In my home, we have no shortage of mobile devices. I personally have a MacBook Pro, and an iPod Touch, while my wife has a nice shiny new netbook and an older Compaq laptop. Given where we live, I’m always a bit concerned about break ins and so forth. Especially considering my neighbor’s home was broken in to three times in six months. Of course we have ADT on all the windows and doors with motion sensors, but for something like a laptop the thief could break in, grab the device, and be gone before police ever get there. So, how do we remedy that, other taking a drug cocktail designed by a physician to curb paranoia?
Today I found Prey. It’s a free service which tracks your laptop’s wifi settings and so forth, when you tell the service it’s been stolen. It’s pretty neat.
Now, given, if you don’t have automatic login turned on you’re in trouble with this. The thief won’t have your password, and therefore Prey will be totally useless. They’ll just pop in an OS disc and either reset your password, or reinstall. I’m not going to argue intelligence of thieves, I’m just going to say that nearly any 15 year old kid can figure out how to reinstall an OS now with such easy installers.
So, what do you think of Prey? It’s available for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux. I, for one, have already installed and configured it.