A laptop ban would be a disruptive privacy risk
backchannel.com
backchannel.com
I recently took a flight from Belgrade via Istanbul to Birmingham (UK). Hand luggage only, no checked luggage.
At Istanbul they took my laptop from me, gave me a receipt, packed it in bubble-wrap, put that in a suitcase with lots of other bubble-wrapped laptops, and put it in the hold.
Yes, I got it back in the baggage reclaim area, but it was cold - seriously cold - I didn't dare turn it on for several hours to let the disk warm up slowly.
This is making international travel a complete crap-shoot.
Take precautions people. Backup your data, don't travel with your valuable laptop.
I think the concern for me of having a cold machine taken of a plane into UK weather right now (24C and humid as hell) is the condensation that would build up if I started sucking damp warm humid air into a stone cold machine.
If you turn it on then warm, moist air is drawn into the cold chassis, and that's when the problems happen. If you don't turn it on then the air that was always in it it still there, and the problem is minimised.
So if it's extremely cold, don't turn it on.
Thermally induced contraction and expansion can become an issue, particularly with marginal cases.
I wonder about the tolerance some discrete components may exhibit, e.g capacitors. For that matter, how much does that resistor vary over larger temperature spreads?
Anyway, I let my equipment warm up (or, when very warm, cool down, e.g. sitting in the trunk of the car in summer).
Sadly, if they do roll out a hand-luggage ban on electronics, I can see it becoming a complete ban due to existing regulations (e.g. EU) that prohibit the checking of li-ion batteries due to the fire risk.
I now feel like something of a tit for pointing out that security theatre is ridiculous while one is allowed to carry li-ion/lipo batteries on one's person, as you could just fold your iPhone in half using a tray table as a lever, and then use the ensuing white hot long lasting flame for whatever nefarious purpose, as they now appear to be closing this window.
If one is outright banned from transporting electronics it will be chaos - will I need to buy a new phone in every location I fly to? What about business travellers - are we going to see a resurgence in portable manual typewriters, and flights sounding like a hailstorm?
I am so sick of this idiocy.
Well, there's a game called FTL (very good Roguelike with real-time ship-to-ship combat) [0] that has teleporting bombs as a distinct class of weapons... So of course, it's not hard to imagine that matter teleporters could and eventually will be used to great offensive and invasive effects, depending what the laws of physics allow.
Make them replaceable, and you only need to buy new batteries at the destination.
Create a standard around batteries (like palettes) and you may only need to borrow them.
But why stop there? We should all just use identical, world-government-approved standard laptops and copy the data around, Chromebook-style. Neatly solves the pesky "people carrying their own data" problem too, by forcing it onto the network where it can be safely monitored and policed.
shiver
The first step to fixing it is to stop electing racist cowards. I'm not holding my breath.
The pendulum will inevitably swing again, as it does every 8 years or so. The Democrats will retake the White House after a term or two, and we will inevitably see another period of time in which they control both the executive and legislative branches simultaneously.
Even so, I would be stunned to see this future Democratic government roll back things like this that are happening now. Barring the occasional revolution or national collapse every century or two, consolidation of power and control only flows in one direction. The idea of this being partisan is illusory.
Actually not a bad idea. You could type up a bunch of memos or reports and then scan them and use text-recognition software when you get to your destination to convert to digital.
As far as mitigation of all this paranoia and destruction of reasonable social & business order, I hope group charter flights become more widespread & affordable, avoiding all the bulk passenger plane nonsense.
If I'm a business consulting company, airlines are no longer reliable enough to ship my employees.
Is that really true? What percentage of flights do you think actually reach this level of outage? I'm not saying it can't reach that level and I don't know the tolerance of your business, but it seems like we're still talking in very small percentages here.
So in my experience, that's a 12.5% rate for major delays, and a 25% rate for any delays.
I'm sure other not-so-developed countries have it quite similar (eg: several in Latinamerica and probably Africa).
Checking in a laptop? Anybody would laugh in your face for suggesting it. Not sure how we're gonna start handling travelling to the US.
At least that way you can't be accused of hiding anything if you literally have nothing to hide - at least at the airport.
That's if you trust TCG and OPAL, and have an OPAL drive. Windows will use OPAL automatically if available for at least Pro and Enterprise and Server products, I'm not sure about Home. Apple and Linux have software implementations (typically with AES hardware support by the CPU).
Edit: Looks like it's been forked. https://github.com/sedutil/sedutil
The TCG and OPAL folks should have commissioned this work for a UEFI application, and open sourced it.
I will be travelling a lot between the US and Canada, so need to decide between Surface or Macbook.
calling a country "civilised" is difficult because youre implicitly calling other countries uncivilised.
Also, because terrorists are rare and are not exclusively members of any one profile, you are more likely to miss one if you shift focus onto one group in particular.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/02/02/0813202106.abst...
The question is whether this effect is stronger or weaker than the gains you get from profiling.
The middle solution: Anti-profiling. It's not about going after certain groups, it's about ignoring certain groups that are harmless.
We don't need to focus on: -70-year-old British grandmas -4-year-old children -Chinese women -etc.
Obviously this doesn't preclude someone slipping something into their bag without their knowledge, so bags would still have to be checked.
But at the end of the day, there's a lot of simple things you could do to make the whole process faster and easier for everyone, including 23-year-old Arab men with congenital overactive sweat glands.
That is still profiling.
Given four groups, A,B,C,D with a property of dangerous/not dangerous.
If I say only A,B and D are dangerous then I'm saying C is not dangerous.
If I say only C isn't dangerous then I'm saying A,B and D are dangerous.
It's the profiling part that's the problem- you can determine through trial and error if you are likely to be interviewed, and adjust your resources accordingly. As noted in the paper, the 9/11 hijackers appeared to do exactly that.
Completely random interviews can't be gamed the same way.
This is the first time I hear of a laptop ban on internationnal flights. Any informative links would be appreciated.
At any rate, the burden of proof rests on the administration to show that the threat is real, not imagined, and that the proposed restrictions are narrowly tailored to prevent the threat. None of this has happened yet.
Do they do this with every piece of luggage going into the hold?
Leave X-ray, asked for chemical residue test, proceed to counter, open bag let them swipe the cloth in my clothes a little, and then the inside of my bag a little as well, test passes and I zip my carry on back up and I'm on my way to the gate. This is pretty routine when flying in Australia. I'm pretty sure we stared doing this for catching drugs and regular non terrorist illegal stuff in the 90s or even earlier, and just decided it was a sensible idea to buy stuff that can also detect explosives as well.