Adeona The Laptop Tracking System

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. Adeona is an independent system which doesn’t rely on any third party software or a central server; you install it and it works, nothing more to it. Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner’s laptop. It is an open source free software developed by a group of students/researchers in Washington, basically the software does what it says, to track the laptop thief by sending the IP address of the thief and a captured image of the thief with your webcam (mac only, why not PC. Adeona is a brand new project, so some aspects of the program (and the documentation) are not yet very user-friendly, and some features, like the ability to snap photos (possibly capturing a thief’s face) using a laptop’s built-in webcam currently only work on Apple laptops.

Adeona uses state-of-the-art cryptographic mechanisms to ensure that the owner is the only party that can use the system to reveal the locations visited by a device. Adeona offers unique and precise location tracking through IP addresses and GeoIP locationing positioning. Its developers point out that most theft-tracking software relies on the ability to regularly reporting a laptop’s location to a centralized server, meaning that “even while the device is still in the rightful owner’s possession, the tracking system is keeping tabs on the locations it (and its owner) visit, meaning that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go !! There’s no need to rely on a single third party.

All you need to do is download a free software program, then the software anonymously sends encrypted notes about the computer’s location to internet servers approximately averaging one every 30 minutes. Unlike other paid recovery software, this is a DIY (Do it yourself) software, meaning to say you’ll have to retrieve the IP address without the assistant of a third party. 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. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop.