Re: Dave Clark comments on prey

[A.Lizard]

At 05:07 AM 7/5/2009, you wrote:

>== 2 of 2 ==
>Date: Sat, Jul 4 2009 2:51 pm
>From: Dave Clark
>
>
>Well, the comments below by A.Lizard look helpful, but I have the
>following concerns.
>On Jul 4, 2009, at 2:00 PM, A.Lizard wrote:
>
> >
> > At 06:18 AM 7/4/2009, you wrote:
> > Prey is a work in progress. It's got some great ideas.
> >
> > However, don't trust it in it's present form to provide anti-theft
> > services until AFTER you have:
> > 1. installed and set up prey
>
>I can't even tell if Prey is installed on my MacBookPro, which is only
>4+ months old and updated to OS X 10.5.7. Prey's installer.app shows
>up as a volume, but that's about it.
> > 2. created a guest account (my netbook has a modified login screen
> > telling 'guests' the UID and PW...) also helpful if you want to loan
> > someone your netbook on purpose). The "nologin automatic guest
> > account" creation is ... not implemented yet.
>
>I have only the vaguest idea what this all means.

Remember, a person who finds your netbook or steals it isn't going to have your
UID/password. So how does he log on so prey can run and give you his
location? The intended
solution is for prey to automatically create a 'no login' guest
account, but that''s not ready
yet. What I did is to create an ordinary guest account with a UID and
PW of guest, then I modified
the login splash screen image to tell 'guest' users, legit and
otherwise that info.

> I believe I know
>how to do the guest account on the Mac, but not on my Dell Mini
>running Ubuntu. Candidly, I'm just a dumb-ass lawyer and the Dummies
>books had me in mind.

look in the system apps for a user account app. If you're running
KDE, use Kuser. Create an
account with guest as user name and guest as password.

> > 3. created the "my laptop is stolen web page" (or implemented one of
> > the alternate methods of telling prey the laptop has been stolen)
>
>Read this on the Prey website, so I entered my dog's facebook page/
>username (http://facebook.com/kenji.inu/), but don't know how to
>change it in Prey to something else if I want.

there's a file named config in the prey directory.
/usr/share/prey
in Linux, maybe it's in the same place in OSX.
Use a text editor as root to edit it.

> Can I do so by re-
>installing Prey, or will that screw everything up?.
> > 4. temporarily turned off security on your wireless router
>
>What wireless router, when and under what circumstances? At home, on
>the Mac, or where?
> > 5. opened your guest account with prey running
>
>As noted, I cannot tell if Prey is even installed and/or running.

you should have a process manager or something in your menus, see if
the prey process is listed.
If not, drop to a terminal and type
$ ps -a
at the prompt.

However, if you have the "theft report" webpage up and it isn't
sending out e-mails, at the very least
it isn't working properly.

> > 6. NOT connected it to your wireless access point (one of the points
> > of the software is that it's supposed to connect to the most easily
> > available open WAP available)
>
>Don't understand what this means.

normally, your system will connect to whatever wireless access point
you set it up to connect to. You can't figure that an unauthorized
user will know how to set it up, so prey has to find and connect to
it all by itself. Which doesn't work yet on the Linux version

> > 7. received an e-mail with the tracking information
> >
> > The latest alpha test development version available via Tomas's git
> > repository (if you don't know what a git version control repository
> > is, you don't need to as an end user) fails at 6/7 on Linux. I don't
> > know about how it's working or not working on Win/OSX. If anyone has
> > got it to 7 on Windows or OSX, please let the rest of us know, that
> > means it's a workable solution.
>
>This sounds ominous. I saw nothing on Prey's website to indicate it
>was a beta. Or is Open Source something like "perpetual" beta?

The problems with the distributed version were severe enough that I
looked for the
developer site to see if early alpha versions were available and to
see if I could discuss
the problems with the developer.

Whether or not a project is Open Source or not has nothing to do with
its being a beta or
not.

http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html
>If you like open source development, you'll love Mac OS X. This
>fully-conformant UNIX operating system?built on Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5?

FreeBSD 5 *is* OpenSource,

>bundles over a hundred of the most popular Open Source products. You
>can shell out with bash, tcsh, ksh, and zsh; edit your code with
>emacs, vim, and nano; and build your projects using gcc, make, and autoconf.
and every OpenSource software package mentioned on that list can be
considered mature.

> >
> > I'm working with him with respect to getting the Linux version
> > working.
> >
> > A.Lizard
> >
> >
>
>Really appreciate your efforts. Keep up the good work.

I want to use the prey software, too.

A.Lizard

> >> == 1 of 2 ==
> >> Date: Fri, Jul 3 2009 7:58 am
> >> From: Dave Clark
> >>
> >>
> >> Y'all might take a look at this (I know nothing about it, but someone
> >> on one of my Mac-lawyer groups referred to it):
> >>
> >> http://preyproject.com/#download
> >>
> >> Any info or reports on this would be gratefully received.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Dave Clark
> >> www.clarklawfirm.com
> >> http://daveclarkimages.smugmug.com
> >> http://twitter.com/dave30c
> >

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[Dave Clark]

I really do appreciate A.Lizard's comments and suggestions, but nearly
all of them are just lost on me. While I was able to verify that this
MacBookPro has a "guest" account -- which does not require a PW to log
in, all the rest of what he writes I don't understand or know what to
do with it.

For the moment I'm going to abandon this effort. While the developers
of Prey may believe they've got a good product and maybe they do, it's
not worth anything to me if I can't figure out how to use it. My
Email to the developer (tomas...@gmail.com - the support point) has
been ignored with no response, and despite A. Lizard's efforts I'm
still lost in the wilderness of computer geek-dom and jargon.

Too bad about that.

Dave

[TheJoe]

i have to ask it.. are you a troll?

i downloaded and installed prey in few minutes and it worked great. What's your problem with it? You can contact the developer from the contact form in theyr site, they answered me in a couple of hours. Anyway feel free to contact me, maybe i could be a help.

Joe

2009/7/6 Dave Clark <dc1...@gmail.com>

[cl...@tobola.com]

Dave wrote

> I can't even tell if Prey is installed on my MacBookPro, which is only
> 4+ months old and updated to OS X 10.5.7. Prey's installer.app shows
> up as a volume, but that's about it.

Did you actually open that volume and run the installer?

In most cases, you need to:
1. Download the dmg file.
2. Run that file to create a "virtual disk" (shows up as a volume on your
computer)
3. Open the "virtual disk) and run the installer you inside that volume.

Maybe you didn't do this last step?

-c

[Dave Clark]

My responses as follows:

On Jul 6, 2009, at 7:59 AM, TheJoe wrote:

> i have to ask it.. are you a troll?
>

No, I am just trying to use the program. In the past year I have
sustained THREE stolen MacBookPro laptops, so I'm a bit paranoid about
security.

Thanks for the offer of help and I may contact you.

Dave Clark

[TheJoe]

ok, nice to kno it.. XD

anyway the program is really easy.. i'll wait for your contact soon. Bye

2009/7/6 Dave Clark <dc1...@gmail.com>