Don't steal my Mac

By William Entriken

1 minutes

Mac OS X 10.6 comes with CoreLocatation. Which is implemented as a command line program in CoreLocationCLI.

So… just

wget --spider "https://example.com/ping/devicename?$(~/Applications/CoreLocationCLI -once)" 2> /dev/null

in your crontab.

And put one of these on your server:

<?php
# URL like https://example.com/ping/devicename
$file = preg_replace('/[^a-z]/', '', $_SERVER['PATH_INFO']);
$info = preg_replace('/#<>/', '', urldecode($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']));
file_put_contents("cache/ping_$file", $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."\n$info\n");

RESULT: Computer phones home every few minutes to report it’s physical location.


Actually this came in handy. When I was kidnapped one day in Manila this helped with tracking. Randomly. They should have not opened my computer!

Comments

Do this on your iPhone too with information at

William Entriken

Please discuss this topic anywhere and let me know any great comments or media coverage I should link here.