This might work... unless the thief is smart enough to not boot it without wiping the hard drive first.

It's possible to install a rootkit as a hypervisor. So what if you installed such a rootkit which had this functionality on your own computer? It could track your laptop long after the thief reformats it, greatly increasing the chance that you'll eventually be able to track it down.

This has been around for some time now. Since it relies on OpenDHT, it has been really unstable and unreliable lately.

Yup, I'd wait for the next version. I tried it a few months back and it was far too flaky to rely on.

I had this installed, but it freaked me out when the camera-light on my macbook went on at random times. Hasn't happened again since I uninstalled it.

Thats because it was taking your picture, they say on their website that there is no way to take a picture without turning the light on. Rest assured, the picture and other data are encrypted with the credentials.ost file.

When I originally installed, I thought the pictures only would be taken if I reported it stolen. Apparently not.

Hey, Dropbox (and similar services): good optional feature to bundle in.

Rationale: I, and a few million others, may be too ignorant or lazy to separately install this 'just-in-case' application. But since I'm putting Dropbox on a few machines, I might as well enable this feature on the ones liable to grow legs and walk away.

Plus, besides making Dropbox/etc. more attractive, this might tie-in nicely for security - I think that, if my laptop were stolen, the thief would have my cookies, i.e automatic web access. It would be acceptable to have Dropbox demand new logins for new access IPs. Or even 'go dark' (have to be manually launched).