For all of you running SETI@Home you’ll be pleased to know that they have finally found something! It’s not extraterretrial life unfortunately, but it’s been used successfully to trace a stolen laptop.
Apparently one techie in the US was running Seti@Home on 8 machines at home, one of which was stolen. When the application contacted SETI@Home base to report it’s results, it reported the IP address it was running from. The owner informed the police about the IP addresses used by the program and they managed to track this down to the perpetrator and successfully retreived the laptop.
The geek’s wife was more than pleased:
“I always knew that a geek would make a great husband,” she said. “He always backed up all my data, but this topped it all. It became like `Mission: Impossible’ for him, looking for hard evidence for the cops to use. … He’s a genius — my hero.”
There you go, one more reason to install SETI@Home?
I was reading this on digg. What a neat little bonus for helping the Seti folks.