Adeona Warns of Instability; OpenDHT Mothballed

gbickford writes "Adeona, the first open source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop, was featured on Slashdot last year. I was stoked when I read about how it worked and I installed it immediately. I just went to look for updates on the site and was greeted with a giant warning message stating, 'Adeona is currently not working.' It seems that OpenDHT, the distributed hash table that stores the location information and photos, has been fairly unstable lately. The developers claim that this is "largely because the back-end OpenDHT system is not able to tolerate the load imposed by Adeona. OpenDHT removed the need for a centralized database with tracking information, which in effect prevents a 3rd party from tracking a user's whereabouts. OpenDHT was Sean Rhea's Ph.D. project back in 2005 and he has decided to officially bow out of maintaining it as of July 1st, which has left the developers of Adeona looking for another back end to store location information and photos. The source code for Adeona is available and they are actively seeking developer contributions on the developer's list. Do any developers have ideas on where to put scads of information in a free, reliable, anonymous, and secure manner?"

Freenet?

[evanbd]

Freenet [freenetproject.org] is an option that *might* meet your needs. Unfortunately, it won't work well unless you're willing to run a node a large fraction of the time (might be hard for a laptop). And that implies a nontrivial bandwidth and disk commitment.

Whether it's reliable enough is another matter. Data that isn't accessed at all will become unavailable after a week or three; shorter term than that, or for data that's accessed at least occasionally, reliability is quite good. Speed isn't exciting, but a few seconds (maybe 15-30 if you don't access at all, maybe a lot longer if it's almost but not quite completely gone) latency and a few kB/s should be plenty here.

On the plus side, it is Free, anonymous, and secure. Of course, all of Adeona switching to it might represent a rather larger load than it's ever seen before -- and would probably be disastrous if those nodes didn't have a decent uptime percentage.

Re:Realistic?

[Daengbo]

"Distributed hashing tables are a class of decentralized distributed systems that provide a lookup service similar to a hash table: (key, value) pairs are stored in the DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key." [1] [wikipedia.org]

They should look at Bamboo DHT [bamboo-dht.org].

Re:I don't know what they were thinking...

[asavage]

What I was thinking was just create a spreadsheet with Google docs. Google docs lets you create a webform to let anyone submit data to your spreadsheet. You could have your tracking software fill out the form with the IP address. The spreadsheet by default can only be viewed by your google account but it you want additional security, encrypt the entries.

Re:Adeona

[indiechild]

Something similar happened to my friend last year in London. Some scumbags got a copy of the key to his apartment -- most likely during an apartment inspection with the real estate agent. They swiped all 4 laptops in the apartment plus a few hundred in cash, but strangely enough left a bunch of digital cameras etc untouched.

My friend had Adeona installed on his MBP and managed to get a couple of good webcam captures of a suspect and IP address, which he sent to the cops. The cops weren't interested in recovering the stolen goods -- not enough police resources to devote to cases like this, apparently.

So much for that. I think it's almost better just to form your own P-P-P-Powerbook goon squad and go knocking heads once you've figured out a physical address for the IP.

Re:Adeona

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. I tried this on a newer model Dell laptop and it did clear the BIOS settings, all EXCEPT the password.

Laptop BIOS passwords are no longer stored in volatile storage, as far as I know. Clearing them probably requires reprogramming the chip on specialized hardware, or just replacing the whole BIOS chip itself.

Re:Google AppEngine

[CrashandDie]

Yup, exactly my thoughts. I've been using the AppEngine's Data Store for some time and can't complain. 1Gig of data isn't a lot, but it's cheap to get more. Just get people to donate and you'll have all the storage you need. Just write a simple class that will convert stored objects to XML and it's a done deal. For upload? Simple POST to one of the servlets

Oh, and for people who don't see how they could encrypt the data from Google: PKI.

If nobody needs to be able to access the data excepted for one person, where's the problem? What's the fuss all about?