
Adeona: A Free, Open Source System for Helping Track and Recover Lost and Stolen Laptops - chaostheory
http://adeona.cs.washington.edu/index.html
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tlrobinson
This might work... unless the thief is smart enough to not boot it without
wiping the hard drive first.

It's possible to install a rootkit as a hypervisor. So what if you installed
such a rootkit which had this functionality on your own computer? It could
track your laptop long after the thief reformats it, greatly increasing the
chance that you'll eventually be able to track it down.

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oomkiller
This has been around for some time now. Since it relies on OpenDHT, it has
been really unstable and unreliable lately.

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eli
Yup, I'd wait for the next version. I tried it a few months back and it was
far too flaky to rely on.

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ericb
I had this installed, but it freaked me out when the camera-light on my
macbook went on at random times. Hasn't happened again since I uninstalled it.

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oomkiller
Thats because it was taking your picture, they say on their website that there
is no way to take a picture without turning the light on. Rest assured, the
picture and other data are encrypted with the credentials.ost file.

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ericb
When I originally installed, I thought the pictures only would be taken if I
reported it stolen. Apparently not.

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ableal
Hey, Dropbox (and similar services): good optional feature to bundle in.

Rationale: I, and a few million others, may be too ignorant or lazy to
separately install this 'just-in-case' application. But since I'm putting
Dropbox on a few machines, I might as well enable this feature on the ones
liable to grow legs and walk away.

Plus, besides making Dropbox/etc. more attractive, this might tie-in nicely
for security - I _think_ that, if my laptop were stolen, the thief would have
my cookies, i.e automatic web access. It would be acceptable to have Dropbox
demand new logins for new access IPs. Or even 'go dark' (have to be manually
launched).

