Have you ever had your laptop stolen and envy those who have spent the time and money on a LoJack type service? Well you may now have a free alternative to those other sometimes pricey services.
Adeona is an open source asset tracking program that is designed and provided by the University of Washington. The application is very small and can be installed on laptops running Windows XP/Vista, Linux, and Mac OS X. The data that is uploaded are; internal IP, external IP, nearby routers, access point information, and if you are running Mac OS X it will upload photos. Once installed, you will need to save a file that is unique to that laptop. Then you can use another machine, along with that file, to retrieve a text file with the location of the stolen laptop that you can turn over to law enforcement.
It looks very nice and I can see huge potential here. Be sure to do your homework though. Keep in mind this is a research project and it is open source. The data that your laptop is providing to their servers may be part of that research.
Adeona
Here is a video of it in action TinkerNut.com
Posted by
Mike Wright
