My laptop got stolen, luckily I had
Undercover installed and got it back. Highly recommended.
That is a very impressive presentation on their site. Does anybody else use this service?
Trying to track IP addresses is futile. They can easily be faked with proxy servers.
Most computer thefts are not by criminals who are especially computer savvy.
At least here in Finland it requires a court order when the Police is tracking down people who download illegally. This also means that the police must have enough evidence to show that the person who is using that IP address has something to do with the crime, so court can order the ISP to reveal the user of that IP address.
The worst case scenario is that it has already been sold and is in another state/country. It gets too tricky to catch the suspect if it requires cooperation between two countries and police departments. A single theft isn't enough to make it worthwhile to catch the guy
It is far less likely that a computer stolen in the USA has been moved to another country, for a number of reasons not the least of which is that the USA is large enough that the thief is going to think he is hiding in a huge territorial space. When you add to that the fact that most computer thefts are by people who were not really looking for computers in the first place (it's usually a theft of opportunity), it is not impossible to recover a stolen computer, assuming a few facts.
The biggest fact we have to assume is that there is a dedicated professional assigned to the case related to the computer theft. This is a lot to assume in many large metro locations, but in most police forces in the USA it will not be that hard to find an interested professional. Considering that the cheapest MacBook Pro is still over $1,000, it could very well amount to the first felony conviction for a young officer learning the ropes, and the jurisdiction will probably be interested in helping him with his first felony conviction.
(In the UK and Canada, a felony is the equivalent of what you call an "indictable offence;" in other words, something that society considers serious enough to get the Crown's attention.)
As far as needing a court order, it will be required if they want the provider's logs and information related to the service. However, inasmuch as the owner of the stolen computer has given permission to track his device, whatever IP address to which the computer has connected can be used for tracking without getting a court order, or while a court order is being obtained.
Even if the jurisdiction feel that a court order be necessary, there is undoubtedly a magisterial service in most jurisdictions dedicated to and prepared for cases like this, and on presentation of appropriate evidence that the device being used is stolen, the order will be granted rather speedily. Here in Virginia, it is certainly easy for CID to get an order on presentation of evidence from the lawful owner that the device is stolen.
My brother's iMac was stolen in NYC. After it was stollen, someone turned it on and it automatically logged into iChat. I noticed him online one day and got the IP address he was connected from.
NYC is large enough they have a computer crimes division - got them the IP address, they contacted Cablevision, got the address of the customer and retrieved the computer. Once we got them the IP they jumped on it - he had the computer back a couple days later.
This is a good example of both how quickly a jurisdiction can move when you get somebody's attention, and how uneducated to the computer world is the average computer thief. I hope that everybody's experience is as good.
IP addresses dont always prove where the computer is. Many people connect to free serveres all over the world to 'trick' people into thinking they are somewhere else. Normally while they are downloading torrent files. Or if they are getting around blocked sites in uni (ive done this, its easy). It doesn't completely hide the computers real IP but makes it harder to find/proove.
While it is still possible to trace its extremely unlickely the police will spend the time doing this.
Everybody who uses a proxy service isn't performing illegal activities. The legitimate reason for proxies to exist is a fear of data mining and data theft, on the part of criminals and overly enthusiastic Web sites looking for ways to make easy, better money.
I do not bother with a proxy service when logging onto MacRumors because it seems to be a small, private company. You can bet your bottom dollar that if I am logging into a vBulletin site that is owned by Internet Brands, however (and being the administrator of their largest single concern), I am only going to connect through a good proxy with security quite high.
Data mining is getting ridiculous. If you're not careful (especially on Windows machines), you can find yourself with an invisible, persistent cookie that is sending all kinds of information you'd be astonished to learn about. Hard to get rid of these things once you let them in...you will have a hard time even finding them.
So...anyway...there's a legitimate reason to be paranoid enough to want to run a proxy. Most proxies are going to be slower than your regular broadband connection, and many people will give up on using a proxy 100% of the time, but there's still a good reason to be cautious.
