Apple ® section

Stop, thief

I took my MacBook with me Sunday when I went to visit my mother at her nursing home. I wanted to show her some pictures, and the Mac's Front Row is a convenient way to do that.

Later, I needed to stop at BJ's to pick up some juice and other stuff. I still had the laptop in the car as I pulled into BJ's parking lot.

When I come into any parking lot, I don't go looking for spaces near to the store. I just pull in and park in the first open slot I see. I don't like other people banging their doors into my car, and I also figure that if I lived right *here*, I certainly wouldn't start up the car to drive another fifty feet. Extra exercise from walking is yet another reason to just drive in and park.

Unless it is very busy, it's unusual to find very many other people at the far ends of the lots. Mostly I have this area to myself, with every other car crowded nearer to the store.

But this time there was another car parked out in the boonies, and someone was in it. I parked, and spent a minute listening to an NPR segment finish up. The guy was still in his car. I got out, and he looked at me as I started walking away.

For some reason that made me nervous. No doubt he was just waiting for someone, or resting, and his glance was surely meaningless. Yet I had left a $2,200 laptop sitting on my front seat - covered from casual view with a seat cushion, yes, but still sitting there. I paused and walked back to the car, pretending to have forgotten something. Should I move the MacBook to the trunk? Hmm.. no, that would certainly call attention to it. Take it into BJ's? Nope. Move my car? Oh, sheesh, stop being so paranoid! Go get the juice and stop this nonsense.

Which is what I did. But I still had that nagging feeling of impending doom as I returned to my car. The other car was now gone, and my laptop was still where I left it, so the all this was completely unnecessary.

But laptops are stolen every day. There are tracking products for Windows PC's (for example http://www.absolute.com/public/computraceplus/laptop-security.asp) but I can't recall seeing one for Mac's until this: http://orbicule.com/undercover/. This $29.99 piece of software uses the Internet to track down a stolen Mac, but also includes the ability to send screenshots. As they say:

Undercover is the world's first theft-recovery software that will
send screenshots of your stolen Mac at regular intervals. These
screenshots will sooner or later reveal the thief's identity (e.g.
when chatting, reading and writing emails,...) making it much easier
to work with law enforcement in order to recover your Mac.
 

For the new Macs with built-in cameras, there's another feature:

If your Mac has a built-in or external iSight, Undercover will
transmit pictures of the thief and his surroundings every 6 minutes,
making it even easier to identify the current user. It's like having
a private detective working for you.
 

Cute ideas, reasonably priced.. sounds like a good deal to me.

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