Free tracking for stolen laptops
A recent post by someone on an internet forum who’d just had his laptop stolen reminded me about this relatively new, free, and open source tracking tool I came across a while back.
Adeona is software currently being developed by a group of students at the University of Washington and is designed to help you try to locate your laptop should it get stolen. The information you can glean from it includes the internal IP address, public IP address, traceroute, name of wireless access point, and if you use the Mac OS X version on a Macbook with built-in webcam then you can also receive photos of the thief using the isightcapture tool.
There’s been plenty such offerings of a commercial nature before, usually requiring a yearly subscription, but this is the first free one I’ve seen. There’s a number of ways in which all these methods won’t work, or can be disabled by a knowledgeable thief, but being free you have little to lose. I haven’t tried it myself but someone who has done wrote this about his experiences here
