Spy on the Guy Who Stole Your MacBook
September 17th, 2007, 6 Comments »
Undercover is one of the cooler laptop security products I’ve seen in a while. If your Apple laptop is stolen, you can activate it and it’ll send you network information about where your machine is being used. Additionally, you can watch what the thieves do via regular screenshots. Best of all, you can turn on the iSight camera and get photos of the thief in action:
Undercover introduces another world first: 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.
Hmm…I wonder why they don’t do live video?
They’ll also remotely lock down the computer so that it’s unusable and displays a message saying so, and promising a reward for its return.
I wondered about the pricing model. A single user license costs $49. Why not just give the software away for free, but charge people $99 when they need to activate it? Of course, then you’re relying on a consistent flow of thefts for your revenue, which probably isn’t very wise. Better to trade on people’s fear, uncertainty and doubt.