Qualcomm CEO's PC, possibly secrets, vanish

According to the Associated Press, a portable computer belonging to Qualcomm Inc. founder and Chairman Irwin Jacobs -- which apparently contained valuable company secrets -- disappeared from a hotel conference room moments after he addressed a national business journalists' meeting. Jacobs told people at the conference that the IBM laptop, which he had used for a slide show-type presentation focusing on Qualcomm's (qcom) wireless telecommunications technology, contained proprietary information that could be valuable to foreign governments.

If security on Jacobs' laptop was limited only to password protection -- rather than a more advanced encryption scheme -- it is "extremely unlikely that it will take any more than removing the hard drive and hooking it up to another computer to read all the files," said Shawn Abbott, chief technical officer of computer-security company Rainbow Technologies. -- Wall Street Journal