Free Laptop Lojack

by Lina M. Maini

Relating to stolen laptops, below are the latest (U.S.) stats (from networkworld and slashdot):

- Every 55 seconds, a laptop is stolen.
- 12,000 laptops a week are stolen from airports.
- 600,000 laptops are stolen each year.

There are many laptop physical recovery aid pay services one can subscribe to such as lowjackforlaptops and brickhousesecurity.

Recently, however, we tested (and are completely sold on) a free, unique open source laptop tracking service, Adeona. Created (and with continuing research and upgrading) at the University Of Washington, Adeona is technologically miles ahead of its privately-developed rivals; primarily due to continual upgrading from UW's computer lab students, joined now by researchers from UC, San Diego and UC, Davis. Here's the best part: there is no third-party or middleman involved. Only YOU can track YOUR laptop.

This short video explains the free downloading and installation.



Also, straight from the Adeona site, for those of us that are very security conscious and carry sensitive information on our portable devices, below is a brief overview and one-line use direction:

Overview
What is Adeona?
Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there's no need to rely on a single third party. What's more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner's laptop. The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network topology) that can be used to identify its current location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.

How do I use it?
Using Adeona only requires downloading and installing a small software client. Adeona is free to use.

I cannot stress strongly enough how important this software is for legal and law community professionals.

BNI Operatives: Street smart: web savvy.

Stay safe.
Beacon Network Investigations, Inc.