Prey is a free and open source computer/device tracking software produced by Fork Ltd which was designed to help recover lost or stolen devices. Supported by Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android devices, the only requirement is an internet connection to make the geolocation magic happen.
We were lucky enough to sit down with Fork's CEO Tom Pollak, who also ended up writing the first few lines of Prey. We wanted to know how the project came to fruition and wondered if there was more to come for such a successful software/web production company.
Could you give us a brief history overview of Prey and how you first got involved with the product?
Some years ago my laptop got stolen. Time after that, thieves broke into my brother’s place and snatched his. As I’m the techie guy in the family, he called me and asked: “Is there a way to track my stolen laptop and catch these crooks?” and well, then it hit me.
After searching around, I realized there wasn’t any free, easy-to-use solution to help you track your Mac, Linux or Windows PC. Adeona intended to, but the project hit a dead end some years ago and never got past it. So that’s when I opened the code editor and Prey was born.
When did you first realize that you were on to something, that Prey was going to be a successful product?
When I made the first announcement, Prey got media coverage all over the world, but it wasn’t until I graphed the growth of users -- about a year later, after the Control Panel had been launched -- when it really hit me.
Originally, Prey was supposed to be a side-project, in fact there wasn’t even a web Control Panel from where to manage your laptop -- you needed to host the check url on your own server. But as more and more people began to ask for an easy way to control Prey we decided it was time to take a step forward.
It was actually the Control Panel what changed everything. We set a limit on the number of devices a person could have -- as resources aren’t unlimited -- but that led to people asking for a way to track more than three devices. And that’s when we realized we could actually have an income source out of this, and be able to invest in more infrastructure and manpower.
On Stage Demo Discussing PreyHow many people are actively working on Prey, and what kind of background do you see from most of your developers?
Here at Fork there's currently two developers working full-time on Prey. There’s four other coders that work with us externally hand-to-hand, and around 30 or so have sent patches or pull requests through Github up to now. I’m not directly in charge of translations, but I believe there’s about 10 of them at the moment. We also encourage non-coders to suggest ideas for new features, so it’s a pretty active community after all.
Can you help us understand how you dealt with issues concerning privacy?
This is a delicate topic, and one that really matters to us. We believe privacy comes first, and that’s the main reason why a) we offer a Standalone mode for users that don’t want their devices to check and report against our Control Panel, and b) we have said no to the hundreds of requests asking for a bundled key-logger on Prey, as that would make it too easy -- and tempting -- to use Prey for evil purposes.
Now, people who use the Control Panel always have control of their data, just as if they were managing a remote file-system. When a report is deleted, we don’t mark it as deleted: we simply wipe out every single bit of information. And when a device is deleted, all associated reports are wiped as well.
Now, we do know that Prey *may* be used for evil and not for good and frankly there’s little we can do about it. I mean, there’s nothing to stop a guy from installing Prey to his girlfriend’s laptop to spy on her, so we try to make it clear that this -- i.e. installing Prey on a PC you do not own -- is a breach on our terms of service, and that the account is subject to be deleted.
We believe the best way to protect the privacy of our users is to be totally transparent in the way we work, the Control Panel works, and obviously, the way Prey works -- which is probably the number one reason why the code is and will always remain open.
Multiple Uses of Prey In ActionCan you walk me through the decision to make this an open source free product, rather than a for-profit closed product?
I’ve always supported the FLOSS movement, in fact I’d say I’ve been really inspired by the culture and philosophy on which it stands. I’ve been using Linux for almost a decade and the whole point of Prey is to have an easy, free, open solution for catching the bad guys. If I had made another closed source anti-theft system, would I have made any difference? I don’t think so.
So, in part, Prey is a way of giving something back to the FLOSS community. But probably the best thing is that our model allows us to finance the project -- something few open source projects have been able to do while keeping the source code open. And that is what makes me really proud of Prey as a whole.
Have you had any success stories of Prey coming through for one of your users, and could you share a story with us?
Sure! There’s been dozens of success stories so far - one of my favorites is a recent one from a radio host in Atlanta. His laptop was stolen from his hotel room while on vacation in Nashville. Thanks to Prey it was recovered and back in his hands. I supplied a link ao you can hear the story first hand.
http://thebertshow.com/jeff-got-robbed-in-nashville/
(Click on the third audio, the one below “Jeff’s laptop is recovered thanks to Prey”)
What kind of hardware infrastructure does your company use to hold and process all of your data, and has scaling been an issue?
We have a couple of high-end VPS’s running Debian. Pretty normal setup (Nginx + Memcached + MySQL + Rails, mostly asynchronous), but highly tuned for the kind of load we get from the way the Control Panel and reporting works.
Scaling has been an issue, though, specially at the beginning, when there was no income source of any kind, and we were running everything on one single and tiny server. After adding a ‘donate’ option we were able to upgrade the server but as our user base grew we always kept hitting the limit. When we finally added Prey Pro as an option we began to make some money which allowed us to invest in bigger and better servers.
Are there any plans to release Prey for other devices, such as the iPhone/iPad or Blackberry? And if there are no plans, why not?
Yes there are. All I can say is that you’ll be gladly surprised in the following weeks!
So where is your company heading next? Can we expect to see any other great products coming out in the future?
We still have lots of plans for Prey and we plan to keep on working on them for a while: support for new platforms, new features, better tools for monitoring large amounts of devices (for schools, universities, etc), tighten security, and the list goes on.
As a company we have other products that we work in, such as Bootic, for hosted e-commerce or the real-estate aggregator Tugar. Both of them are currently available in spanish (our native tongue) but we plan to release them for the english-speaking community as well.
There’s also a new secret project we’re working on, but why spoil the party? :)
Special thanks to
Tom Pollak for taking the time to speak with us! Feel free to check out the
Prey Project from
Fork Ltd. - and on Twitter
@preyproject.
Yeah it really is great - I have a $1200 computer for business that I could not afford to lose or have stolen (could never afford another one!).