The University of California, Berkeley's SETI@home, has signed up by more than 1 million volunteers worldwide in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It has helped up to find a missing laptop. James Melin, one of a volunteer of the project who installed SETI@home is his wife's laptop, which was stolen recently. Melin monitored the SETI@home database to see if the stolen laptop would "talk" to the Berkeley servers. Indeed, the laptop checked in three times within a week, and Melin sent the IP addresses to the Minneapolis Police Department.
After a subpoena to a local Internet provider, police determined the real-world address where the stolen laptop was logging on. Within days, officers seized the laptop and returned it. >>