CANADA ABSOLUTE SOFTWARE STOLEN COMPUTER TRACKING SOFTWARE MAKES AN IMPACTGlobetechnology
Now there's an electronic lock for your laptop

By SIMON AVERY
From Thursday's Globe and Mail

Louis de Bernières, the best-selling author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, had been working on a new novel intermittently for 30 years when the unthinkable happened. Someone broke into his summerhouse and stole the notebook computer containing the first chapters.

In August, the writer offered a £1,000 ($2,216) reward to try to retrieve the laptop and the first 50 pages of A Partisan's Daughter and then sat down to rewrite the chapters. Absolute Software Corp. says it could have saved Mr. de Bernières and the thousands of other people who lost portable computers this year stress and worry if they had subscribed to its theft recovery service.

The Vancouver-based company sells a tiny piece of software that installs on a computer and runs silently in the background, regularly communicating its location to Absolute Software's monitoring centre without alerting the user. If the computer is stolen, the company uses information to locate the device and then works with local police to get subpoenas and warrants issued to recover the computer.

The communication channel opens every time a user goes on-line, whether through a dial-up modem, or an Ethernet or wireless connection. Ben Haidri, vice-president of marketing for Absolute Software, says 70 per cent of stolen devices are reconnected to a network within a week of the theft.

The company has just hit a milestone, recovering its 1,000th computer since launching the service in 1996, he says. Absolute Software is so confident it can track and recover lost property that it recently launched a service for consumers that guarantees to pay them up to $1,000 if it can't find their computers within 30 days. Absolute says it has had to pay out in “less than 10 per cent” of the recovery cases it has handled.

Software security products such as Absolute Software's Computrace or Boston-based ZTrace Technologies' ZControl and ZTrace Gold are becoming increasingly popular — especially since manufacturers are now selling more notebook computers than desktop models. Absolute Software, for example, has more than 300,000 individual, corporate and government customers who pay between $100 and $129 for a three-year subscription to its tracking service. Sales increased to $7.6-million in the fiscal year ended June 30, up 14 per cent from a year earlier.

Not only is the tracking software very small and difficult to detect, it's also extremely difficult to remove, even if the hard drive is wiped. About 98 per cent of corporate customers never tell their employees that the product is installed, Mr. Haidri says.

For corporate customers, Absolute Software also offers remote data deletion capabilities. It can send a command to a missing notebook telling it to erase sensitive information to stop it getting into the wrong hands.

The company says its technology is just part of what has contributed to the success of Computrace. Thieves move stolen computer equipment quickly using on-line auction sites or pawn shops, so it's essential that Absolute Software work with many local law enforcement agencies once it locates a missing device. The company says it has a recovery team of experienced former law enforcement personnel who know how to get the necessary warrants and work efficiently with local police. Mr. Haidri claims that Absolute Software has never been denied a warrant.

The company also says it has good relationships with about 80 Internet service providers across North America. Although ISPs are legally required to provide information about their clients if subpoenaed, how quickly they pull it together depends on effective relationships and simple requests that fit a format ISPs are accustomed to dealing with, Mr. Haidri says.