For all that discussion, some folks prefer to have stuff shipped to their own accounts (like David); others (like me) don’t mind a centralized resource handling the collection.

The report on Orbicule’s security flaw dates from Jan. 2006 in one commenter’s note. I hope that commenter doesn’t work for a rival firm and is trying to cast aspersions on a firm. Three years is a long time to learn lessons!

@David:

“@Glenn: Thanks! Didn’t realize they were at Macworld. Should have tracked them down (no pun intended… okay, maybe intended a little bit).”

They were in a very tiny booth! 1/4 of one south of the Apple booth in a pavilion.

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http://blogs.23.nu/c0re/2006/01/antville-11058/

Some of these issues have been fixed I am sure, but for a company to launch a product like that is irresponsible. I don’t like that they can activate my camera and images go to them. I think the Mac Track product addresses this issue, but I wish they had a trial version so I could test it first. Anyone had experience with it?

I had Adeona installed on my MBA for a while, but then discovered it did not work as there are issues with the Open DHT servers etc.

Right now I just use File Vault and keep my MBA close to me at all times.

I checked out Orbicule and MacTrak at the show. MacTrak was actually recommended by Zack Smith during the laptop theft presentation. The key differences I found are first of all MacTrak has the wi-fi positioning right now. They are the first to implement it and looks like Orbicule is playing catch up and won’t have it until next month anyway. Another HUGE difference is that the MacTrak product goes to YOUR email and YOUR Flickr account. The Orbicule product sends photos and your location to their server in Belgium or wherever. This is not cool. They can activate your camera and take photos of you and get your location from their monitoring center. The MacTrak folks were pretty clear about their privacy safe component at their booth as this is a core part of their design, that they do not have access to your location, images or network data and your computer sends it to both your email and Flickr account. I guess LoJack works the same way where they can track your location and even have access to your files.

I liked Crashplan as well, another cool thing is that you have the choice of where you want to have your data backed up, either to a remote server, a friends server, another system on your network etc.

For the super security conscious there was Checkpoint, they have really cool whole disk encryption which is probably the easiest to deploy on large networks I have seen for the Mac, really cool and knowledgeable guys at their booth as well.

See you in Dubai!