We’re still celebrating the world didn’t end last year, and to show you how happy we are, here’s our first 2013 present for you: Prey for Android now takes pictures of whoever steals your device. From now on, it doesn’t matter anymore if your desktop, laptop, tablet or phone gets stolen—as long as there’s a built-in camera on your device, you’ll see the bad guys’ faces.

But that’s not all the news! Prey for Android got much more handsome, it also features an Uninstallation Lock, and now gathers hardware information to help you identify your lost device in case it gets found. Some bugs were also fixed.

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After almost four years using Google Groups, we’re moving our community forums over to answers.preyproject.com.

As a mailing list, Google Groups works pretty well, but unfortunately it doesn’t have a way of organizing content, so it makes it hard to find what’s useful and that usually means duplicate duplicate topics.

Annoying, isn’t it?

To tackle these problems we built a new, simple forum platform from scratch with a clean user interface, focused on making it easy to find relevant content. All of the data has been migrated — and most of it categorized — so you can update your bookmarks and let us know what you think.

Here’s the introductory post: Welcome to the new support forum for Prey.

As you know, our mission is to make the best anti-theft solution out there (in other words, achieve world domination). And that requires people! We haven’t written much about the team behind Prey so we though it was time to show some of the faces of the people in charge of the battlestation.

Meet the newest members of the Prey team!

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As you know, recovering your stolen laptop or tablet is all about getting the right information on time, and of course, keeping a record of it. Chances are that if you ever lose sight of yours, it will probably happen while away from home — in a café, on the bus, on top the Empire State, who knows. Thing is, you need a quick way to trigger Prey into sending the device’s location while on the run. And that’s one of the things we’ve been working on.

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Just dropping a quick note to let you know about some updates regarding security and performance and awesomeness that we’ve made to the Control Panel.

Full HTTPS support

Until now, only the login and signup forms pointed to HTTPS endpoints — the rest of the site using plain HTTP. This was, in part, due to some of the assets being hosted on a non SSL-enabled domain, which caused browsers to complain about “insecure content”.

Well, not any more. The Control Panel is now fully HTTPS, from tip to end. Download links also begin with ‘https://’ as they should.

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Over time we’ve been getting an increasing number of emails from people who’ve managed to recover their laptops, tablets or phones thanks to Prey. The stories are really amazing (some of them simply out of this world!). So we’ve decided to create a new section on our website and put them all together in one place.

Of course, all of the stories are published with full permission from the owners, and without any kind of censorship or editing from our side (besides removing names and references to accurate locations). Additionally, we added a contact form for those who want to let us know about new stories, so it’s easier for us to put them together.

There’s still a load of stories that we need to process, but we already have a bunch of them for your reading pleasure. So hit the “Recoveries” link on the top and have a look!

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.

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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.

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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.

One of the biggest requests we had in our suggestion box was to develop a way to toggle the missing state of your laptop in an easier way. Lets face it — maybe you and me know what a URL is, but there’s no way your sister or your mom will.

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.

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