A New Lock for Your Laptop

OK, so the gentleman at right has resorted to, shall we say, extreme measures to keep his laptop on his person. Or, maybe he just loves checking email that much, it's hard to tell. There are, of course, plenty of commercially available options for laptop protection to choose from. My favorite (based on name alone, not from experience, being LoJack for Laptops...classy). But now, for those of us who don't want to shell out the Benjamins for such services, there's a free, open source product called Adeona.

Named after the Roman goddess of safe returns, Adeona is the brainchild of combined research efforts at the University of Washington an the University of California, San Diego. Adeona uses the Internet, the researchers say, like a homing beacon. You install the software, and then the laptop occasionally sends its IP address and related information to a free, online storage network called OpenDHT. This information can be used to determine the computer's location.

The main difference here is that you're not turning over your laptop's location information to a company. The researchers say that the Adeona system scrambles the information, and that it can then only be deciphered using a password known only to the person who set up the account. Hence, only the only can access the information, and can take that information to the police to help trace it. That way, even if OpenDHT got hacked, your information is still encrypted.

One of Adeona's creators puts it this way: "Typically when you create a forensics trail, you leave breadcrumbs that you can see, but also everyone else. We've created a private forensics trail where only you can see those breadcrumbs."

One note for Mac users. Adeona can use the internal camera to take a photo and send it to the OpenDHT server. That, of course, might capture an image of the thief. Or more likely, of you doing a late-night nose pick while you surf Facebook. Classy.

Oh, and as you can imagine -- iPhone owners are already asking for an app of their own.

Here's a video of UC San Diego doc student Thomas Ristenpart discussing his work on Adeona:

(Photo by tdenham via stock.xchang)