Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.
From the Adeona website:
Adeona is named after the Roman goddess of safe returns. This system is the result of recent academic research started at the University of Washington, with participants now also at the University of California San Diego and the University of California Davis. The foundations of the Adeona design — and an analysis of its security and privacy properties — are published in a research paper at the 2008 USENIX Security Symposium.
Best of all, Adeona is free, and has downloads available for Windows, Mac and Linux. As an added bonus, Mac Powerbook users can configure Adeona to work with the built-in iSight camera and freeware software isightcapture to take a photo of your laptop-mooking perp. Like your location information, these images are privacy-protected so that only the laptop owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can access them.
Learn more at the Adeona website, or get started with Adeona now!
