phone and computer in it, I'm in trouble.

That said, it's pretty cool, and I like the website design.

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I do see your point, but wouldn't dropping your car keys also allow someone to steal your car?

the change of you having your car keys and your car in your backpack at the same time is much, much lower.

But having a car stolen is way less of a problem than all your personal data being stolen. If my car is stolen because someone stole my bag with the keys in it then all I lose is my insured car.

If my laptop is stolen with the 'keys' to the laptop also in the bag, my life could become very difficult very quickly taking me years to recover from.

I think the point is you don't want to have the same paradigm as car + keys when it comes to your private information.

Do you use full disk encryption? A lot people don't and it's easy to get your data when you got logged in as another user.

I use FileVault built into OSX.

That's a totally valid point. My guess it that they assumed most users would keep their phone in a pocket (since it's easier to tap than if it's buried in a bag).

In any case it's a big upgrade from people who leave their computer unlocked all day. I'd love to see them add automatic proximity-based locking.

Install prey project. I create a guest account on my Mac so if I lose it, people will actually try to use it and connect it to WiFi.

They won't need the guest account with this product.

You use the guest account as a honeypot so they open the Mac and use it for long enough (without wiping it) for you to get a wifi connection and can get the location with Prey :-)

Sure, that's a best-case scenario. How about no WiFi in the vicinity and a couple of accidental knocks on the phone?

Haha, yeah - in that case you're screwed ;-)

Edit: although ideally Prey will still be running. They'll just be able to run amok in the meantime...!

If you're using Filevault for full disk encryption you can't have Prey installed and use it on an open guest account. You can have a guest account and use the iCloud 'Find My Mac' though.

But that's exactly what I did on my last Mac (which wasn't using Filevault).

You could use iCloud to remotely wipe your phone if that happens.

How do you do that before the thief is able to get into your Mac and steal all your data when you've just lost all your devices?

This assumes the thief is techy enough to know that Knock To Unlock is installed, and then know how to use it. Granted, it's not a great situation to be in having your stuff stolen, but thieves doing rip-n-runs aren't typically high tech users.

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