is used to develop logs for the purposes of justification in grant proposals to support the ongoing funding of such projects. Aside from malicious software phoning home, phoning home may be done to track computer assets—especially mobile computers. One of the most well-known software applications that leverage phoning home for tracking is Absolute Software's CompuTrace. This software employs an agent which calls into an Absolute-managed server on regular intervals with information companies or the police can use to locate a missing computer. More phone-home uses Other than phoning the home (website) of the applications' authors, applications can allow their documents to do the same thing, thus allowing the documents' authors to trigger (essentially anonymous) tracking by setting up a connection that is intended to be logged. Such behavior, for example, caused v7.0.5 of Adobe Reader to add an interactive notification whenever a PDF file tries phoning (to its author's) home. HTML e-mail messages can easily implement a form of "phoning home". Images and other files required by the e-mail body may generate extra requests to a remote web server before they can be viewed. The IP address of the user's own computer is sent to the webserver (an unavoidable process if a reply is required), and further details embedded in request URLs can further identify the user by e-mail address, marketing campaign, etc. Such extra page resources have been referred to as "web bugs" and they can also be used to track off-line viewing and other uses of ordinary web pages. So as to prevent the activation of these requests, many e-mail clients do not load images or other web resources when HTML e-mails are first viewed, giving users the option to load the images only if the e-mail is from a trusted source. Malicious phoning home There are many malware applications that can "phone home" to gather and store information about a person's machine. For example, the Pushdo Trojan shows the new complexity of modern malware applications and the phoning home capabilities of these systems. Pushdo has 421 executables available to be sent to an infected Windows client. Surveillance cameras Foscam have been reported by security researcher Brian Krebs to secretly phone home to the manufacturer. See also Digital Rights Management (DRM) Product activation Spyware Internet of Things References Computer network security Spyware Internet privacy