CALIFORNIA COMPUTERS SECURED BY CABLES TIED TO DESKS YET STILL STOLEN FROM STANFORD UNIVERSITY The Stanford Daily Online EditionComputers stolen from EV cluster

By Daisy Chung
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
last updated November 15, 2005 1:24 AM

Recent thefts in the Escondido Village computer clusters have prompted a review of safety protocols on campus. Three separate incidents resulted in the loss of 12 Macintosh computers and two Dell monitors. The first theft occurred on Oct. 28 in EV 54D. Three Macs and a Dell monitor were stolen. In the second theft, which took place on Nov. 6, the remaining three Macs and another Dell monitor in EV 54D were carried away. In the third incident, all six Macintoshes in the computer cluster for Studios 5 and 6 in Escondido Village were stolen.

Police investigations have not revealed the perpetrators. However, the nature of the crime suggests that they were premeditated.

?These were not crimes of opportunity; someone didn?t see a laptop lying around and decide to take it,? said Cluster Operations Manager Surajit Bose in an interview with The Daily. ?These are well-planned, well-executed thefts that got around security measures.?

It is unclear whether the three incidents are related. The means used to remove the computers from the clusters is also unclear.

?The computers are cabled to the furniture in such a way that you can?t steal the computers without taking the furniture as well,? Bose said. ?The locks are gone, but we don?t know how they were removed. Either they used a cable cutter or they had a key.?

Efforts to prevent future thefts are underway.

?We?ve been in conversation with housing and public safety,? Bose said. ?We?ve discussed the possibility of increasing police patrols, but the Department of Public Safety doesn?t have the personnel at the moment.?

Bose has also been working with Residential Computing coordinators (RCCs) to increase student awareness of the possibility of theft.

?ResComp is asking that everyone be very alert to the possibility of theft in their cluster and their rooms,? said EV RCC Ugochi Acholonu. ?We are trying to make sure that residents know that they should not prop the cluster door open at any time for any reason. ResComp has notices to that effect posted in the clusters. We are asking residents to report any suspicious persons or activity around the cluster to security immediately.?

The ability of ResComp to replace stolen cluster computers is limited by both budgetary considerations and technical issues.

?We don?t have spare computers lying around, and the money, about $15,000, to replace those computers isn?t readily available either,? Bose said. ?Also, you can?t run Panther on the latest Macs. They use Tiger, which isn?t compatible with our current AFS networking client. We would either have to acquire older Macs or wait until the AFS client for Tiger is released. But we have no dates at the moment.?