Slashdot Mirror
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."
The IP address that the outside world sees is not proprietary information.
The IP address that you have on the inside of a NAT, as well as the routing information on the inside is.
A remote web site logging that I have 123.45.67.89 as my IP address only logs the public information. It doesn't see that my internal IP address behind the NAT really is 172.16.0.16 and that I use a router at 172.16.0.31, unless that information is specifically sent to the remote server.
The owner of the network I'm on might not want people on the outside to know that internal machines uses a 172.16.0.0/22 (or whatever) subnet, and how it sends traffic through various internal routers. The internal topography is proprietary information, but can be useful to intruders.
In addition to the timestamp, you also have the information of which web site they accessed. Normally, in medium-to-big companies, all web accesses get logged by a security proxy, with the internal IP address.
But again, that discovery is something that should be done by those explicitly allowed to do that kind of discovery. Vigilante investigations are not permissible in a modern society.
Where, exactly, was that question posed? Except in your post right now? Moving the goal posts when running out of arguments?