According to a MacRumors forum member, the upcoming Find My Mac feature, which may make its debut with Lion, could offer the ability to remote wipe your Mac, even with nobody logged in. Also mentioned was that the service might be dependent on the partition layout of your drive.
The reader was installing the Developer Preview 3 update and got a dialog box (pictured above) that further supports the rumors that Lion will support a version of the service. This warning message appeared when the reader attempted to install Lion on a HFS+ journaled formatted partition.
Due to the layout or type of your disk, installing to the selected disk will result in a install of Lion that is not compatible with the following features: – Full Disk Encryption
– Find My Mac
– Recorvery System
Although we don’t yet know whether the rumored Find My Mac features will exist in OS X Lion, clues have nevertheless been discovered in several versions of the developer preview to indicate this.
iOS devices use a combination of WiFi triangulation and GPS location to accomplish the task of finding your device, but as Macs don’t yet have GPS built in, they would not be able to locate themselves as accurately. All Macs have WiFi built in however and using that, along with an IP address, could fairly easily locate a Mac.
It’s likely that the Find My Mac feature will include the basic messaging features of the iOS version. It would be really nice to see remote wipe and remote lock options as well. We will most likely find out exactly what shape Find My Mac will take as Steve Jobs formally announces Mac OS X Lion at WWDC 2011.
[9to5Mac]