Geek Gestalt

SEATTLE--Imagine your laptop is stolen.

Set aside for a second the likelihood that if it was you wouldn't be able to read this story and think instead about how you might go about tracking it down.

There are existing services, such as LoJack, that are designed to help find purloined laptops by identifying the IP addresses where they are subsequently used and through other assorted methods.

(Credit: Adeona, a project being run out of the Computer Science department at the University of Washington, aims to give people a way to track stolen laptops while also providing the kind of privacy that commercial services may not offer.)

But according to a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington, the price you pay for utilizing such services is a loss of privacy--as well as a reliance on a corporate third party to take care of you.

That's why the team has come up with its own alternative, which it is calling Adeona, the name for the Roman goddess of safe returns.

The idea behind Adeona, according to Tadayoshi Kohno and Gabriel Maganis, who gave a talk about the project at the Gnomedex conference here Saturday, is to give people a method for safeguarding their laptops that relies neither on proprietary commercial software nor the centralized servers of the companies that provide such software.

Adeona, they said, is the world's first free, open-source laptop-tracking system, and one that can be installed by users themselves, and which doesn't require a corporate intermediary.

The team is also developing a version of its software for iPhones, though it isn't ready for public use yet.

To Kohno, the danger associated with commercial laptop-tracking services is that it's never possible to know for sure that someone at a company that makes such software wouldn't exploit the company's possession of your personal information--and access to what's on your laptop--for personal gain. Or, he said, that information could be subpoenaed in court cases.

Tech journalist and author Sarah Lacy listens to a question from a Gnomedex participant during her presentation at the Seattle conference Saturday.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

SEATTLE--Since there is significant attendee crossover between the Gnomedex conference here and the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, it's safe to say that when Sarah Lacy took the stage Saturday, a lot of the audience had some pretty strong memories of the last time they'd seen her.

Last March, it was Lacy whose SXSW keynote interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ended up in a Twitter-fueled mutiny by the audience. Many on hand in Austin had felt she conducted that session in an overtly flirty and self-promotional style that left little room for participation from a crowd eager to interact with the young billionaire.

With that recent history, then, the packed house on hand for Lacy's Gnomedex talk Saturday, "What happens when you get what you want: The growing blogosphere angst," was keyed up and wondering what kind of fireworks might erupt this time around.

And fireworks there were, though they came from uber-blogger Robert Scoble, who at one point during the session oddly got up out of his seat near the front of the auditorium and marched toward the back of the room to tensely confront author and entrepreneur Geoff Livingston.

But more on that later.

During his talk at Gnomedex in Seattle on Friday, I Can Has Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh discussed the history of the site, and some of the lessons learned as it has become one of the largest communities online.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

SEATTLE--How does one build an empire on pictures of cats with silly, misspelled captions?

As most fans of the Internet now know, I Can Has Cheezburger has become one of the most popular sites online. Its daily collection of LOLCats is the source of endless humor, and you can be pretty sure that someone in your office is reading the site and chuckling to themselves right now.

But how did it happen?

At the Gnomedex conference here Friday, I Can Has Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh talked about the genesis of the site, and some of the milestones it has gone through as it has become not only a household name but the vanguard--if not the originator--of one of the most popular memes ever to hit cyberspace.

To Huh, the "Lolean Timescale" started several years ago, back when LOLCats were a much edgier phenomenon. Back then, a LOLCat was as likely to have a snarky, sexual theme as not. You may remember the famous, "Ceiling cat is watching you masturbate" LOLCat that began to make its way across the Internet a couple of years ago.

SEATTLE--If you've ever wanted to hand control of your life off for a day, let me recommend putting it in the safe care of iPhone applications.

That's what I did Thursday, a day for which the plan I had originally made fell through.

During a day in Seattle, CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman used a series of iPhone applications to direct what he did. Click on the above image to see the photo gallery.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

So, late on Wednesday night, as I was pondering what to with myself here Thursday--I'm in town for the Gnomedex conference, which begins Friday--I started thinking about my brand-new iPhone 3G and all the applications I've heard you can get.

And it occurred to me that it could be quite an experiment to turn my day over to the direction exclusively of some of those apps. I already had downloaded a couple, but as I looked around on Apple's App Store, I found that there were countless others that could help get me through my day.

I began the morning by booting up LocalEats, a free app from WhereTheLocalsEat.com that offers up lists of the top 100 places to chow down in 50 American cities. It makes its suggestions based on where you are and then sorts them, nearest first.

LocalEats had a few suggestions that sounded good, but before I set off in search of food, I thought I'd give another app, UrbanSpoon, a chance as well.