Prey Project - Protect your Portable Devices

Today I bring you a program that may actually help you recover your stolen items such as your laptops, netbooks, PDA's, iPods, and other fun little devices we use every day. Surely you say there must be a cost for a program like this I mean who is going to make anything like this for free? Well the people at http://preyproject.com/ have done exactly that!

Let's get started shall we. This lovely little program is called "Prey" for obvious reasons to a thief your exactly that nothing more than their prey. Well here is where we "flip the switch" on them figuratively and literally. Prey is a small program that runs on Windows, Ubuntu, Mac, Linux, and Android silently sitting in the background just waiting and resting happily. However should the day come where your lovable portable pal gets taken prey turns the hunter into the hunted all without their knowledge.

So what exactly can this software do? Well once you have setup your free account at preyproject.com and registered your devices. (You can register up to 3 devices for free or pay to upgrade to more devices.) You are given the ability to use prey projects web administration panel to remotely flip the switch on the program to start your intelligence gathering.

One of the first features which I am totally in love with is the geo location awareness where prey will use either GPS if built in or wifi hot spots to create a triangulation map and report it back to you. This gives you the ability to narrow down your search area and track the thief. Now your probably thinking your wifi won't connect to open hot spots but prey enables the wifi auto connect signals allowing it do just that. The cool feature you can enable with this if you have tracked the thief back to your local coffee shop is a loud alarm that will sound for 30 seconds giving you audible proof that the person is in possession of your stolen property.

The second one is getting to know your thief up close and personal. If your laptop has a built in web cam prey makes an attempt to access it and take a picture of the thief and emails it to you. Now you have physical evidence of exactly who your criminal is to present to the police.

Want to know what they are even using your computer for? Yep there is a way to do that as well. Setting another configuration switch will cause prey to take screenshots and send them to you at certain intervals. If this person logs into a social network and a screen shot is taken you now have a full name to give to the police. Oh this program just keeps better but there is still more juicy data goodness.

Say your worried about some personal data you keep on your laptop or phone such as bank information and your social security number. (Two things which really should never be on there in the first place in plain text.) Well you can hide your email passwords that are stored in your email clients such as outlook or Thunderbird. If that's not enough you can even remotely remove those stored passwords.

If your still worried about the data then you can activate system lock. This will totally lock down your PC making it completely unusable without the correct access code. This will turn the computer into a total paperweight for the thief. Personally I have a concern here as this will alert the thief somethings up and they may just format the system nullifying the purpose of the program.

Some people may be concerned about personal data being sent over the internet however according to the developers all information is sent over full SSL encryption (Secure Socket Layer) at level 3. This means all your data is encoded as it's sent over the data stream and decoded once it reaches it's proper destination. This keeps prying eyes from gathering any useful information on a user level.

So why trust this program and how do you know it's not malevolent with ill intentions? Well that's the beauty of open source programs. Open source means that the entire program including the code source and structure used to make it are available to the public for full scrutiny and examination. Something you won't see Microsoft doing.

Now with all this said of this great program and future possibilities it offers please take these last words with all seriousness. You should never attempt to confront a thief or criminal by yourself! This could have grave consequences that aren't worth the price of replaceable electronics. Gather your information, contact proper authorities and abide by the law.

Head on over to http://preyproject.com/ and check it out. Like I said it's free, silent and sits out of your way like a Ninja just sleeping in the shadows until it's called upon.

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