Named after the Roman Goddess of safe returns, Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party.

What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner’s laptop. The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network topology) that can be used to identify its current location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.

How it works?

Upon the installation of Adeona on your laptop, encrypted connections to OpenDHT storage server is established. If a laptop is stolen, one can log into OpenDHT and check the location of the laptop through the IP addresses and the Internet nodes, last known and used to connect the lost gadget. The best and the most distinguishing feature of this software highlights its privacy ideas which do not let the Law enforcement agencies or any external individuals to go through the data in one’s laptop.

Thing to ponder over:

• There still remains a question mark over the security of Open Source Security software as even the thieves could work over it for modifications, owing to the fact that its source code is known to all.
• Its major focus is over the hardware and not the data where a valid point lies that if a thief would steal a laptop for data reasons, he might not wait for the thing to be tracked down. His motive of information theft could be achieved in minutes leading him to discard the machine.

Use it

There are downloadable binaries/installers for Linux, Windows and Mac.

Author Scott Dunn believes that the “best freeware” lists published by Web sites and magazines frequently trumpet dozens of programs, but the results reflect the subjective opinions of just one or two testers. Thus, to find out the best of the lot, he compared roundups of “great” freeware conducted recently by four reputable publications to find the programs that were endorsed by at least three of the reviews. And the result is an awesome list of the Best Windows Freeware.

Here are the list;

1. Avira AntiVir Personal: Good malware detection rates and its ability to take on rootkit viruses makes it an ideal Free Personal Anti-virus solution. However, it does not scan incoming e-mail though it can scan it once the attachments are saved. It does detects malware if you open an infected e-mail.
2. Comodo Firewall Pro: Comodo comes with a long whitelist of safe sites, which you can add to as you surf and is regarded to be better than the firewalls built into Windows XP or Vista. Though a little complicated for novice users, this is regarded as one tough and robust software.
3. TrueCrypt: TrueCrypt is an open-source program and can create encrypted files that appear as disk drives. It also lets you encrypt an entire drive (such as a USB flash drive), a drive partition, and — for extra safety — hidden drive volumes.
4. CCleaner: This software scrubs your system by removing temp files, cookies, browsing history, recent-document lists, log files in the Recycle Bin, and a lot of other digital detritus. The utility can also be used to uninstall applications and scan for orphaned and unused Registry entries.
5. Lightning for Thunderbird: Lightning is a plug-in from Mozilla that combines Sunbird calendar program with Thunderbird’s e-mail features.
6. Foxit Reader: A much faster alternative to Adobe PDF Reader, and has more options for viewing, printing, and annotating PDFs. You can even use Foxit to fill out PDF forms.
7. Audacity: An open-source audio editor that supports .mp3, .wav, and other popular audio formats.
8. Wavosaur: A single executable file, making it easier to run from a USB drive, Wavosaur is another free audio-editing software. Note that you may need to download the free Lame Encoder .dll file to allow the program to export to the .mp3 format.
9. Pidgin: One client to rule all Instant Messaging protocols — AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, or another messaging network. This open-source IM client (formerly called “Gaim”) lets you communicate with users of all the above and a dozen other chat networks.