Free LoJack for your Laptop- Mac or PC VERY HOT!

Recently I came across a new totally free service called Adeona which provides location tracking of your laptop, desktop pc or Mac. This is a great service as an estimated 12,000 laptops are stolen at airports alone every week (According to research carried out by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Dell).

Now the question you are probably asking is how safe is it? Will the software give the location of my laptop or collect personal info to a 3^rd party?

That’s a great question, the developers of Adeona believe that commercial tracking services are unappealing because the services could theoretically be used to keep tabs on legitimate users. So unlike commercial tracking services (Absolute's Computrace LoJack for Laptops about $40 per year or Brigadoon's PC Phone home 1 time fee of $29.95) which stores and collects your ip address every time your computer logs-onto the internet, Adeona instead sends your encrypted location info to OpenDHT a free storage service which has been in existence for many years.

Because the Adeona software is opensource (all the source code is viewable by the public and is can even be downloaded, changed and resold if wished) it has been documented (cnet downloads, softpedia)to be spyware free. As a matter of fact the 3 primary objectives of  Adeona is 1)privacy: Adeona uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to ensure that ONLY the owner of the device can retrieve Adoena Location info and not by 3^rd parties which ,most offer little to no privacy guarantees. 2)Reliability: by using OpenDHT (Distributed hash tables a decentralized distributed systems) it greatly increases the retrievability of location updates and 3)Adeona like other open source software is free and viewable anytime.

How it works:

Installation is simple just follow the instructions provided by Adeona here.

Don’t forget to download the Retrieval Tools (you should install this onto a different pc) if you don’t have an extra pc its okay (use a friends) , just remember to follow the instructions from this page in order to track your lost device.

If in fact you have lost your laptop and using Adeona, retrieved its location info, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO GET IT YOURSELF, the best way is to contact the local police and present them with the information.

Composition of Location info:

Internal IP address:This is your Internet location as reported by the operating system.

External IP address:This is your Internet location

Nearby routers: uses traceroute to see what's nearby

Access point: hotspots

Photos (Macs only):isightcapture will take a photo (via built-in iSight camera) as the laptop is being opened or used (the thief inspecting his haul) and send it along with the rest of the location info to the OpenDHT storage facility

If you are worried about privacy issues and still would like track you expensive (and expensive doesn’t just mean money, e.g. priceless photos or business data) laptop then Adeona is for you; Adeona get 2 thumbs up from me.

Download Adeona here.