In order to avoid such mishaps and unfortunate events, we have gathered here a great collection of different Anti Theft Gadgets and Bizarre Designs that are meant to help individuals make their devices and belongings less attractive, appealing or desired to a normal bystander. Moreover, there are a few security gadgets and projects that may also interest the more techy of you, who may be looking for some new gizmos to own or security diy to built.
The following aren’t guaranteed to deter thieves or work colleagues from getting at your gadgets but are meant as an additional things to make them think a second time before getting at your personal stuff.
These amazing sandwich bags are a sure way to keep any co-workers from getting into your lunch.
As if any introduction is needed, some individuals at work are rude enough to touch, get into or even treat themselves to your lunch. I am not sure what drives these folks into allowing themselves to eat someone else’s food without permission, but unfortunately these few do actually exist.
In order to battle them when you cannot install a video camera inside the refrigerator, these Anti Theft Bags could really do the trick. The Sandwich bags contain green splotch marks on both sides of the bag, so when a sandwich is packed in there, it looks as if it is old and rotten.
The design itself is amazing, but it does have a few possible downfalls such as a different person throwing your lunch in the garbage because of the color, or the coworker decides to take an additional step and investigate your lunch.
For a simple and easily accessible place to store your ’stash’, this cool Secret Electric Wall Socket compartment provides a great solution.
It is a simple 2 plug wall socket that is not meant to run electricity throughout it but is an actual hidden wall compartment for individual belongings. You can store cash, jewelry and other ’stuff’ inside that would stay out of harm’s way, and off a burglar’s radar. Plus, it looks just like your other electric sockets, so you are not changing any of your home’s design and characteristics.
With the innovation of gadgets, let alone music gadgets, most car stereos advance as well, adding CD’s, disc changers, mp3, video and even video games to be played while riding in the vehicle. In order to get thieves to decide to move on to the next vehicle after a glimpse at your stereo dashboard, this cool diy is a funny one.
The Fake car stereo utilizes an old cassette tape deck as a facade that attaches on top of your current stereo deck in your car.
This way, when thieves take a look at your stereo, they would think twice before breaking in for a 90’s car stereo that will be useless in today’s market.
These stickers don’t seem like much at first glance but then again, a thief would rather go for a ‘prettier’ and newer bicycle then risk being caught for a scratched and old bike.
The Anti theft stickers are great designs that are easy to implement on your bicycle, motorcycle or even automobile. Whatever the reason you are trying to ugly your product, these stickers provide an easy solution.
This innovative Anti Theft Mug is a cool way to keep your work colleagues from using your mug while you are away or on a sick day.
I am certain there are more than a few out there who get extremely angry when they find their personal mugs and dishes have been used by others in the office. It is a sense of a personal space being invaded and should not be tolerated. For that, the plug mug grants a perfect way to keep your mug at work and know ahead of time that others cannot use it to fulfill their needs and habits.
By a simple ‘plug’ designed in the mug, the owner may remove the plug when deemed needed, and therefor the mug itself becomes useless. That is, unless someone will use their fingers to keep the mug hole filled so liquids won’t spill out.
The Brief Safe looks rather disgusting when you first lay your eyes on it but please realize it is meant to look so in order to keep people from checking any further. These disgusting looking underwear are actually a storage compartment which has been “designed” with certain marks, so to keep prying hands out.
When traveling and having to carry cash, documents, or checks, you do not always have the access to a safe in your room. In those situations, the Brief Safe is a great alternative, where you may store your personal belongings and could easily imagine that no one would search through it. I mean, just put yourself in the burglar’s shoes…if you ran across someone’s dirty underwear in their room, would you try to see if there are any valuables stored in there…or would you be so disgusted and just leave it alone?
For a more colorful solution to Home Security, this Paintball Gun Turret DIY is a great option. It may not be as ‘correct’ or ‘ethical’ as some would expect from home security measures, but then again…are thieves using ‘allowed’ methods?
The Tesla Coils Car Burglar Alarm is an innovative and bright project that grants a light show for neighbors, passerby and others who come near this vehicle. Once the switch is turned on, a burglar could trigger the device, in turn locking themselves within the Tesla circle. I am not sure about any of you, but such a method could really be a spectacle for all around which may in fact force some to dare others to do it…just to see the light show.
These few cool laptop cases provide some alternatives to regular notebook cases in designs that may help deter onlookers. The choices provided are, again, not guaranteed (just like all the above) but provide a different way to carry your notebook computer. The designs themselves of a daily newspaper or a postal envelope grant a method that hopes will make bystanders disinterested or unknowning of the material or items that are stored inside.
The Newspaper Notebook case provides a choice of 5 different newspapers (in 5 separate languages) to choose from and looks like a cool idea. But wouldn’t people actually have a second or third look since the headline doesn’t change…even weeks, months or years later?
The Postal Envelope Laptop Sleeve is also a fun option and can be folded or rolled when not in use. The thing is, after seeing the old Macbook Air commercials…these kind of envelopes are probably what a laptop thief first looks for.
We use USB Flash Drives practically every single day at work, home or at a friend’s house, but this also endangers the documents and files by taking them away from your home into the world. In order to secure your important data, here are two cool solutions with the Ironkey and Biometric USB Flash Drives.
The Ironkey USB Flash Drive is provide the normal features of a portable USB storage device but with added encryption (military grade AES encryption) and is filled with epoxy based compound, thus waterproofing and preventing many from its internal hardware. Moreover, if it is damaged or the password is incorrectly entered 10 times…the data will self destruct.
The second option is the Biometric Flash Drive, which simply provides the Biometric option to log into the USB Drive. With this, you can rest assured that unless it is you (or someone that has your fingerprints) that attempts to log in…the data will remain secure and out of harm’s way.
Whether you are traveling, going out for a day or simply like carrying your camera around, I am sure you have been worried about your camera being snatched or stolen. A cool way to deter potential thieves and camera snatchers is to uglify your camera…in other words, make your camera less appealing by making it ugly, old looking and rather worthless.
In this cool image taken by Connors of Jimmy’s Ugly Camera, one can easily exemplify a really ugly camera that was tested in the field. As was mentioned, it was used throughout travels in Brazil and was left behind when stopped and mugged by locals. Seems like they would rather have a few bucks then an ugly camera.
Although this Walkman iPod Case was made for the classic iPod models, I am sure a different version can accommodate the iPod touch as well. It is a great solution for those that feel threatened by bystanders staring at their new iPods and would rather have them look another way.
This cool case is an ode to old music gadgets by re-using an old Walkman cassette case as a case for a newly innovated gadget. While everyone is walking around listening to their iPods, talking on their iPhones and perhaps even watching a movie on their Zune, you could make sure to remain below the radar, for your music product is just so old…no one would be interested in it. Who even listens to cassette tapes anymore?
A cool and innovative design that provides a bicycle owner the sense of serenity that thieves would not be interested in stealing their bicycle wheel. The collapsing bike wheel design provides the owner the ability to collapse the inside rim with a turn of a key, making the bike wheel unusable, ‘broken’ and a deterrent from thieves.
If you cannot afford real security cameras for your home (or are not interested), then these fake security cameras are a cool, inexpensive alternative that would provide a simple ’scarecrow’ like solution. While it wont’ record and provide any real surveillance, it would assist in decreasing those who may not be interested in getting on film…this could be more than just burglars and criminals.
For citizens of the US, the social security number (SSN) is the gateway to all things financial. It fills its government purpose of helping us pay our taxes and track our (in many cases, hypothetical) government benefits, and it has also been widely adopted as a means of verifying identity by a huge range of financial institutions. As a result, anytime you disclose an SSN you run a real risk of enabling identity theft. So far, most of the SSN-related ID theft problems have resulted from institutions that were careless with their record keeping, allowing SSNs to be harvested in bulk. But a pair of Carnegie Mellon researchers has now demonstrated a technique that uses publicly available information to reconstruct SSNs with a startling degree of accuracy.
The irony of their method is that it relies on two practices adopted by the federal government that were intended to reduce the ability of fraudsters to craft a bogus SSN. The first is that the government now maintains a publicly available database called a Death Master File, which indicates which SSNs were the property of individuals who are now deceased. This record provided the researchers with the raw material to perform a statistical analysis of how SSN assignments related to two other pieces of personal information: date and state of birth.
The second is that the government has centralized its handling of SSN assignments and provided documentation of the procedures. The first three digits are based on the state where the SSN was originally assigned, and the next two are what's termed a group number. The last four digits are ostensibly assigned at random. Since the late 1980s, the government has promoted an initiative termed "Enumeration at Birth" that seeks to ensure that SSNs are assigned shortly after birth, which should limit the circumstances under which individuals apply for them later in life (and hence, make fraudulent applications easier to detect).
That last program proved to be the key feature that allowed the new research, as it ensured that SSN assignments were more tightly correlated to date of birth. The researchers used the Death Master File to split out data from individual states (which determine the first three digits) then order them by date. At that point, they searched for statistical patterns within the resulting data.
Even from data before the 1990s, rough patterns were apparent in the assignment of region and group numbers but, by the mid-90s, it's obvious that, with a few exceptions, individual region and group numbers are used in a clear sequential order for most SSNs. The patterns are even easier to pick out in less populous states. Patterns in the final four digits were harder to detect, but the authors created an algorithm that predicted them with a lower degree of confidence.
The accuracy of these algorithms is positively disturbing. Using a separate pool of data from the Death Master File, the authors were able to get the first five digits right for seven percent of those with an SSN assigned before 1988; after that, the success rate goes up to a staggering 44 percent. For a smaller state, like Vermont, they could get it right over 90 percent of the time.
Getting the last four digits right was substantially harder. The authors used a standard of getting the whole SSN right within 10 tries, and could only manage that about 0.1 percent of the time even in the later period. Still, small states were somewhat easier—for Delaware in 1996, they had a five percent success rate.
That may still seem moderately secure if it weren't for some realities of the modern online world. The authors point out that many credit card verification services, recognizing the challenges of data entry from illegible forms, may allow up to two digits of the SSN to be wrong, provided the date and place of birth are accurate. They often allow several failed verification attempts per IP address before blacklisting it. Given these numbers, the authors estimate that even a moderate-sized botnet of 10,000 machines could successfully obtain identity verifications for younger residents of West Virginia at a rate of 47 a minute.
All of that requires that the botnet master have access to date and place of birth information, and a number of commercial services will happily provide that data for a price. But the authors also point out that it may not be necessary to pay; they cite a publication in progress that indicates it's easy to harvest a lot of that information from social networking sites like Facebook.
By Hadley Leggett 
For years, government officials have urged people to protect their Social Security numbers by giving out the nine-digit codes only when absolutely necessary. Now it turns out that all the caution in the world may not be enough: New research shows that Social Security numbers can be predicted from publicly available birth information with a surprising degree of accuracy.
By analyzing a public data set called the “Death Master File,” which contains SSNs and birth information for people who have died, computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University discovered distinct patterns in how the numbers are assigned. In many cases, knowing the date and state of an individual’s birth was enough to predict a person’s SSN.
“We didn’t break any secret code or hack into an undisclosed data set,” said privacy expert Alessandro Acquisti, co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We used only publicly available information, and that’s why our result is of value. It shows that you can take personal information that’s not sensitive, like birth date, and combine it with other publicly available data to come up with something very sensitive and confidential.”
With just two attempts, the researchers correctly guessed the first five digits of SSNs for 60 percent of deceased Americans born between 1989 and 2003. With fewer than 1,000 attempts, they could identify the entire nine digits for 8.5 percent of the group.
There’s only a few short steps between making a statistical prediction about a person’s SSN and verifying their actual number, Acquisti said. Through a process called “tumbling,” hackers can exploit instant online credit approval services — or even the Social Security Administration’s own verification database — to test multiple numbers until they find the right one. Although these services usually block users after several failed attempts, criminals can use networks of compromised computers called botnets to scan thousands of numbers at a time.
“A botnet can be programmed to try variations of a Social Security number to apply for an instant credit card,” Acquisti said. “In 60 seconds, these services tell you whether you are approved or not, so they can be abused to tell whether you’ve hit the right social security number.”
To keep identity thieves from exploiting their research, the scientists left a few key details about their method out of the paper, and they released the document to government agencies before making it public.
After developing an algorithm using the Death Master File, the researchers tested their results using information on birthday and hometown taken from a social networking site (the researchers declined to say which one). Again, they were able to predict Social Security numbers with a high degree of accuracy.
“It worked a little worse in the online social test for obvious reasons,” Acquisti said. “Some people may not reveal the right date of birth, or they may call hometown where they went to high school, not where they were born. There’s more noise in online social networking, but nevertheless the two studies confirmed each other.”
It also turns out that some SSNs are easier to predict than others. Because of the way numbers are assigned, younger people and those born in less populated states are more at risk, Acquisti said. Before 1988, many people didn’t apply for an SSN until they left for college or got their first job. But thanks to an anti-fraud effort in 1988 called the “Enumeration at Birth” initiative, parents started applying for their child’s number at birth, making it much easier to predict based on a person’s birthday.
The new findings remind consumers that they should use caution when sharing data online, even when the information itself doesn’t seem particularly sensitive. But Acquisti said his real message is for policymakers.
“We really wanted to come public with this result because the issue goes way beyond individual response,” he said. “It’s not just about remembering to shred your documents or to remove personal identification off your mail. As much as you try to protect your personal info, the info is already out there.”
According to information privacy experts, Social Security numbers were never meant to be used for authentication purposes, and using them as passwords puts all consumers at risk for identity theft.
“I have long argued that Congress or the Federal Trade Commission should prohibit companies from using SSNs as a means to verify identity,” Daniel J. Solove, professor of law at George Washington University Law School, wrote in an e-mail. “Merely protecting against their disclosure is insufficient since Acquisti and Gross demonstrate that they can readily be predicted.”
As a first step, the researchers suggest that the Social Security Administration start randomizing the assignment of SSNs. But randomization is only a Band-Aid, Acquisti said.
“It can buy us more time, but it isn’t going to change the underlying problem,” he said. “These numbers are supposed to be secret, but your bank has it, your insurance company has it, even your doctor has it. As long as we rely on numbers that are used as both identifiers and authenticators, then we are a system that remains insecure.”
Privacy law expert Chris Hoofnagle of the University of California, Berkeley, says the response must be drastic. “Their paper points to a radical solution: Perhaps we should stop trying to protect the secrecy of the SSN, and just publish all of them to prevent their use as passwords.”
May 11th 2009
By Harmon Leon
In these crazy times, have you ever wanted to know how to disappear, vanish or completely exit the life you've led? Well, Frank M. Ahearn is an expert on the matter. The skip tracer and privacy consultant has even written a guide on the matter: "How to Disappear ... and Fall Off the Grid."
Knowing If You're in the Clear 
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