Adeona is free software to help you track the location of your notebook & desktop computer that may have been lost or stolen. (Shhh.. You may also use this to know the current whereabouts of your spouse via his or her laptop.)
Adeona, that weighs less than 3 MB, is currently available for Windows, Mac OS X & Linux but going forward, it can become available for iPhone & Windows Mobile phones also.
The idea is simple - you just install the Adeona client on your laptop and it does the rest. The software runs in the background and will upload the current IP address of your computer as soon as it is connect to the Internet.
This can work because, in most cases, the geographic location of a missing laptop can be successfully determined from the IP address alone.
When the stolen computer goes online, it send a message with its own IP address on to the web and you can retrieve this information from any other computer by running the Adeona Recovery tool shown here.
Mac users enjoy another advantage - Adeona on a Macbook will also upload pictures of people who use that computer via the built-in camera and iSightCapture.
Adeone worked brilliant in a quick test run - it provided me both the internal and external IP address of the computer along with location of nearby routers. See this log:
As you would have guessed, there’s a limitation though - if someone disables the Adeona process before connecting to the Internet, the system won’t work as expected but still, its something worth considering.
Adeona, which is named after a Roman Goddess of "safe return", is developed by researchers at University of Washington.
Related: Protect Your Laptop Against Theft
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/software/find-stolen-missing-laptop-computers-with-adeona/4218/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
What if the thief reinstalls the OS before starting the laptop?
Written by Anurag Mishra on 08.12.08
Why cant this be an inbuilt, always on feature for windows? So that nobody can stop this process! It might actually help stop the piracy as well. For Genuine Windows, MS can assist the owners track their laptop. Internally Windows may tie up with things like MAC address, Hard Disk ID (if any), RAM ID(if any) or some CPU identifier. So unless some thief changes all the part of your laptop you might still trace it.
Written by Arvind on 08.12.08
Both of the previous posters have a point… I think OS makers should rather think about it. I know Apple pings home all the time but you have to activate this feature.
Written by TJ on 08.13.08
What happens if the stolen laptop’s os is removed and new is reinstalled ?
People used to do this obviously.
Written by suresh on 08.13.08
Oh, yeah. I think it would be better, if the IP sending is directed to mobile phone. Isn’t it faster?
Written by Yanto on 08.15.08
Need same kind of solution on hardware [chip level].. so that OS dependencies can be avoided. :)
Written by Shashi on 08.16.08
This is a good starting point to protect your laptop, if the thief is a basic user. However, if the thief knows what he is doing then it will take him seconds to disable the software.
As pointed out above, some kind of hardware chip would be great, that should stop those thieving scum.
Regards
Jeff.
Written by infoaddicts on 08.19.08
Or even better some sort of radio tag that can be tracked on the net. :)
Regards
Jeff.
Written by infoaddicts on 08.19.08
Even if the circumstances are perfect, ie the thief does not change the os or remove the software and dowes go on the web and you get the ip address, what do you do next?
Most I.S.P.s are difficult enough to get info from when a customer needs help, local law enforcement will not be technical and national level law enforcement techies are not going to get involved in rescuing my basic laptop as they are all too busy with serious crime.
Nice idea. It at best will work as far as reporting IP. This will only be useful if the situation or information pertains to a national emergency of very high level data leakage.
Written by Stephen Doherty on 10.20.08