Catch that thief!

This seems like a compelling application for anyone with a costly MacBook laptop – it’s named Undercover and for $49 a year provides a decent chance of not just catching the thief of your laptop but also, probably more importantly, recovering your laptop and all the data resident thereon.

It’s a software service which is loaded on your MacBook laptop which, if stolen, transmits screenshots of what the thief is doing and sends his picture to law enforcement using the built in camera. All Macs except the Mini now have a built in iSight camera. The thief’s IP address is also recorded when he logs in to the Internet and allows the cops to locate him easily.

The next best thing to loading your laptop with some C4 for remote detonation.

Of course I am fighting the urge to point out that this does not work on Windows laptops for a reason, but I won’t go there. Just take a look at Microsoft’s latest exercise in incredibly poor taste and you will see why no one should care if a Windows laptop is pinched. Purportedly an advertisement for Internet Explorer, this really does confirm that MSFT needs to address changes at the CEO level.

Full disclosure: I never let my disgust with MSFT’s products interfere with investment policy and I do own their 6/01/2019 4.2% corporate bonds. Even Ballmer can’t screw up $22bn of annual free cash flow to service a few billion in senior secured debt interest. The bonds were issued to finance the idiotically overpriced acquisition of Yahoo at $30bn which, of course, failed, much to the relief of MSFT’s shareholders. Yahoo’s market value today is now half of that bid and falling. Still, I suppose those same shareholders can take comfort in the knowledge that there is (or rather, was) a dumber CEO than Ballmer – Jerry Yang at Yahoo.