14 DAY TRIAL // For people who are always on the go, a laptop is a must-have piece of technology. The thing is that it can be lost, not to mention stolen, incredibly easily. And once that happens, you also lose all the data stored on it (which sometimes can be private, confidential information that you don't want others to look at). Adeona (as in the Greek goddess of safe returns) is an open source system developed by researchers from Washington and California University, which you can use to track down your lost laptop.
"The research project at first was initially not about delivering a service for people. We were originally looking at the privacy implications of some of the device-tracking systems now on the market. But as we got into it, we realized we were going to develop a client that people would be interested in using," says Thomas Ristenpart.
All you have to do is download the software onto your laptop and go, since the system does not rely on proprietary, central service. The software is free which is great considering that other similar software solutions can set you back a pretty penny, and it does not track the location of the laptop 24/7. The problem with other tracking software programs is that they work all the time, thus the location of your laptop is tracked continuously, even if it has not been stolen, as opposed to Adeona which you can turn on and off whenever you wish to. The issue here is that someone can take advantage of this technology and use it to track you down, since you will obviously be in possession of the laptop. People who value their privacy will surely have something to comment about this issue.
Here is another interesting feature of Adeona: if installed on an Apple laptop, not only will it track it down, but it will also take a picture of the thief. The downside though is that the thief may be smart enough to blind the iSight camera, or even wipe clean all the information stored on the laptop, denying Adeona the chance to do its job.
Professor Aviel Rubin, from the Johns Hopkins University, comments: "Not all the information that you're going to get in every circumstance is going to find the laptop or catch the bad guy. But this is a pretty big step forward. Without this, you could pretty much kiss the laptop good-bye."