»In which we phone home

Manas Tungare has published his freeware version of LoJack for Laptops: the Laptop Theft Protector. Not for the faint of heart, it requires knowing how to place and run a php script on a webserver. Other than that (and surely that can be automated even more fully, without the privacy concerns the author cites), it's oojah-cum-spiff, or a little bit of all right.