Effortless computing

The unthinkable happens and a burglar nicks my MacBook… two days later I remember the name of the (beta) tracking software I’d installed on it a year earlier, and discover it stopped working soon after the initial test I ran on it. Two schoolboy errors: keep a master sheet of important information on Google Docs and monitor important software to ensure it’s working. It’s what my IT support company does for backups (and much more) every morning…

So, with hindsight. here’s a review of tracking software for Mac laptops. (Apply the same principles to Windows apps. For iPhones and iPads, use Apple’s “Find My iPhone” – it’s free and none of the 3rd party apps work effectively.)

A tracking app is a small piece of software that you install on laptop, which runs automatically and invisibly, and which you can command to tell you and the police where the laptop is and who is using it. These apps work.

I tried three of the leading Mac OS X tracking services. All have

• Mapping: a Google map of where your laptop was last detected
• Images: a photo from the laptop’s web cam and a screenshot are taken at intervals, which can often give the identity of the thief
• Network data: a report of the public and local IP addresses of the machine, and any local Wifi stations detected.

I tested these services with both corporate and home firewalls to see how robust the services are – it’s no good if the tracker can’t reach your laptop on some networks.

The key features to look for are:

• Monitoring: how do you know if the tracker on your laptop has broken? It’s no good losing a laptop, turning on the tracker, and finding it’s been dead for months.
1. Ideally you should get an email when a laptop, which hasn’t been stolen, goes more than a few days or weeks without contact.
2. Failing that, it should be easy to see from a web page when your laptops were last seen – but this depends on you remembering to do this, so it’s a very poor second best.
3. Having to test each one individually might be not much worse than #2 if you just have a few, but it’s not scalable for a company.
• Actions: can you sound a warning on the stolen machine, or put a message on it? These have proven useful against casual thieves.

My recomendation is Prey Project - it’s the only app that emails you when it loses contact with a machine that hasn’t been stolen:

I also tried Witness, which turns your MacBook into a burglar webcam, recording a video when it spots motion whilst activated but unattended. It’s neat and works well, but depends on you remembering to activate it each time… so not dependable.