Falling asleep last night I thought of a terrible thing. What if a poor little Glowforge got kidnapped from it’s warm and safe home?
Seriously though, what if one is stolen got me thinking. If they can only be used online do you need to be “logged in” to an account with it?
Since they seemed to be named individually at the Glowforge offices can they find the location/track the ip sort of thing for the authorities?
Some sort of LoJack? A ‘Find My Forge’ app?
I get the impression that if one was stolen it would be a worthless box to the thief or anyone he/she tried to sell it to. I worry less about my little CNC being stolen than my drill press. Thieves look for the easiest to carry most fenceable(sp?) things they see.
Here is an old answer by dan 
If a glowforge is stolen, the server should alter every file it prints to include "Stolen from… "and a local police number to call.
How about it auto-rotates the onboard camera and sends a pic of the thief to the cloud !! lol ( and then lasers “stolen from XXXXXXX” onto every project tried on it)
Wouldn’t it be better if your stolen GF just silently announced its current location (assuming such can be found from the network it connects through) so that local authorities can be notified? Given the retail value of a GF, theft of one one might be considered a felony and subject the thief to significant penalty.
I suspect that thieves would be a lot more likely to steal TVs, laptops, tablets, etc. which probably can be sold much more quickly than a GF.
This is one of the reasons I did not place my pin on my house in the Glowforge Map thread. Just seemed like I was making it way too easy.
I’ve noticed a lot of pins in parking lots and shopping centers. (Like mine too.) 
I’m pretty sure if glowforge HQ gets a valid warrant to find your glowforge or even you by the IP your glowforge connects from they will comply.
I’m certainly guilty of the shipping center. Tells folks roughly where I am so they know there is someone in the area. But no one knocking on the door asking, Can I borrow a cup of photons…
Also given the size of the glowforge I think you’d need some planning to carry it off. Easier to just go to my neighbors without a yard placard for alarm monitoring and probably unlocked doors.
Not worried about theft at all - anyone trying it gets a backside full of buckshot. 
(There are certain advantages to living in Texas to offset the year-round mosquitos and killer heat.)
I carried weight for a living, as a result, at 61 I’m still spry enough to carry 55 pounds of Glowforge under each arm.
I do have a weakness, I provoke easily. Bad news for anyone I catch trying to abscond with my 'forge.
Never pick a fight with an old man. if he’s too old to fight he’ll just kill you.
I teach my students that it’s better if it’s a frontside full of buckshot (or something else). If it’s the backside the perp can complain that he was running away from the crazy person and had just stopped to ask a question when you went all postal on them. If it’s the front, they were in an aggressive posture and if they’re no longer able to speak, there’s no sympathetic story to be told to a credulous jury - just a bad guy trying to invade your home (CT has a Castle Doctrine which suggests that if he falls backwards and outside that it’s best to drag him back inside before calling for help 
).
The GF has to talk to the cloud servers, which means that it reveals its public IP Address.
Depending on whether the GF company has logging (beyond the user account that is allowed access), it is trivial to do an IP geolocation of that internet connection.
I want to say Dan commented about a stolen Glowforge service could be shutdown, but that they did not have processes or procedures in place for recovery or assisting of law enforcement.
There is the concern of service providers giving account info and such to law enforcement without due process and legal protections for a service provider. I am certain Glowforge would want to assist recovery of the product to the rightful owner, but they need to prevent costly “wrongful” suits occurring when someone tries to game the system.
Welllll…we don’t generally want to end them just for trying to steal stuff. Too often the perpetrator turns out to just be one of the neighborhood teens being realllllly stupid.
And we’re allowed to shoot people for attempting to escape with our property, or our neighbor’s property if we catch them in the commission of a crime. (Defense of life and property laws.)
As a result, most people are extremely polite. The only ones who continue to get into trouble are the imports. (Not from other countries, from other parts of this country.)
For instance…we got a huge influx of bad characters when we opened our city to help house the refugees from Hurricane Katrina. Gangs, murderers, criminals of all kinds…Louisiana just bussed them in and let them walk off into the city without even trying to turn them over to someone in authority… and all of them tried to set up shop here and start new gangs.
It took about two years for the shopkeepers to get the problem under control again. Our “guests” weren’t prepared for the fact that here, they’re more likely to encounter someone who’s legally carrying than not. As they tried to rob a store or jack a car, they got permanently removed from the equation.
We save the front side for when we’re serious.
( It does work. The survivors high-tailed it back to Louisiana as fast as they could get themselves there.)
@Jules. That’s why our motto is “don’t mess with Texas” and simultaneously “The Friendly State”. The two really go together well 
Y’all know the Don’t Mess With Texas was an anti-highway litter campaign that caught on exceptionally well?
Out of likes…
- Rich