Hey everyone, glad to be posting once again over here. It’s been a while since I hit the “New Post” button on this blog, and god it feels good. I just wanted to give you a quick heads up on what we’ve been up to these last few months.

Server (over)load

Ahoy! Yes, this has to be the number one on the list because with no doubt, it is the first and foremost reason why we’ve getting almost no sleep for the past months. If your reports ever got delayed — all appearing at once later — or if you ever received a “timeout error” or even got to see the infamous “fail feathers” on the Control Panel, well this is why. Scaling issues. And again. And again. And when we thought the battle was finally settled, yes, again.

And there we were, once again, up to 3 am in the morning fixing things to keep the servers running as usual.

We’ve dealt with complex setups in the past — on different projects here and there — but you must know that Prey is a whole different beast. The fact that there are hundreds of thousands of devices hitting the servers and posting data constantly, every single second, with huge (and I mean HUGE) spikes every 20 minutes poses a very singular challenge.

I’m not going to dive into the specifics about where our bottlenecks were or how we managed to fix them — that’s a topic for a future post –, but I can happily say that we finally managed to tame the beast. We made some big changes in our server infrastructure, optimized our report processing backend, tested and tuned the web servers, the app servers, the database cluster and even the Linux TCP/IP stack to our optimum settings, and of course, set up a real monitoring environment to ensure that everything keeps running smoothly. Even after whatever happens on 21/12/2012. :)

So that’s it — the timeout days are over. Next one!

Team getting bigger

As you know, for a very long time Prey was just me and Carlos (and before that it was simply me). However I’m very glad to tell you that our team is no longer a two-man-army but a — drumroll please — FOUR man army! Besides me and Carlos, Diego Morales has joined the team to help us on the business side of things, and a new member is just about to join as well. Diego’s been a tremendous addition to our team and we hope things will get better in the forthcoming weeks.

Welcome Diego!

And by the way, we also moved to a new office! We’ll send some pictures later once we get everything in place — now where IS that keg anyway? (Hehe, just kidding).

Developers, developers

Yes, developers. That’s what we are, after all, and that’s what we like to do. So I guess what makes me really glad right now is that, now that the battle is over, we’re finally back on track. Our code editors are open again and our hands are fully dedicated to builing new stuff for Prey — rather than only responding to support requests asking about the timeout issues!

We’re also in the process of moving all our code repositories to the Prey organization at Github.

There’s about 82 or 83 new things that we want to do and believe me, it’s difficult to choose where to start. But there’s a couple of things currently underway that we’ll be letting you guys know about in the following weeks. Hold on — why don’t we start right away?

iPhone version

Oh yes, Prey now runs on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches. Didn’t you see it? The awaited-for-longer-than-i-can-remember iOS version of Prey is no longer vaporware, it’s 100% realware and available for download at the App Store. There’s a bunch of things to know about the iOS version so we’ll be posting something new about it in a while.

In the meantime, check it out and let us know what you think! (And don’t forget to rate it as well).

By the way, I just remembered — we need to update the FAQ!

Control Panel updates

If you’ve logged in the last few weeks, then you should’ve noticed a few changes we’ve been making to the Control Panel. First of all we built a new page that consolidates all reports — yes, we heard you guys — making it easier to browse through them, and also having a much faster way to delete the ones which are of no use.

Additionally, we added a search input for Pro accounts which hold over 10 devices, so you don’t need to browse through the full list of devices to find the one you’re looking for.

Benvenuti nel Pannello di Controllo

(That stands for “Welcome to the Control Panel”, by the way).

It took a bit longer than expected but the work of our translations team has finally come to life. Thanks to the amazing work of over 10 people — guided by the great Benny Rodríguez from Spain, we can finally unveil five new languages for the Control Panel: Catalan, Turkish, Dutch, Russian and Italiano!

So if you’re in the land of spaghetti or the land of vodka and you don’t know english too well, there’s no need to pick up the dictionary any more. Hit your flag of choise at the upper right corner and boom! If you find out there’s a wrong translation, though, please let us know so we can fix it.

By the way, this has all been possible thanks for your constant support and feedback, and specially to the ones who’ve believed in us by upgrading to Pro. After all, the servers don’t pay themselves and we do need to have lunch, so thanks everyone and we hope to keep bringing you new stuff and improve our service day by day.

That’s it for now folks. Happy hunting!

• Response encryption: Prey now supports 128 bit AES decryption for response bodies, which means that all data sent by the Control Panel will be encrypted with a salted secret key, rending theoretical man-in-the-middle attacks impossible. We’ll be deploying this gradually during the next days!
• We also added a check to prevent malitious code execution through config values in the response XML. (Issue #85)
• Better way of knowing if On-Demand is still active or not, using timestamps from the keepalive pings sent by the server. This should fix the issue that prevented some users from switching back to Interval mode.
• Lots of code cleanups, removed duplicate or unused stuff. We’re also switching backticks for $() calls, which is much easier to read.
• Small improvements to the auto update process.
• Initial support for Prey to be run as a non-root user. On Ubuntu we were able to run as a third user with some sudo permissions. Once we get it working on Mac we’ll switch over and not run Prey as root any more (yes, we heard you guys).
• Support for SMTP servers which don’t require authentication. Simply leave the SMTP user/pass fields blank and you’re set. Passwords with spaces should also work.
• Added a simple SMTP user/pass verification routing in check mode (Standalone users).

That’s about it! For the full commit list check out the comparison view on Github. As always, any questions or comments are welcome.

Happy hunting!

Today is a good day for Prey users.

As you all know, one of the biggest differences between the PC and the Android version of Prey is about the way it’s activated. On PCs, Prey wakes up every X minutes and asks the server whether it should send a report or perform any actions. On Android phones, however, Prey doesn’t need to check as you can “push” that activation signal by sending an SMS message from another phone. In other words, while on phones you can locate your phone the very instant you want to, on PCs there’s always a lag that you need to wait for.

Turns out today we’re putting and end to that.

Prey 0.5 boasts a new “On Demand” mode which lets you request a report and trigger actions instantly from the Control Panel, even faster that you can say crack-a-lackin’. No kidding.

In brief

Prey Pro users can now switch between the current, default activation mode — which we call “On Interval” — to a shiny new “On Demand” mode. This allows you to send the activation signal instantly to desktops and laptops by pushing a button, without needing to wait for Prey to run on next interval.

On Demand works in Mac, Windows and Linux PCs and also Android phones, as it provides an alternative way to send the activation signal — one that doesn’t need sending an SMS (see below).

How it works (Mac, Windows and Linux)

When choosing the On Demand option for your laptop or desktop, the Control Panel will request Prey to open a secure TCP connection to an On Demand Hub, which is hooked directly onto Prey’s Control Panel. When connected, your device’s status will be updated and you’ll be able to send the activation signal. Your PC will no longer send requests to the server on intervals, as it will wait for the signal to be pushed from the Control Panel.

If the connection is broken — either because you turned off On Demand mode or the PC lost connection to the Internet — Prey will fall back to its normal way of operation, asking the server for its set of instructions on intervals. If the PC simply lost connection and then is back online — meaning you didn’t switch off On Demand –, then Prey will reestablish the connection to the Hub and you’ll be ready to dispatch your orders once again.

This also means that you’ll have immediate feedback on your device’s current network status. When connected, you’ll see a green light pop, which will show that your PC has established a connection and awaits your command. When not connected, you’ll see the regular “Last seen” info box from Active Mode. This way you’ll know exactly what’s going on with your PCs.

How it works on phones

Prey for Android version 0.5 supports Google’s Cloud To Device push messaging system, so Pro users can also send a one-time activation signal through the Control Panel, without needing to text the activation SMS from another phone. This also means that Prey 0.5 is ready to run on Android tablets that don’t have GSM/3G support (no cellular carrier but with Wifi support).

How to try On Demand

First of all, you’ll need to update to the latest version (currently 0.5.1). Secondly, you’ll need to show us your love and support by switching to a Pro account. :)

Now, when you enter your device’s administration page, you’ll now see a switch that will let you use On Demand activation. Toggle it and then click on the Save changes button. If the device you’re managing is a phone, you should immediately see a green button which will push the signal through Google’s Cloud To Device’s messaging system.

Now, if it’s a laptop or desktop PC, you’ll see a message stating “Waiting for connection”, which means that the Control Panel will ask for your PC to establish a connection next time it requests its set of instructions. Once that happens, you should see something similar to the above. That means you’re ready to roll.

On Demand vs On Interval

We don’t think On Demand should replace On Interval mode. They’re made to be complementary. On Demand lets you run actions or get reports exactly when you want to, but only when you want to. If you want to get report on an automated fashion — i.e. because you’re not there, perhaps because it’s 2 AM and you want to get some sleep — then it’s time to switch back to On Interval.

In other words, neither activation mode is better than the other — they’re simply different. Along with Active Mode, they work together as a team, as they provide a better way not only to keep track but also lock or secure your your assets using Prey’s built-in actions.

Now, the good thing about On Demand is that we designed the system to be bidirectional, rather than simply one-way. So, although we’re now using the connection only for pushing the activation signal to your PC, there’s lots of other things we can use it for, and some of them are already on the way.

Which ones? Come on, we wouldn’t want to spoil the party, would we? :)

When we launched Pro accounts, we included a new feature called Active Mode which lets you keep track of each of your laptop/desktop check-ins. It’s pretty useful. It lets you know when was the last time your PCs pinged the server, so you can know if they’re actually where they should be or not. Active Mode is automatically enabled on Pro accounts which means you only need to log into the Control Panel and take a look at the timestamps.

The only problems is that logging in is not automatic. And that’s not good.

In order to be truly useful, Active Mode should work on its own, without you needing to log in every time just to check if everything’s in place. And that’s exactly what we’ve done: we’ve redesigned the whole notifications system on Prey’s Control Panel to make it easier for you maintain. You can manage everything in one place and forget about checking in personally: Prey will simply keep you posted whenever something happens.

Take a look.

All for one, one for all

First of all, we’ve decided we put together all notification settings in one place. Previously if you wanted to enable or disable reports notifications, you needed to toggle the checkbox for each of your devices. Now, settings apply for all of them at once so there’s only one spot where you need to go.

Secondly, we added the option to enable/disable the “Hardware modified” email and more importantly, the “Device marked as missing” one. Lots of people asked for this and so here it is.

Active Mode notifications

There’s two new notifications Pro users can enable which greatly enhance Active Mode:

The first one, “Devices are not seen for”, sends you an email whenever one of your devices hasn’t checked in for a certain amount of time. Options are 12 hours, one day, three days or a week. This means that if a device hasn’t given any “signs of life” for more than, say, half a day (depending on the setting you choose), we’ll send you an email like the one on the right.

The second one, “Devices check in after”, is similar to the one above, only the other way around. Whenever a device sends a request after being away for a certain amount of time, you’ll get an email. Options are also 12 hours, one day, three days or a week. To see an example click on the image at the right.

So there you have it. We’ve been testing these notifications for a while and they’re pretty handy. To set them up, click on the new Settings link at the top menu and, while you’re at it, let us know what you think! If you have any ideas or suggestions we’d love to hear them.

About a year a half a little GPL laptop tracker was born. It was called Prey and it didn’t even work in Windows. Six months later, the Control Panel was launched, and some weeks later the first mobile client appeared. During this time, more than 800 commits from around about 20 developers were made, and there’s already support for all major OS’s, while new ones are on their way.

We’ve received some good attention on the media and nearly two million reports have already been gathered and sent to the Control Panel. The number of registered devices nearly tripled in the last five months, passing the 100.000 mark, and we’ve already needed to upgrade our servers exactly seven times. It’s really been a hell-of-a-ride and we’re more than amazed with the way things have unfolded.

Today we’re giving a new step towards making Prey not only better but also bigger.

We’ve been thinking about this for a long, long time, and we finally realized that you guys were right. There should be an easy way to track more than three devices with Prey. Yes, it’s time to get serious and to do things right. We’re launching today Pro accounts for the Control Panel, not only to help us cover the server costs an to invest in more infrastructure, but to insure a continuous development flow in order to keep making Prey what we all want. That is:

An open, free, robust, featureful and easy to use tracking solution for everyone.

In a few words

If you want to track 10, 20 50 or even a hundred devices using the Control Panel you can now upgrade to a Pro account and do so, forgetting about the three device limit. You’ll also get access to some cool features that will help you keep better track on your stuff, such as the new Active Mode.

The pricing model

We thought about this for quite a while. Initially we planned to charge a fixed fee for each additional device, so that you we’re billed for the exact amount of devices you needed. But after doing some maths we realized that this would end up being much more expensive in the long run, specially for the ones in need to track, say, a hundred devices.

Secondly, we figured that this would mean you’d need to log in and confirm your order each very time you wanted to add a new device. Too much hassle for no good reason.

So, we finally realized that a subscription model was the best way to go. You choose the size that fits best and simply pay as you go, avoiding costly upfront fees and remaining free to go whenever you want. We built different plans according to different sizes, dropping the price-per-device ratio as the amounts increase. The figure is quite simple and it looks like this.

We also included a 10% discount for yearly payments and optional discount codes for non profits and educational institutions. If you feel you’re eligible for one of them feel free to contact us. You probably will.

And basically that’s it. Once you set up your subscription you can freely install Prey on more devices and they will magically pop up under your account.

Now let’s head for the good stuff!

Hardware scanning

Prey 0.4 bundles a new core module called System, which as of today lets you to fetch your Mac or PC’s hardware information remotely from the Control Panel. This is specially useful for those cases in which your PC is recovered by the police, as they usually request your device’s Serial Number in order to verify that it actually belongs to you.

But that’s not all.

It turns out that not every time a PC is stolen in its entirety. Sometimes only a part of it is — mainly RAM — and actually these kind of thefts seem to be quite common.

To address this, we designed the hardware scan feature in a way in which you can know whenever something is modified since the last scan was performed. It’s really quite simple and you’ll get the hang of it in a minute. You just need to click on “Request new hardware scan” and Prey will perform a new scan and update your device’s information accordingly, and let you know immediately if something’s changed.

Currently the system module works in all PC OS’s (Mac, Linux, Windows) and you can see, it gathers the PC’s Serial Number, UUID, BIOS vendor and version, CPU model and speed (in MHz), and finally, the number of installed RAM modules and their total amount (in MBs).

And by the way, this feature applies to all Control Panel users, not only to Pro accounts. The only difference is that Pro accounts let you make it play even better thanks to…

Prey Active Mode

As the name implies, Pro accounts allows managing Prey’s behaviour in a different way. Normally it’s up to you to mark your PC as missing or trigger actions on it. In other words, Prey behaves in a passive way as it sits silently awaiting your command.

Active mode means Prey will also keep you informed on what’s happening with your stuff, and there’s two main ways in which this works. The first one is that the Control Panel will display the last time each of your devices “checked in”, and thus, make you aware of which of them are powered up and connected to the net and which of them are not.

The second way is, yes, you guessed right: hardware scanning.

As Active mode keeps better control on what’s happening with your PC’s, by setting the hardware scan feature Prey will automatically perform a daily scan on the device to check if something’s changed. This means you don’t need to request a new hardware scan by hand: Active mode will automatically take care of this for you.

Sounds good, right?

If you want to try it just create a new subscription and you’ll be set, since by default all Pro account devices work in Active mode. That’s it!

Ultra-fast frequency for reports and actions

Normally you can set the interval for Prey executions up to five minutes (which is quite fast, actually), but you never know when the moment will come and the points is to respond as quick as you can. That’s why Pro accounts will get an option to increase the interval up to two minutes. Click and boom, Prey spreads its wings.

Automated deployment

This is a really important issue, specially for the ones in need to track large amounts of PCs. We’ve been tweaking a lot the way Prey is set up, and we can now provide a way to deploy Prey automatically in multiple devices, without needing to mingle with the settings one by one.

In a few days we’ll be releasing a new set of installers (yes, we’re switching to PackageMaker in Mac) ready and tested for automated deployments, and we’ll put all the necessary documentation on the FAQ in order to get you going.

Revamped Control Panel

This is not really a feature and it applies to all users, not only the ones with Pro accounts. As you can see, the Prey website has been redesigned and so has the Control Panel. We made some major updates (and some small ones too) to make it even easier to track your devices with Prey. The changelog isn’t precisely “brief” so we decided to list what’s new on a separate post which you can read over here.

Hope you like it!

Looking forward

To be truthful, initially we (or I, should I say) never expected to get something in return for Prey (i.e. money), because the whole point was to have a free, open way to track your laptop. And though all the requests we received made us consider the Pro account option, it finally came down to what was necessary to keep the project moving forward, which is a) development hours, b) server resources and c) yes, bandwidth.

It took us a while, but we finally came to the conclusion that a stable income source would not only let us invest in better infrastructure, but also get more people involved in the project. And that means keeping in on track, and keep it growing steadily.

So, to put it in other words, Pro accounts are not only good news for you, but they’re also good news for us. Donations helped us a lot at the beginning, but nowadays we’re spending much more that what we’re getting out of them. We hope this will change things for good, so if you want to help us the best way is to upgrade to Pro account (and don’t forget to tell us how you like the new stuff we’ve been brewing!).

It’s been only a year a half but we’ve already made huge progress, and now I think the future looks brighter than ever. So thanks everyone for your support, for the constant feedback, for the bug reports, for everything.

Prey is more alive than ever and that’s only thanks to you. And I mean it.

It’s been over a year since we launched the Control Panel and it was about time we made some changes. During the past months we’ve been noticing which things work and which needed to be looked at, thanks to the constant feedback we’ve received from you guys.

So, first of all, thanks everyone!

Here’s a brief list of changes we’ve made to the Prey Control Panel, which hopefully will make it easier for you to manage Prey and keep an eye on what’s going on with your stuff.

Here we go.

To the left, not to the right

This is probably the first thing you’ll notice when visiting the new version of the Panel. We used to align everything to the right — honestly, out of no reason in particular — and though it looked good, that didn’t necessarily mean it also worked good. We were constantly battling with alignments, keeping stuff into position and, you know, trying to make the thing look not-so-awful in IE.

So we decided to turn things around and follow the logical way of reading, which makes it work a bit better while also keeping the structure more in place.

New grid view

This is a cool new feature. You can now watch your devices in grid mode in addition to the traditional list, which not only lets you capture them all in a glance, but also allows you to filter and sort them either by their status or their names, among other things.

This feature is currently disabled for Internet Explorer as the rendering speed is really lousy (sorry guys) and we still need to figure out how to make it work better. Everyone else will enjoy it, as it works really good.

Tabs for keeping better tabs

First of all, we separated the different sections of the device management page into tabs, so you can find much faster what you’re looking for. We also renamed the “Update” button to “Save changes” as it makes much more sense, and we also added a second one at the top so you don’t need to scroll the whole way down to apply your new settings.

SSL support, at last

As promised, all forms which handle passwords on the Control Panel are processed through SSL (e.g. login, signup, profile). So, having that the signups from the installers are now also handled through SSL, this means your user info will never again fly in the wild. This makes us much more comfortable when logging in and out of the Panel and probably you will, too.

No more language switching

Yes, it’s gone. We finally seemed to catch the inglorious bugstard that was causing the Control Panel to randomly switch to a different language without your request — although it was quite a funny bug in our opinion, hehe. The Control Panel will now also check your browser’s HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE header so in most cases your language will be automatically selected if there’s a localization available.

From our tests the bug is no longer there, but please let us know if you see any funny behaviour again.

Different colours for buttons

Small one but important nevertheless. Some of you told us sometimes you’d accidentally remove a device when you actually wanted to add a new one, because of the fact all the buttons were orange. Well, not any more.

And that’s about it! Next time you log in you’ll see all these changes (hit Ctrl+R to reload the files in case it looks weird), and you’ll also notice small differences here and there that hopefully will make your life easier.

We hope you like the new look of Prey’s Control Panel and hope it works for you as it works for us. Happy hunting!

This time it’s the Control Panel’s turn. We’ve heard all of your requests and that’s why we decided to take a while and polish all the rough edges, to add new features and thus make it easier for you to manage Prey and track your computers for when the time comes.

‘Nuff said. Let’s start from, well, from the beginning, shall we?

1. Forgot/reset my password

Having trouble remembering your password? Fear no more!

2. OK/Unverified devices

This looks like the normal welcome page of the Control Panel, right? Well, look again closely. You’ll notice that the second device reads “Unverified” below its title. That’s because we added states for devices, which will make it easier for you (and us) to know when a device is properly set up or not.

Basically, when you add a new device in your Control Panel, it will default to an “unverified” state, which won’t allow marking the device as missing until the link is actually verified. Whenever the server gets a request from the device (meaning it was correctly configured) it will switch to “ok” and then you’ll be able to activate Prey. This way you won’t have to test the configuration by trying to activate Prey: the Control Panel will simply tell you if it is!

3. Module fine-tuning + new Alarm module

Yup, that’s right. Now you can fine-tune the different modules by changing each of their settings directly in the Control Panel, not having to edit the config files by hand in your computer.

if you look closely your eyes will tell you that there’s another module in there, and you can believe them alright. We just added an Alarm module which allows you to trigger a loud sound on the computer for 30 seconds, which may help you find your computer if it is located nearby. We advice you, though: be careful with this one!

4. Better reports, brighter pictures too

Reports now render all the information — we like to call them traces — collected on the computer. This means you should now see, depending on the active modules, the internal (private) IP address of the missing device, its MAC address, its current uptime, the list of active connections, and so and so on.

This is not noticeable on a first look but it surely is important. Now the Control Panel post-processes dark images so you’ll have a better chance of knowing who’s behind your computer if the picture is taken at night or in a dark room.

5. IE support

We’re not that fond of IE — to be truthful, we have bad dreams about it –, but since we’ve gotten a lot of requests to have better support for IE, we decided to hack our CSS and make it look good better on Microsoft’s browser.

For now the official supported version is IE7 (IE6 people it’s time to upgrade!), but IE8 should render just fine. Any comments please let us know on the mailing list.

There’s also been some minor interface improvements here and there, which will make the site look a bit slicker on others browsers too.

6. New translation system

We also worked out a new system for managing translations in an easier way. This will allow to make translations available faster, thanks to the work of the amazing people who have offered their help. We’re very excited to have this finally out, since there’s a lot of different languages on the way!

By the way, to everyone who have contacted us regarding translations, sorry for taking so long but we’re finally ready!

7. Bigger, bolder server

Yes, Prey has lived only for a couple of months on its current home, but it was already time to make room for more growth. In fact, just today we passed the 200.000 report mark! You shouldn’t have noticed the change (everything was done real smooth), but if you experienced any glitches during the migration process please let us know so we can handle it better next time.

That’s all for now. Hope you enjoy the updates on the Control Panel. As always, suggestions are most welcome, and as always, thanks everyone for the help and the constant feedback. More news to come soon!

At last!

We’ve finally completed the migration to what will be our home for the next months: our own VPS for the control panel and website. This means we won’t get any more 500 errors because of server overload, and in general the service will work faster, leaner and meaner.

This wouldn’t have been possible without the contribution of several different people who kindly made a donation to our Paypal account. However our current funds are still very low so if you would like to give us a hand please make a contribution. Any amount will be appreciated.

By the way, our VPS provider (Linode.com) allows for referral codes on account signup. So if you’re in need of a good hosting solution, we recommend you try a Linode VPS, their machines are great and the prices are even better. If you do so please enter this code when signing up: e3a20152e86710707df51cb16484a6ab66a493dc (you can also use this link). We’ll get a $20 discount!

Thanks again everyone who made this possible. Thanks for letting Prey keep growing.

Being still in early stages, we had thought that this new service would start off slowly but things have been quite different: we’ve already passed the 1000 user mark! Best of all, it seems to be working really good and it keeps to grow steadily, so we’re very pleased with how things are working out. So big thanks to everyone.

Now, as you may imagine, the control panel does get some load (after all it’s being constantly hit by requests from Prey in devices all over the world), so we decided to take some precautionary measures to reduce the server load, and make sure it keeps up and running as a rock. Most of the stuff you won’t even notice (it’s mainly got to do with caching), but there’s one which you will, and that is that devices will hold a maximum of 10 reports from now on.

Basically nothing happens until you reach your 10-report limit. But if you do, new reports that arrive will “push” the old ones out, deleting the oldest records as well as their associated files.

Being a free service, we simply cannot offer an unlimited amount of record-keeping for devices and certainly not unlimited storage (for your screenshots and webcam snapshots). In fact, with how things are going we’ll probably have to upgrade soon to a bigger server! Anyway, we think that 10 reports is a good number, and probably more than enough to keep track of your computer (heck, probably with just two or three reports you’d be able to catch the guy!).

We’ve also received some requests to raise the maximum number of registered devices on the control panel, but for the same reasons as above we’ll have to say no for the moment. Now, what we are indeed figuring out is whether or not to enable some kind of premium (payed) accounts, that allow registering more devices on the control panel (and perhaps access to more features). We still haven’t made out our minds on this, so we would love to hear your opinions to have a better view of things (through the mailing list please!).

Anyway, you must know that if we do enable premium accounts, we will still (always!) have free accounts for everyone (with a limit, but free as in beer). And of course, needless to say, Prey will be open source software for the rest of eternity. That, you don’t have to worry about.

So basically our idea was to build a one-click way of activating Prey remotely, something simple yet useful, and not only for experienced hackers but to everyone.

So as we say in Chile, “pusimos manos a la obra”, and not only did we accomplish our task but we decided to go a bit further.

While we were developing the web thingy we realized we not only could tell Prey to wake up, but also trigger certain actions/modules in spite of the fact that Prey itself had become a modular piece of software!

In other words, this means that besides activating Prey, you can use the control panel to activate or deactivate different modules in Prey, and also to configure certain things remotely — for instance, changing the delay between intervals which is a really nice thing.

It’s important to note that Prey can still be used as before in a standalone fashion (i.e. not connected to the control panel), but in this case you’ll have to set up the URL yourself, and well, you won’t have the niceties like the remote configuration or function triggering.

So what are you waiting for? Go check the new control panel and tell us what you think!