Photo from the University of Washington.If you’re reading this post on a laptop computer, rest easy. Your computer may have just become far less appealing to thieves.
The University of Washington has released a free program that will track your laptop if it’s stolen. If the program is installed on a computer with a built-in camera, it will even send you a photo of the thief at the keyboard.
It’s called Adeona, after the Roman goddess of safe returns, and it’s a lot like LoJack — the silent alarm and recovery system for cars — for laptops.
We’ve blogged before about Levitt and Ian Ayres‘s paper on how Lojack drives down overall car theft because thieves can’t be sure which car is protected and which one is not.
The officially licensed LoJack for Laptops software has been available for purchase since 2006. But with a free version now also in the mix, far more laptops will be protected by anti-theft tracking tools that could lead police right to a thief’s door.
What would crime look like if every car and computer came with a free tracking device — or every bicycle, bulldozer, and boat?
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To be effective the system would have to be hardwired into the board. Even that could be bypassed, but it most likely wouldn’t be worth doing for your average laptop. A software LoJack would be totally useless as a thief is not required to run the software installed on your laptop.
They make it sound almost fun to track the thief, take his photo, etc. I’m tempted to let my laptop be stolen.
By the way, the FAQ for this program makes it clear that it’s intended to thwart “common criminals” who are not tech savvy. The program can be easily uninstalled or wiped from the hard-drive.
You ever have a family member or friend ask you a ridiculously stupid question about a computer issue?
Most thieves are not as smart as your family members.
Will some bypass it, sure. You can bypass LoJack too. Still, its recovered thousands of stolen vehicles and equipment.
To help make sure that the Computrace Agent cannot be disabled by criminals, Absolute Software works with computer manufacturers to pre-install a portion of the agent in the BIOS. The BIOS-based Computrace Agent has the ability to survive operating re-installations, hard-drive reformats, and hard drive replacements.
The Bios-based agent will secretly re-install Computrace LoJack for Laptops on a stolen computer, so our Theft Recovery Team can track and recover the stolen computer even if the hard drive has been replaced or tampered with.
If OEM’s standardize on an open source standard this could be a great thing, but right now Computrace has the edge because they have the bios.
This may not prevent thieves who can reformat a heard drive. But I think it will be most effective against thieves who are trying to steal information of off a computer, which you would lose in a reformat.
I just went to the webite of the product. Looks like you can embed the software into the bios of the laptop, which will reinstall Adeona even if the hard drive is replaced.
Many OS installs are password protected. Does this software run only when logged in? If not, a “dumb” thief wouldn’t be able to login in the first place, thus wouldn’t get caught.
A hardware solution with the help of manufacturers would be more viable.
It sounds like a great idea, but I wonder about how the criminal will be pursued. Who is going to confront the thief? You gonna go up to who you think stole it and demand your laptop back? Will the police get involved? Would they really stop arresting skateboarders to go rescue a laptop? I can see it working on something expensive like a car, but petty thievery doesn’t seem to be the sort of crime police would really care to investigate.
Thoughts?