A friend of mine, Will Green, podcaster extraordinaire of BritishMac.com fame posted this tweet last week. Those of you who follow Will’s endeavours will know that he has recently setup a studio and training centre in a lovely rural spot just outside of Ironbridge in Shropshire and is in the process of making his love of podcasting and training his own business. Unfortunately for Will some people have little respect for passion and instead see others hard work as an opportunity for a quick buck, and in Will’s case these individual’s decided that they would help themselves to his new equipment by breaking into his studio and loading the lot into a van !
Thankfully Will is a resilient sort and is already planning the replacement of his studios kit, but this story may have had a different ending if Will had installed the excellent utility Undercover from Orbicule. Undercover is a small application that you can install on Apple computers ( iMac, MacBook ) as well as the iPad and iPhone ( though I am not covering iOS versions in this article ). Once installed Undercover does, well actually, once installed it does precisely nothing ! The installer hides an application deep inside your Mac and leaves no obvious trace of itself to indicate that it is there. The application then lies dormant until the fateful day that your precious Mac is either lost or stolen, at which point you go to http://www.undercovercenter.com and login with the credentials you created when you installed the application. Here you can mark the Mac as lost or stolen and additionally can add crime reference details and email addresses of the police which is used to update the police directly on the status of your stolen machine.
What happens then depends on what has become of your Mac. In all likelihood the thief will either attempt to use it themselves before passing on or selling it. This is where you can help the Undercover application by enabling a default user account on your Mac with no password when you install it, as you want the thief to be able to login and start using the computer. Once they have logged in they will most likely attempt to connect to the Internet and as soon as they do this the Undercover application will be triggered and will start tracking the use of the computer in a number of ways. It will attempt to locate itself using the Skyhook wireless location service, this location information will then be reported back to www.undercovercenter.com and you will receive an email telling you that your Mac has been found ! In addition it will record the IP address of the device and fire off regular screen grabs of information on the screen and return those to your undercovercenter.com account. Finally Undercover will take regular snaps using your Macs built in webcam and send these up to your web account as well. Together this set of data provides the police with a very strong set of evidence for locating and apprehending the thief before they have chance to sell it on, in fact there are a whole host of stories on Orbicule’s web site of users who have retrieved their Macs after installing Undercover.
In addition to the steps Undercover takes as standard there is an option on the web site to trigger what they refer to as “Plan B”. In this mode the Mac will be configured to simulate a screen failure with the aim of fooling the thief into taking the Mac to a repair centre or Apple Store. A further mode can be setup to display a full screen message and to setup the text to speech engine to shout a user defined phrase at the devices highest volume level. These steps will hopefully ensure that if the thief does try to sell on the Mac it soon becomes apparent to whoever picks it up that this was stolen.
If you wish to test the recovery steps so you are clear how it works and what to do if you are in the position of needing to use for real, you can go through the process of marking as stolen and see for yourself exactly what the information retrieved looks like. Once you are happy simply mark it as recovered again and you will receive an email confirming that it has been recovered as well as a link which will delete the test data from your account.
All in all this is an essential purchase and is easily justifiable, especially if in the worst case it helps you to recover your lost Mac !
Undercover has a number of licence variations from a single user at $49, a household version for up to 5 Macs at $59, a site licence for up to 25 Macs at $249 and student and enterprise volume licences. Notably Orbicule also offer a money back guarantee should you not be able to recover your stolen Mac.
Unfortunately due to the fact that the application installs itself as a root process Orbicule are not able to sell through the Apple App Store so you will need to go to http://www.orbicule.com to download and purchase. For users who change their computers often there are full instructions on removing and transferring the software between machines so you won’t need to buy again when upgrading.
Unfortunately for Will some people have little respect for passion and instead see others hard work as an opportunity for a quick buck, and in Will’s case these individual’s decided that they would help themselves to his new equipment by breaking into his studio and loading the lot into a van !