Adeona Warns of Instability; OpenDHT Mothballed

gbickford writes "Adeona, the first open source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop, was featured on Slashdot last year. I was stoked when I read about how it worked and I installed it immediately. I just went to look for updates on the site and was greeted with a giant warning message stating, 'Adeona is currently not working.' It seems that OpenDHT, the distributed hash table that stores the location information and photos, has been fairly unstable lately. The developers claim that this is "largely because the back-end OpenDHT system is not able to tolerate the load imposed by Adeona. OpenDHT removed the need for a centralized database with tracking information, which in effect prevents a 3rd party from tracking a user's whereabouts. OpenDHT was Sean Rhea's Ph.D. project back in 2005 and he has decided to officially bow out of maintaining it as of July 1st, which has left the developers of Adeona looking for another back end to store location information and photos. The source code for Adeona is available and they are actively seeking developer contributions on the developer's list. Do any developers have ideas on where to put scads of information in a free, reliable, anonymous, and secure manner?"

Comments

Here's an idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Post the information in anonymous Slashdot comments!

Re:Here's an idea...

[RuBLed]

I save my files in 127.0.0.1 and that site is fast. It's also secure btw, I asked my friend to access 127.0.0.1 and he cannot see my files. Also whenever I try to access 127.0.0.1, it's reliable and always there. I never leave my basement though.

Re:Here's an idea...

[jonaskoelker]

Actually, it wouldn't be such a horrible idea*.

Just come up with an RSA keypair and store it on all your machines. Encrypt and sign all data you want to store "in the cloud", and find someone who will store it for you.

* Slashdot might object to this and delete your post. I recommend using Reed-Solomon coding (or some other error-correcting code) and storing your data redundantly on several sites.

You could also do mirrored RAIF (Redudant Array of Indepedent Forums), though it might be rife for puns. And RAIP, where P=Posts, would be ripe for them. (Someone's gonna RAIP my karma for that, but the puns and anagrams form such a FAIR PAIR...)

Re:Realistic?

[Daengbo]

"Distributed hashing tables are a class of decentralized distributed systems that provide a lookup service similar to a hash table: (key, value) pairs are stored in the DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key." [1]

They should look at Bamboo DHT.

Over-reaching

[Bruce Perens]

The reason for using OpenDHT, I think, was that Adeona didn't want it to be possible to trace user's movements using their system until the laptop was reported as stolen. Not that I am entirely clear on this. Perhaps the best thing to do for the time being would be to back off on the unbreakable-privacy goal until a reliable system arises, and use a database like the rest of us.

Yes, this is dangerous, in that it centralizes in one place the call-in data regarding some large number of laptops. And it makes it tempting for some government to subpoena the data, use it for eavesdropping, etc. So it should not be allowed to stand forever. But it seems kind of silly to just fold up tents until some reasonably blue-sky software meets production goals.

Bruce

Re:Adeona

[davester666]

There's two types of thieves for laptops/small electronic devices.

One type (drug users, thieves with little technical knowledge, people who just want very quick cash) generally just try to pawn the device ASAP and get less than 10% of the retail value. The person who purchases the device from the pawn shop may or may not be that knowledgeable or have install disks to wipe the installed system.

The other type will try to maximize the money they get from the system. These people tend to be more technically knowledgeable and are more likely to wipe the computer and install a new system on it and then ebay or craigslist it, or they may even try to ransom it back to the original owner.

The devices stolen by those of the first type of thief generally will get booted up and plugged into the internet with tracking software intact and ready to report.

Now, it's not enough just to get a report, like an IP address and possibly a photo of the person using the device, because the police may not be interested in tracking down the device. Recently, I read a story about a stolen Mac with tracking software installed, where the owner went to the police with the info, and they were brushing him off except a member of their drug enforcement department happened to see the picture and recognized a drug dealer they were looking for, so they did track down the location and arrested the guy/returned the computer intact.