Back to My Mac saves a stolen laptop

it is cool that back to my mac let you spy on your stolen notebook, but will it be so uncool if the thief know mac well, and use back to my mac to hack back to your desktop at home?? of course you can immediately unregister your notebook .mac from your desktop (though i don't sure if it only unregister .mac sync, or do it also deactivate back to my mac), but you can't track down the thief anymore.

sounds like anti-thief solution like Undercover is better

If a thief steals your computer and you require a password to log into your account, he's probably going to just reformat it.

Additionally, if you've got a MacBook with the wifi issues, this isn't gonna work unless the thief actually plugs into a network.

And, of course, if you're not set to accept DHCP on that wired net, you're still screwed, unless you both happen to have the same subnet in your network, etc.

Lucky user. We found the police to be less than helpful in a similar situation. One of the members from the MacWichita User Group had their car broken into recently. In the break-in the woman's purse was stolen, which had their iPhone. AT&T was called and they disabled the cell phone functions on the iPhone and she purchased a new iPhone. (AT&T made her start a new 2 year contract for some reason, but that's a whole different thread).

Shortly after this time, she started getting bounced e-mails. These were being sent from her iPhone using the thief's wireless Internet connection. The headers showed the IP address as being in the Cox network (local cable modem provider). The police wouldn't even consider submitting a subpoena to Cox to get the identity of the thief because apparently, "even people that commit crimes have a right to privacy" or some garbage like that.

Needless to say, she was a little ticked that even with such a direct lead (the stolen device was connected to this wireless access point right here), they wouldn't pursue it. Grrrrr......

Not sure "burglarized" is the word you're looking for. A house gets burgled not burglarized I'm afraid.

I too have never gotten BtmM to work. I even had trouble getting iChat screen sharing to work, though I did finally manage to get it to behave while the two Macs were on the same subnet. Apple's routing techniques are just not robust, which is but one of the many things they are going to have to fix if they are truly trying to move into Enterprise. Right now several of their touted features are hobbyist only.

This would never help me. I have my laptop set to always require a password upon boot or wake from sleep.

I think the new name for this feature should be "Give me Back My Mac".

I guess the perps were stupid enough not to notice that a green light means the iSight camera IS ON!

I get BTMM working just fine at home. At a wi-fi powered coffee shop, it did not work, but it might be that my home iMac was sleeping. I'll check again this weekend.

A similar incident happened here in Vancouver a few months ago. The owner had settings that automatically uploaded their photobooth pictures to Flickr.

http://www.switched.com/2007/09/27/stolen-laptop-self-uploads-photo-of-suspect-to-web/

a month or so back on here, there was instructions so that you could launch a automator workflow via a special coded email. i have set that up so if i send a code to my email address then it will launch a workflow which takes a snapshot then creates a new mail message and sends it. a much better (and free) way of doing it.