Journalism of Courage
Premium
This is an archive article published on June 21, 2010
Put a private detective on your laptop
Baruch Sienna figured his teenage sons laptop was gone forever. During a party in Israel,a thief had taken his MacBook,and there were no witnesses.....
3 min read
Baruch Sienna figured his teenage sons laptop was gone forever. During a party in Israel,a thief had taken his MacBook,and there were no witnesses. The police were very unhelpful, Sienna said,speaking from Jerusalem. They said,Youll never see your laptop again.
But the son was fortunate that his father had installed Undercover,an antitheft programme,on his computer. He remotely activated the software,which grabbed screen shots of the thiefs online activities,while the Macs built-in camera shot pictures of him. After eight months,the software had given police enough information to identify the thief.
The 2009 Computer Security Institute Computer Crime and Security Survey found that 42 per cent of respondents had lost a laptop or other portable device to a thief in the last year. You can keep an eye on your devices and not leave them unattended,but they might best be protected with some software. A number of good programmes are available for laptops,phones and tablets. Here are a few of them.
Story continues below this ad
GadgetTrak: Available for Mac and Windows PCs,with versions for BlackBerrys,iPhones and Windows Mobile phones,all priced at $24.95 a year,it takes a photo of the user with the computers webcam,either every 30 minutes or whenever the computer is awakened from sleep. Pictures,along with location data gleaned from Skyhook,are sent to the users Flickr account.
Laptop Cop: We record everything, said Tom Bilyeu,the chief marketing officer of Awareness Technologies,the maker of Laptop Cop. That includes every keystroke,user name and password,and all web sites. Laptop Cop ($49.95 a year; Windows only) also gives its customers the ability to selectively lock out,delete and retrieve data. As a result,even if the laptop is not recoverable,ones data often is.
LoJack for Laptops: One of the best-selling antitheft packages,with 1.2 million users in 51 countries,LoJack for Laptops ($39.99 to $59.99) monitors a devices activities once a laptop is reported stolen. When Absolute Software,the company that licenses the LoJack name,gathers enough information,it notifies the police.
Undercover: Available for Macs and iPhones,it takes pictures of a laptops user every time the device is turned on. Once the machine is connected to the internet,it uploads those photos every six minutes. The laptops location is also noted using Skyhook technology,and all the information is sent to the laptops rightful owner,who can pass the information on to the police.
Live Blog