Global Undercover Tracking System (gUts)

As promised, we will offer you a glimpse of Undercover's future. The first aspect we would like to talk about, is the server backend. A lot of our users might not realize it, but the Undercover software is just one part of the equation. A recovery would be impossible without our servers and our custom server software.

Based on our recovery experiences we have completely rewritten this backend system, streamlining the entire recovery procedure from the moment you report your Mac as stolen until we get the final confirmation from the police that your Mac has been located. The new system enables us to get an even better overview of all thefts, while making it easier and faster to change the status of a stolen Mac.

Over the past few days, we moved all previous thefts to this new system, called gUts, or the global Undercover tracking system. As of today, we started using gUts as our sole recovery system. Unlike its predecessor, gUts is completely written in Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

Many of guts' benefits might not be immediatley apparent to our clients. However, the system will enable us to easily add new features to Undercover, such as reporting a theft through our website. At present, victims of theft have to either email us, or grab a phone and call us. In the very near future, it will be possible to report your Mac as stolen through our new web interface, adding a third reporting possibility.

Another benefit of this new system is that we can gather recovery statistics by pressing one button. As we are just finishing our first year of operation, this feature has been very handy to compile our recovery statistics for 2006. Since so many people have asked us to share statistics and recovery percentages, we will be publishing our statistics for 2006 on this weblog. Stay tuned!