Assuming that 'lowlife' plans to install it in his/her car:
1. They will need a sled
2. Assuming they aquire one you can search the car park for cars with empeg sleds installed
bmiller, I'm truly sorry to hear of your loss fellah, truly.

Looking forward,
What about a replacement boot partition in the eeprom that performs some kind of user chosen check at boot, i.e. user chosen button press sequence every 100 reboots or every 10 hours of play which makes the player unusable until a correct validation is applied?
To subscribe the owner would register on a www site, enter serial no. (checked against a database of stolen players) and download a tailor made binary to write to the bootloader only. As part of the registration, the original (legitimate) registrant could supply a password to get an unlock code for their own player if they forgot/misplaced the unlock sequence. Additionally, upon registration the owner could possibly state the terms and frequency of re-validation required on their player. I am assuming that the factory serial no. is already stored somewhere in the flash (boot block?) and that the initial installation would verify this before proceeding. I am also assuming that firmware upgrades to date do not alter the eeprom boot partition. I'm thinking that while any cracker worth his salt could break this system easily it's unlikely it would happen.

Even if this suggestion is plausible it won't prevent crackers breaking things. In terms of probability and available cracker resources it's possibly worthwhile e.g. how many cracker hours are out there to do bad things to the Empeg given the few that (presumably) have been stolen to date?

To summarise, I know that potentially locking up an Empeg in the hands of a thief won't prevent theft but it must make the bereaved owners feel happier that their lost Empegs aren't benefiting the thieves?