Stolen Laptops can now Phone Home

Laptop monitoring just got big… really big. Isn’t it frustrating when your beloved laptop gets stolen from under your nose? Well you don’t have to worry any longer because your laptop will phone you back saying it’s been kidnapped and will also give its exact location.

The blokes behind this wizardry are open source experts at the University of Washington.
At present it surely is possible to have your laptop monitored 24 hours a day… which is a good thing… but then the bad part is that you have to pay a lot of cash… and the ugly part is that someone knows what you are doing all the time.

So the wizards from Washington have devised Adeona (named after the Roman goddess of safe returns) which will give people a method for safeguarding their laptops and which does not rely on proprietary commercial software.
Tadayoshi Kohno and Gabriel Maganis, the chief wizards stated that Adeona is the world's first free, open-source laptop-tracking system and that it can be installed by users themselves. And they’re on their way to safeguarding more and more gadgets as they are also working on Adeona for iPhones.

So how does Adeona work? Its quite simple really… the user has to make a copy of a credential key that the software provides… and he/she has to keep the copy on a pen drive or a CD which is required to track the laptop if it's stolen.

It works a little like LoJack but there is more privacy and less dependence on corporate middlemen because the tracking doesn't go through central servers.

Once kidnapped, Adeona will broadcast the IP address where the Laptop is used. And if the laptop has a built-in camera it will take a picture every 30 seconds to snap a shot of the person using it. It also can sniff the SSID of the wireless network the thief is on, eventually pinpointing the exact location of the laptop.