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Open Source Adeona Tracks Lost & Stolen Laptops

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the marco-polo-marco-polo dept.

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."

12 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm... by dahitokiri · · Score: 5, Funny

    Mobile device + Linux + Adeona == cheap way to keep tabs on your girlfriend/wife/kids at all times?

    1. Re:Hmm... by cthulu_mt · · Score: 5, Funny

      ...No, he knew where she was the whole time...

      --
      Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
  2. But without a central service by pxc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    it may be more difficult for Adeona to gain traction with non-technical law enforcement officers.

    "So who do I call to confirm that this laptop is stolen?"
    "Umm, me. You see, there's this free software called Adeona that anyone can set up to track their own laptop."
    "Never heard of it..."

    In previous threads about stolen laptops (like the AskSlashdot thread on how best to recover a stolen laptop) I read some anecdotes where people were in a similar situation with similarly-purposed software that they rolled themselves. Perhaps the software having a common face (same name and features) will be enough to solve this problem.

    1. Re:But without a central service by Zenaku · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The important thing is to provide all the relevant details when you file a police report -- model, color, and most importantly serial number. If you don't file a police report, then nothing has been stolen as far as the law is concerned.

      I did not have my serial number written down anywhere, but when my house was burglarized a few months ago and my Macbook Pro was stolen, Apple was able to provide me with it along with a copy of my invoice. I made sure the police report had the serial number in it, even though I did not have any special software installed for tracking it.

      A few weeks later, I found a bunch of new bookmarks in my browser that I didn't recognize and I realized whatever fool had my laptop had not bothered to re-image it, and was still using my Firefox profile, which was still connected to my Foxmarks account.

      So I changed them all to point to a redirect page on my own webserver, and set up a cron job to watch the logs and email me whenever it got a hit. Foxmarks dutifully synced my changes down to my stolen laptop the next time the guy opened Firefox, and suddenly I had his I.P. address. He sent it to me several times a day, and it was always from the same IP.

      Now, the police in my precinct are not technical, but I called them and left a message explaining the information I had, and referencing my case number, and making it very clear that all they needed to do was get a subpoena to get the subscriber information from Comcast. It took about a week for someone to call me back to find out what the hell I was talking about, about 20 minutes on the phone for me to give him a brief "TCP/IP 101," and then about three more weeks for them to get the paperwork through the courts. But then one day the detective called me up, told me he was standing in the suspect's apartment, and asked me where to find the serial number on the laptop.

      I told him how to remove the battery and find the serial number, he matched it against the police report, and I had it back a couple of hours later. The guy that was using it got charged with a felony (receiving and concealing stolen property).

      All of my personal files were still on the laptop, just moved into the trash bin. Along with several pictures of the guy and his buddies mugging for the camera and throwing gang signs. (These, of course, I burned to a CD and gave to the police).

      Anyway, my point is just that even though the cops are usually not remotely technical, they will follow up on this sort of thing if you are polite, take the time to explain the technology, and make sure to follow procedure by filing a detailed report as soon as your laptop is stolen.

      I'll definitely be installing this software on the laptop as soon as I have a free moment -- I got lucky with Foxmarks, but it's better to be prepared than lucky.

      --
      If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
    2. Re:But without a central service by Zenaku · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
  3. Reformat HD = Free Laptop? by QuantumLeaper · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All you have to do is reformat the hard drive and now some one has your laptop for free.

    1. Re:Reformat HD = Free Laptop? by Verteiron · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    2. Re:Reformat HD = Free Laptop? by arth1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The proof of the pudding is in the eating. How many laptops has this system recovered so far?

      Also, for a PC, I don't see what this software does that's more useful than the following crontab entry:

      30 * * * * perl -e 'sleep rand(1800)';\
      wget -q --spider http://my.website/report/LAPTOPNAME

      That too does a connect on average every half hour, and the IP address and time is being logged.

      It does not send any traceroute information (which would be easy enough to do with another half line in the crontab), because doing so could very well be considered illegal black hat activity on your part. Consider someone connecting a stolen laptop to a corporate network. Just because your laptop was stolen doesn't mean you have a right to examining the internal topography of that corporate network, and sending the information to a third party. I'm amazed that the authors of this software are stupid enough to do so!

    3. Re:Reformat HD = Free Laptop? by Vendetta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How would it be illegal black hat activity on my part? It would be the fault of the douchebag who connected my laptop (that they stole) to this imaginary corporation's network. I'm not the criminal, the person who stole it is. Please, explain your logic to me.

  4. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  5. Did we need this? by pla · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    ...Because putting "wget mywebsite.com" in your system startup script (yes, you can do that on Windows as well, you just need to download wget first) has sooooo many proprietary, centralized dependancies?

    I actually use something very like that, solely for the purpose of finding my own remote machines' dynamic IP addresses. I don't really see the need for a dedicated "project" to make an entry in your access_log on startup.

  6. Re:Missing component to open-source project. by nategoose · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1. My brother's alienware laptop was stolen. 2. Reported to the police. 3. Alienware got a tech support call from some guy that bought it on eBay. 4. Guy sends it in for repair. 5. Alienware calls my brother to tell him they have it and only need the police to ask for it officially so they can send it as evidence. 6. My brother tells the police. 7. Police say "huh?" 8. Laptop never sent, buyer never questioned, thief never caught. Similar thing when my sister's credit cards were stolen and used to buy gas at places with security cameras, except then even the credit card company didn't seem to care.