Since then, you might have overlooked the missing New York state government laptop with 540,000 names. Or the Federal Trade Commission laptops with 110 names. Or the Ernst & Young Global Ltd. unit with 243,000 names. Or the Providence, R.I., YMCA laptop with 68,000 names. Or the Equifax Inc. laptop with 2,900 names. Or the ING laptop with 13,000 names. Or the IRS laptop with 291 names. Or the Ahold USA laptop with an undisclosed number of names.

And those were just some cases that surfaced in June.

Yet technology is available that would allow "laptop" and "security" to be spoken in the same breath without triggering gales of cynical laughter. Such systems generally depend on either Internet tracking, "kill switches" or encryption -- or, more commonly, a combination of the three.

Laptop tracking

One of the vendors in the field of laptop tracking is Absolute Software Corp. in Vancouver, British Columbia. In Abosolute Software's Computrace service, subscribing laptops check with an Internet server once a day. If a machine is reported stolen, the next time it checks the server, it will be told to start checking in every 15 minutes, explained Les Jickling, marketing manager at Absolute Software. Using various databases, its IP address will be matched to a street address. The next knock on that door may be the police, who have come to recover the machine.