Foiling a thief - high tech Dropbox style

In the past, I've talked about how amazing the cloud-based software Dropbox is. I use it to share my Paucis Verbis cards and share large files with others instead of attaching the whole file in an email. Here's one way I hadn't even imagined but love how stealthy this is.

In the LifeHacker blog (a general, tech-focused Tricks of the Trade website), a reader described how he used Dropbox to recover his stolen laptop.

How did he do this?
In a nutshell, Dropbox maintains a list of all the active devices which are sync'd to your Dropbox account. When you go the Dropbox website, you can log into your account and view all the devices affiliated with your account. For me, my laptop, iPhone, and iPad all have the Dropbox app. If you roll over the blue "i" next to the date of last activity, it will tell you the IP address of where it last sync'd. Because the synchronization takes place automatically, you can track where your laptop was in use most recently.

This led to the capture of the person who stole the reader's laptop. I love how sneaky and resourceful the reader was.

Just something to remember if you get your laptop or peripheral device stolen...