Be a PC Crime Fighter: Keep Your Hardware Safe

Protect Yourself

Let your Webcam be your eyes and ears while you're away from home or the office. A simple Webcam costs about $20, and a good surveillance-software package with motion and sound sensors, video recording, and remote viewing from any PC with an Internet connection can be purchased for less than $50. NovoSun's free SurveillizCam Lite provides basic video recording triggered by motion sensors, but for remote viewing and audio monitoring, you need a full-featured program such as DeskShare's $50 WebCam Monitor (free trial available here).

For more-sophisticated security, IP cameras can be placed anywhere inside or outside your home or office to transmit their images to your PC over an ethernet or Wi-Fi network. D-Link's $152 DCS-G900 wireless IP camera, for example, lets you view the video it captures in any standard browser (see Figure 4).

An important consideration when you're shopping for an IP camera is how it will be powered. Cameras that connect to a Wi-Fi network avoid the hassle of running ethernet cables, but they aren't really wireless because they require that you run a power line to them. Devices that support the new Power over Ethernet standard--or IEEE 802.3--need an ethernet cable, but they draw power from the cable, which eliminates the need to use a separate power line.