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Home invasion suspects caught with iPhone's help
A Chicago thief and his accomplice may regret stealing an iPhone during a series of home invasions. In one robbery, the suspect took an iPhone after he pistol-whipped a woman and two men and then forced them into a bathroom. The suspect was apprehended after police used a GPS app to locate the stolen phone. The report doesn't mention what GPS app they used, but it's likely Find my iPhone or a third-party competitor. Apple hasn't released any stats on the number of people using the Find My iPhone service, nor how many devices have been recovered thanks to its presence. Judging from the news reports and the tips we receive, the list of recovered devices is probably long. I've enabled Find My iPhone and Find My Mac on all my Apple products just in case I ever need it, have you?
Find My Mac not working for you? You're not alone
If you're having trouble getting Lion to let you enable Find My Mac, you're not the only one. It seems at least a few people are running into a problem where they see the above message in the iCloud preference pane, but clicking the update button (or running System Update manually) yields no updates to install. If this describes your situation, the good news is that there is a solution -- the bad news is that it might require a little bit of patience. Before getting too worked up over the problem, though, it's a good idea to try the simplest methods first. Go to System Preferences, go to the Security and Privacy preference pane, and click on the Privacy tab. Check to make sure that Location Services are enabled: If that didn't do the trick, head on over to Apple's support site and download the Lion Recovery Update package manually, and install it. It's approximately 832 MB, so it may take a while to download if you're on a slower Internet connection. Once installed, reboot your Mac and go back in to the iCloud preferences (under the Internet category in System Preferences) to see if you can enable Find My Mac now. If you can check the box, you're all set! If Find My Mac is still greyed out, however, then the problem is likely that your Mac is in need of a couple of housekeeping tasks to get things in order. This next step works best if you close any apps you have open. Open your Applications folder, then open the Utilities folder and select Disk Utility. You should be presented with a screen similar to the following: From here, select the volume that Lion is installed on from the list on the left side of the menu as shown above. Then click the Verify Disk button on the bottom right of the window, and Disk Utility will scan the volume for any problems. The process usually takes about five minutes, but might take longer depending on the size of your hard drive. If you're still with me at this point, I'm betting that you will probably receive a message similar to the following: What this means is that somewhere along the line, the part of the system that keeps track of where files are stored on the hard drive recorded some information incorrectly. My guess is that this probably happened during the upgrade to Lion, and affects a specific part of the disk that is used by the recovery system. Luckily, it's not necessarily anything bad, and it's relatively easy to fix, though the process might be a bit complicated if you're unfamiliar with it, so I've outlined it below. Power off your Mac completely. Use the Shut Down command from the Apple menu. Power on your Mac, and immediately press and hold the Option key on your keyboard. Once you see the boot menu appear, you can release the key. In the boot menu, select the Recovery HD item with your mouse, or the arrow keys on your keyboard. You may need to press the Enter key to confirm the option if clicking with your mouse does not seem to work. After a few moments, you will be presented with a screen labeled Mac OS X Utilities. This menu allows you to perform tasks like restoring a Time Machine backup or reinstalling Lion on your Mac. The option we want, however, should be the last item in the list -- Disk Utility. This will open the same screen we saw before, but this time you might notice that the Repair Disk button (in the bottom right, under the Verify Disk button we clicked last time) is now enabled. Go ahead and click the repair button, and Disk Utility will automatically find and fix any problems that are found. Once the repair has finished, close Disk Utility, then restart your Mac by selecting Quit from the OS X Utilities menu. When your Mac is finished restarting, you'll need to head back over to the Apple support site to download the 10.7.2 Update (or download 10.7.2 Server Update if you're running Lion Server). When the download finishes, go ahead and install the update, which will require a restart when the installation has finished. Finally, you'll want to go to your Downloads folder and install the Lion Recovery HD update that we downloaded earlier. If all went well, you should be able to go into your iCloud preferences now and enable the Find My Mac option:
iCloud now features Find My Mac service
Find my iPhone and Find My iPad have been around for awhile via MobileMe, and we've heard dozens of success stories where people used the service to recover lost or stolen iOS devices. Macs have been reliant on third-party solutions or clever hacking to enable the same functionality -- until now. With iCloud comes Find My Mac, a feature that's essentially identical to what's been offered for iOS devices. If you have a free iCloud account and your Mac is running OS X Lion 10.7.2 or greater, has Wi-Fi access, has a recovery partition installed (more on that later) and has been set up beforehand in the iCloud preferences, you can use Find My Mac to locate your computer anywhere in the world using either iCloud.com or the Find My iPhone app on an iOS device. Find My Mac is not enabled by default (possibly out of privacy concerns), so once you've met all the relevant prerequisites, go into System Preferences on your Mac, navigate to the iCloud preference pane, and tick the checkbox next to Find My Mac to enable it. If you've used Find My iPhone before, you'll be familiar with how Find My Mac works. You can locate your device on a map with a fairly reasonable degree of precision, assuming it's connected to Wi-Fi. You can also "ping" it so that a message of your choosing will pop up on screen (along with a very loud sonar sound alert), or you can remote lock or remote wipe the device. Remote wiping the Mac should be a last resort, though, because after you pull that trigger you won't be able to use Find My Mac to locate it. If Find My Mac can't find your device right away, you can even tell the service to send you an email when it does finally locate your Mac. It's all quite slick, and it should bring peace of mind to MacBook Air and Pro owners in particular. Find My Mac requires your Mac to have a recovery partition installed on it in order for the service to work. If you downloaded OS X Lion from the Mac App Store and did a normal installation, you already have a recovery partition on your Mac, so you don't need to worry about that requirement. But if you're like me and you used a third-party app to clone your Lion installation from an old disk to a new one, you likely missed out on that recovery partition and won't be able to take advantage of Find My Mac until you install one. There are various hacky solutions to this problem, none of them particularly user-friendly, but I found it easiest to simply re-install Lion completely and start fresh. Since Macs don't have built-in 3G or persistent Wi-Fi when they're asleep (in most cases), iCloud is going to have a harder time locating stolen Macs than iPhones or iPads. It's still a very handy feature, and it significantly increases your chances of recovering a Mac that's mysteriously sprouted legs and gone walkabout.
Apple updates Find My iPhone app
Apple has pushed out a minor update to the Find My iPhone app. The app allows users to track their iOS devices right from their iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Today's update doesn't bring any major changes to the app -- just "stability improvements" -- but it does seem to find devices quicker than the previous version for those of you running the iOS 5 beta (at least on my iPad 2). I was personally hoping this update would enable you to track your Macs running Lion, however that is still yet to come apparently. Hopefully when it does, Apple will rename the app to something that describes all the devices its capable of finding. "Find My Devices" anyone?
Apple offers Find My Mac for beta testing, wants to play Cops and Robbers
Ever misplaced your hard earned MacBook Air or had an entire project vanish at the hands of a dirty thief, only to be gone forever? Well friends, the time is coming soon for the Find My Mac feature to provide a highly sought after sigh of relief, Find My iPhone-style. Apple has released the software into the wild for registered iOS devs, with the only other requirements being OS X Lion and an iCloud subscription. Using WiFi networks to locate your missing appendage via a web browser or iOS device, the location tool offers you a number of anti-theft options -- send a threatening message, lock down the machine remotely, or even wipe the machine's drive clean. Perhaps we will see this security detail launch with iCloud in fall, which was also released in beta form earlier this week.
Apple opens Find My Mac to beta testing
Apple has enabled beta testing of Find My Mac to registered OS X developers, according to MacRumors. Just like Find My iPhone, Find My Mac allows users to locate their Macs from any web browser or iOS device. When found, you can choose to play a sound or send a message on the Mac; you can also remote lock or remote wipe the Mac. However, remote locking and wiping will prevent you from locating the Mac again. The Find My Mac feature will be free. All you'll need to use it will be OS X Lion and a free iCloud membership. iCloud is expected to debut this fall, and we'll likely start hearing the first Find My Mac success stories soon afterward.
Mac OS X Lion beta reveals "Restart to Safari" browser-only mode (update: honeypot)
MacRumors was digging through the latest developer beta of Mac OS X Lion when it found a rather intriguing new option -- if you choose "Restart to Safari" on the user lock screen, the computer will reboot into a mode which consists entirely of the web browser. If that sounds familiar, perhaps you've heard of Google's Chrome OS, a partially-fledged operating system that runs within the browser itself... but we haven't heard Apple express a desire for any such thing. Now, certainly we've seen a number of Windows desktops and laptops ship with a secondary, browser-centric OS like Splashtop in order to have an instant-on mode, but if you have to boot and reboot the computer to get to Safari, that doesn't sound like much of an improvement. Perhaps it's a way to let guests (or children) entertain themselves without giving them access to your files? All we know for certain is that it's a most mysterious option. Update: But perhaps not as mysterious as we thought -- 9to5 Mac spotted its genesis earlier this week, and it's a bona fide honeypot. If your Mac gets stolen, the idea goes, it'll need to be connected to the internet for you to be able to track it with Find My Mac or perform a remote wipe, so you'll let the thieves browse this guest account to keep them busy without letting them peruse your personal files. Cue the Admiral Ackbar, we suppose. [Thanks, Jamie]
Find My Mac kicks off with Lion
In the latest Developer Preview of Lion, Apple has activated the new Find My Mac feature. Like Find My iPhone, Find My Mac allows users to locate their Macs from any web browser or iOS device. As noted by 9to5 Mac, the Find My Mac setup is available through the Mail, Contacts and Calendars setting in System Preferences. Simply click "Allow," and your Mac is ready to be tracked. Once enabled you can use any web browser or iOS device to track your Mac. When found you can choose to play a sound or send a message, remote lock the Mac or remote wipe the Mac. However, remote locking and wiping will prevent you from locating the Mac again. The Find My Mac feature will be free, all you need to use it will be Lion and a free iCloud membership. This feature is sure to be a bane to thieves, and no doubt we'll be hearing stories about how Find My Mac thwarted more thieves in the future.
