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Open Source Adeona Tracks Lost & Stolen Laptops
An anonymous reader writes "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."
Actually they state as much right in their FAQ:
What if a thief removes the software, reinstalls the OS or doesn't connect to the Internet?
A motivated and sufficiently equipped or knowledgeable thief can always prevent Internet device tracking: he or she can erase software on the device, deny Internet access, or even destroy the device. For example, Adeona currently has no mechanisms for attempting to survive a disk wipe.
We point out that we do not believe this renders Adeona (and other location-tracking systems) useless. The Adeona system was designed to protect against the common thief -- for example, a thief that opportunistically decides to swipe your laptop from a coffee shop or your dorm room, and then wants to use it or perhaps sell it on online. Such thieves will often not be technologically savvy and will not know to remove Adeona from your system. While device tracking will not always work, systems like Adeona can work, and it is against the common-case thief that we feel tracking systems can add significant value.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
In my experience (meaning this is of course only anecdotal evidence) it all has to do with their manpower vs. the likelihood of making an arrest.
In my case for example, the house was burglarized. My alarm system went off, and the police did respond, but as I understand it, they noted that the door was open, and that was it. My friend who was house sitting had to call them back to fill out a proper report with the things she could tell were missing, and when I got back into town I dropped by the precinct with a written, detailed list of everything taken. At this point they did not have anyone assigned to investigate -- they basically take a report so you can send it to your insurance company, and that's all they do. So you're right about that.
But they aren't wrong to do that, exactly -- they have limited resources, and as a citizen I don't necessarily want them wasting their time on a case with no witnesses, no suspect, and no leads. A 5000 dollar property crime doesn't exactly warrant bringing in the CSI team to look for DNA. If it did, they would need a hell of a lot of CSI teams. I'd rather they spend their time and money catching violent offenders.
But when I ended up with the IP address that could lead them to the stolen property, suddenly they were more than willing to help. They assigned a detective, who took what I had and ran with it, because suddenly the solveability of the case had gone from a low probability and high difficulty to good probability and low effort. I'm nobody important, I assure you. Just a guy that had an actual lead.
Maybe I'm giving people too much credit, but I think most police (I've met some assholes too, I assure you) really do want to help -- it's just a matter of how best to spend their limited time and budgets.
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