About 14 mins into this ted talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html), the presentation shows some pretty sophisticated ways of analyzing such connections.

From TFA:

"Furthermore, Curry said when a highly anticipated game was refused classification, two things could happen â" interest in the game would actually increase, and people would still get the game via importation or piracy."

Will. They. Ever. Learn.?

Having made the switch to Linux myself a few years ago, I often face problems with getting peripherals to work well - easily.
Anyone tried getting the G15 keyboard macro keys working easily? This is not what I call easy. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LogitechG15
I persisted because I want to support FOSS, but I can easily understand that if government departments and companies are faced with similar issues, they probably don't care about FOSS - they focus on budgets and the costs involved in support.

Until the desktop industry embraces Linux in the same way the hobbyists do, this issue is a major roadblock.

The developers of Machinarium are certainly not asking for much dollar wise for a game that, bang-per-buck, it's completely worth it.

A friend put me onto the game. She bought it specifically to play in Linux but found that it was missing from the CD version of the game.
She emailed the supplier, showed proof that it was purchased, and within a couple of hours was sent a download link.
That level of great customer service from an independent developer, plus how cool the game looks - I had my credit card out in seconds!

It's fantastic to see justice served anytime, especially if you were able to get some answers about past break-ins, retrieve more stolen goods etc. Also good to know that people listened and increased security levels and changed processes - a positive outcome. But if a stolen laptop was insured and could be encrypted and hardware locked, I would suspect most petty thefts would not be worth the efforts you went to, even if it doesn't seem like too much effort from your perspective.

And just to address irving47's comment ("leave the keys in the ignition as long as you have insurance.") - yes, sort of; it's more like those "honeypot" cars cops use to catch thieves, leaving the keys in but with a recording and tracking device installed. That way the scum you mention would get caught and punished but your real OS would be safe.

Have to agree AC. With encryption and a good hardware level password, the stolen laptop would be almost useless to the thieves, even making it hard to sell it. The process would become more like/
1) Purchase new replacement from insurance process
2) Restore from a backup and move on!

If you _REALLY_ wanted to see "vigilante" style justice served in the case of such thefts, partition the drive as follows. One partition is a securely encrypted OS that you use. The other is Windows. Set the default to automatically boot Windows and load it up with backdoors, keyloggers, automatic webcam capture to web etc like people have already described.

After struggling with F-Spot, I got fed up and switched to Picasa - never looked back. Yes it's using WINE, it's not open source, and it probably reports stats back to Google, but its so fraking fast compared to anything native to Linux, it leaves them for dust! This new Shotwell? Well, I'll give it a shot.

I wonder what pro-gamer kids involved in this do for fun?

When a computer can understand why forum replies like "First post!!!!1" are so stupid, then they might have a chance at passing.

you make some very good points. i was about to post a similar objection (i.e. that the android model is similar to shareware / freeware and the black hats can exploit that so it's "caveat emptor") but your post stopped me in my tracks. i still abhor the iphone marketing model. maybe something like a peer-review process could solve this...

Can someone PLEASE un-mod / re-mod anagama's post??? He has totally misinformed Slashdot about a fantastic answer to the original question by going to .com and NOT .org. It looks like he didn't even visit scroogle.com because it's damn obvious it's not a privacy related site. Well, ok it features private parts but that's stretching the joke.

Lol - well at least now the light beer is (almost) free^~

--
New punctuation: "^~" at the end of a line to indicate 'Super Snarky'.

A friend put me onto Runes of Magic (which uses Micro Transactions) as I was an ex-WoW player, vowing to never pay for MMO games again. So I played for free for a couple of months and enjoyed not having the "pressure" to get value for money that a monthly fee seems to induce. The decision to buy a mount using real $$'s came easily. A few more purchases later, I'd spend about $50 and felt I had got my moneys worth. I spend when *I* want, not when a certain date passes. I can take a break for a few weeks and nothing is lost (although a few purchases do have a time limit)

The model works very well!!