In this strange world, people can’t seem to leave your stuff alone. All the electronic gadgets of today are too attractive to the lowlife of this world. So what do you do if somebody swipes your laptop? You take a few pictures of him, and trace his IP address!
This kind of software has been around for a while, and a few companies have made good money of of it. The closed source solutions are also feeding information to those companies when you don’t want it to, and you’re also not sure what information is send to the company.
There is now a solution for the more paranoid geeks amongst us. It’s called “Adeona”, and it is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop. The software does not rely on a proprietary and/or central service, and is entirely free.
What’s also nice is that only the owner (that’s you) can access the machine should you want to trace it. If you don’t trust me, and don’t trust Adeona, you can always check the sourcecode yourself.
A laptop is the most logical target of the casual thief, so it makes sence to install it on there. A casual thief is usually not tech savvy, so before he discoveres that Adeona (or any other similar program) you will have usually traced him.
Burglars also tend to take your desktop machine, so you might aswel install Adeona on there, too. And since Adeona comes as an OSX, Linux and Windows program, most of the computers out there will be covered.
I only wish that I could live in a world where people could appreciate other people’s toys without touching or stealing them.