by Brandon
August 10, 2010 11:12 PM
Having recently purchased a laptop of my very own, I began to wonder what would happen if my Precious was lost or stolen. What would I do? There are commercial applications available, such as LoJack and others, that provide services to locate and recover your missing hardware. Some of these services even come with a money-back guarantee. Even with all these assurances, I still believe that any half-computer-savvy thief could easily get around a barrier like this. Regardless, looking into this type of application has been on my to-do list anyway, just to see what is out there.
A few days ago, I was catching up on episodes of Hak5 when they showcased the Prey Project. Prey is an open-source, free laptop recovery system. I'd tell you all about it, but just check out the Hak5 episode below.
I installed Prey on my MacBook Pro in just a few minutes. Installation was easy. I chose the control panel mode and created a new account from within the installer. After Prey was "running" (you get no visual indicators, icons, etc. which is what you want) I went to the control panel site and enabled the Alert feature under Action Modules. The message displayed as promised twenty minutes later.
Portable computer recovery software such as Prey, and others, is limited, however, and can only assist you if conditions are ideal. Those conditions include the computer being powered on and able to connect to the Internet. Prey will search for available wireless connections, but you'd better hope an open WiFi access point is nearby if your computer is locked via a password. If you don't have a password (and you really should) the thief will probably take care of establishing a network connection for you. If the thief is experienced with computers, however, chances of software such as Prey being successful is even more limited. An experienced person would probably keep your computer powered off and remove the hard drive after the deed is done. It's a good thing there are a lot of dumb criminals out there.
I plan to stick with Prey and hope that I never need to use it for its intended purpose. If you have a portable computer, give Prey a try. It's better than nothing at all, right?! If you choose the Control Panel tracking method you get to register up to three computers.
Let me know if you've used Prey or any similar services. Did you lose a laptop and activate the service? Did you get it back?