I was reading PC PRO the other day when I came upon an open source project called Prey, it looked so interesting I downloaded and installed it.  Basically what the software does it install some code on your laptop that reports back to a central server it’s location.

First off you download and install the software, and you need to sort out your account online as well.  It runs in the background and you don’t know it’s there, and that’s the point of it.  After installing the software and doing the necessary configuration work I ‘reported’ my laptop as stolen on their website…

After about 20mins I was emailed a report detailing a whole bunch of information about where my laptop currently, and it even took a picture of me while I was using it.  So on my test report it reported:

• My location using Google Maps (pretty accurate as well!)
• A ‘pretty’ picture of me i.e. whoever has stolen your laptop
• A screenshot of what I/they were up to
• Active connections
• Wifi info

As well network info…

Now I still need to do further checks, for example seeing if it works when others are logged i.e. does it run as a service, but it looks good so far.   And to tempt that nasty person who steals my laptop, assuming it does run as a service, I might leave a Windows login without a password to ensure then can get on and incriminate themselves!  I don’t think it my password won’t be that easy to crack.  They have agents for Windows, MAC and Linux, with more to come (including iPad), and it also does phones such as Android as well.

So while some further testing is required I’m quite impressed by the software, maybe one of the problems I’ll have is remembering that I’m making use of the service.  It doesn’t interrupt what I’m doing so I forget it’s there.  I’d suggest it was certainly worth looking at and trying out.