Track the location of your notebook with Adeona

Adeona is a free Open-Source software to track your computer. It works completely independent and is running in the background on the computer system. It automatically recognizes a change of location by analyzing the network connection of the notebook. If someone would connect to a WLAN the software would automatically do IP lookups to determine the current location of the notebook.

Those information would then be compiled, encrypted and used by the OpenDHT distributed storage service to store a location update of the notebook. These location updates can then be retrieved from another computer revealing information about IP addresses (internal and external), the time, access points and nearby routers.

This information can be filtered to display only data of a specific date range. This should be tested at least once to make sure everything has been setup correctly.

The Adeona software is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh. The Mac version has an interesting additional feature. It can create screenshots with a camera and add those to the tracking information.

The main application according to the developers is to recover a stolen notebook. The main problem with this kind of software based tracking is that it might help against a normal thief who keeps the notebook as his own and does not completely wipe the hard disks before using it. A clever thief would problem do that and install another operating system to start over. Some thieves may fire up the computer at least once to check for data like credit card information that they can take advantage of.

I guess some users will find different uses for this kind of software, like tracking their children, wifes, girlfriends, husbands to see what they are doing. Please note that you may end up with legal troubles if you are using the software for unlawful or unethical activities.

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