Sean Power from Ottawa went on a trip to New York City and had his laptop bag stolen along with his birth certificate, cell phone and cash. Fortunately, he had installed a security program called Prey onto his laptop that helped him get it back!

Prey allows you to log on and take snapshots of the person using the laptop and uploads them to your account. Sean then twitted to his followers on Twitter the IP address (still in the bar he had last seen it), along with the photo of the person using his laptop. Now don’t try this at home, but some of his followers happened to live in Soho New York and actually talked the man into giving them back Sean’s property after he realized they had his photo and that they would likely call the police.

Prey is a open source software, meaning it is free to use (there is a paid version with other options) and sounds like a good idea for all your expensive toys. There are other programs like this out there, but this one works on Mac, Windows and Linux.

Source: Toronto Star – Friday May 13, 2011