Adeona is free software to help you track the location of your notebook
& desktop computer that may have been lost or stolen. (Shhh.. You may also use this to know the current whereabouts of your spouse via his or her laptop.)
Adeona, that weighs less than 3 MB, is currently available for
Windows, Mac OS X & Linux but going forward, it can become
available for iPhone & Windows Mobile phones also.
The idea is simple - you just install the Adeona client on your
laptop and it does the rest. The software runs in the background and
will upload the current IP address of your computer as soon as it is
connect to the Internet.
This can work because, in most cases, the geographic location of a
missing laptop can be successfully determined from the IP address
alone.
When the stolen computer goes online, it send a message with its own
IP address on to the web and you can retrieve this information from any
other computer by running the Adeona Recovery tool shown here.
Mac users enjoy another advantage - Adeona on a Macbook will also
upload pictures of people who use that computer via the built-in camera
and iSightCapture.
Adeone worked brilliant in a quick test run - it provided me both
the internal and external IP address of the computer along with
location of nearby routers. See this log:
As you would have guessed, there’s a limitation though - if someone
disables the Adeona process before connecting to the Internet, the
system won’t work as expected but still, its something worth
considering.
Adeona, which is named after a Roman Goddess of "safe return", is developed by researchers at University of Washington.