Cheap way to lowjack

[ossuarian]

I got this idea earlier today, and I just got it to work.  I wanted a program in case my laptop was stolen that would periodically record what network it was on and what was in front of the camera.  That way, if someone not very bright opened my laptop on a network, I'd know the IP of the nearest router and I might get a picture of the thief.

Comments

[xerhino]

Oh! I think I've seen that guy on Amerika's most wanted!

Boneycam!

[buddhafiddle]

Also seems like a great tag to begin a thriller. I see sort of a high-and-low thing, where somebody gets a laptop stolen with a vast amount of highly secure information, and the thief is just somebody who saw the guy and felt like he just needed to be fucked with.

[unixronin]

Upon quick observation this morning vs. overnight, that is definitely updating, but does not appear to be doing so at intervals as short as one minute. But then, you probably shut the laptop down overnight.

Here's a suggestion to get around the gross-surrender-of-privacy angle: Have a "safe" flag file somewhere, say in your home directory or somewhere in /etc/ or /var. Set it up so that something you do daily causes that file to be touched. Have a cron job that checks it daily and removes it if it ever becomes, say, 48 hours old. If the flag file's missing, then the uvccapture job starts snapshotting.

[ossuarian]

Yeah, I'm trying to leave stuff on less often. Also, for this to
work, a gross surrender of privacy isn't necessary. Currently,
it's writing the image to a public Dropbox folder, and you guys
can see it. I could just as easily write to the default Dropbox
folder, and then you couldn't.

Now Adeona actually encrypts everything to the remote server,
so it really keeps your trace and image very private. Even if
someone accesses the remote server or sniffs the packet, they
won't get any real information. So Adeona gets points for
privacy but fewer points for actually working.