I’m not familiar with those modules … IMHO anything that lets the thief know they may be under surveilance is a bad idea, so if they change the laptop’s wallpaper or sound an alarm on the laptop, then I would not be interested in the feature. I did as a test report the laptop lost, and the laptop shortly afterward started taking web cam images, and uploading those to the web.
I basically agree with that. But there may be a time when such functionality would be appropriate. The module that deletes the sensitive data would be useful but I haven’t tested that one yet for fear of messing my system up.
Of course the Achilles heal in the system is that it relies on the wifi or a network connection to transmit the location but there are few open wifi spots are in reality so unless the thief connects via ethernet or you’re lucky enough for him to be in range of an open hotspot it won’t help. This is assuming that the user accounts on the OS are passworded preventing the thief to access the system and set up wifi. The ideal system would use the mobile networks but then your laptop would require a GSM card in it.
If the laptop is stolen for the hardware as opposed to for the data on it then the thief would probably just wipe the disk with a clean install of an OS wiping Prey from the laptop anyway. It’s still a nice to play with and I’ll probably keep it.
Will you still be updating your builds when new updates come out?
Indeed packages such as PREY are NO GUARANTEE. Indeed they are far from any such guarantee and any astute hi-tech thief will not be caught by any such software.
What I like about PREY is it works for both MS-Windows and Linux OS. For those of us with dual boot laptops, we can set it up for both and when the thief boots (most likely to MS-Windows) the same web site can be used to attempt to locate the laptop and thief.
There have been a number of documented cases of non-technically aware thiefs who stole a laptop, and switched it on, and used it to surf with the existing OS, not realizing that they could be observed (by software such as PREY) by doing so. Fortunately one does not see too many cases of this capability being advertised, for it it was very common knowledge amonst the computer illiterate, then the dangers to thiefs who boot a laptop and connect to the web using an existing OS would also be very common knowledge.
One can only do the best one can with the tools that one has available.
Hi
Yes, I’m waiting for 0.4.4 to arrive with the fixed GUI configurator,
then if it’s looking good I will probably push through to one of the
community repositories.
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.32.19-0.3-default
up 1 day 16:03, 2 users, load average: 0.05, 0.09, 0.02
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - Driver Version: 256.53
Hi All
prey-0.4.4 is now available and built on OBS. It looks like the streamer issue has been fixed for me on my netbook, so this patch and my second one for iwlist was fixed as well. So users should be good to go 
I have left my third patch for using xwd to grab the screen shot and still in discussion with the developer on this one.
Enjoy
Thanks. I’ll give it a try.
Hi All
Just a note that prey has been accepted into the ‘Security’ repository.
http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=prey&baseproject=ALL&lang=en&exclude_filter=home%3A&exclude_debug=true
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.32.24-0.2-default
up 6 days 4:13, 2 users, load average: 0.06, 0.05, 0.16
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - Driver Version: 260.19.21
I stumbled across this 6 week old post on the prey site: It’s official: Prey is now on Ubuntu and Debian – Prey
and so it appears debian and ubuntu are now including Prey in their ‘official’ repositories.
Malcolmlewis, I note after your excellent help in packaging Prey (version 0.4.4 ) it has now appeared in Index of /repositories/security (version 0.5.3).
I’m wondering given Index of /repositories/security is NOT an official repository, if an effort may be worth while to ask the SuSE-GmbH packagers to include prey in OSS, or if that would just be seen as more openSUSE bloat ?
I have not tried to update Prey from Index of /repositories/security and I think I’ll give that a try this weekend.
On 06/02/2011 11:36 AM, oldcpu wrote:
>
> I have not tried to update Prey from ‘Index of /repositories/security’
> and I think I’ll give that a try this weekend.
i’d sure be happy to hear how that goes…for the first time in a long
time i have a portable…i took it to town the other day and then
realized it is totally unprepared for physical access of an
untrusted/stranger …
prior to taking it out again i need to:
-password protect the bios
-stop the autologin
-crypto the home
-install and set up and activate Prey
good thing i’m not paranoid! 
–
dd CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP via openSUSE 11.4 [2.6.37.6-0.5] + KDE 4.6.0 + Thunderbird 3.1.10]
Dual booting with Sluggish Loser7 on Acer Aspire One D255