Stolen Laptops Come Home

By Digital Trends Staff April 15, 2008

Imagine if there was a tracker buried deep in your laptop, put there in the motherboard bio during manufacture so it can’t be wiped. CompuTrace One, a tracking solution from Absolute Software, is that, and has helped track 5,000 computers. Certainly it’s worked for the West Midlands Police in Britain, who used it to trace 30 stolen computers from as far away as Saudi Arabia and Argentina. When one of the stolen machines was hooked up to the Net, it automatically connected to a monitoring center to give its IP address. That let local police use the ISP to discover its location. Alan McInnes, general manager with the Association of Chief Police Officers crime prevention initiatives, told silicon.com, "The more widely this technology is used, the more the risk goes up and the more it will devalue the attractiveness of computer theft. This tracking technology has already proven itself useful for recovering large numbers of cars, its success rate is about 95 percent, and we hope it will do the same for computers. You not only recover the stolen property you are looking for, you often will uncover more stolen property and other related crimes."

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