Archive for May, 2008
Flying to the US on business? Leave your laptop at home
Business travellers visiting America are being warned not to travel with sensitive information - because US security staff can copy it and hang on to it indefinitely.
“Right now, the U.S. customs department has the right to look at the data on your computer and download that data if they want to,” Gurley said. “The Ninth Circuit held that it is within the purview of the U.S. government to look at or download anything” on laptops and other electronic devices at the border, she said.
A recent court ruling says that laptops are just like any other luggage, which means security have the right to search their contents.
The Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) has issued a warning to its members worldwide – and to all business travellers – to limit proprietary information on laptop computers when crossing U.S. borders, and to eliminate any personal data, including photographs, finances and email that you do not want examined by Border Protection authorities. The warning follows a decision by a federal appeals court on 21 April 2008 giving customs officials the unfettered authority to examine, copy, and seize travellers’ laptops – without reasonable suspicion.
The ACTE isn’t telling its members to hide data; it’s suggesting that they should take steps to avoid sensitive corporate information from getting into the wrong hands, or from being deleted by some fat-fingered fool. The group also recommends:
3) If your laptop also serves as your major home computer, get another one for travel purposes.
I reckon journalists travelling to the US might want to pay attention to that one.
Save the environment by making your bathroom look like the toilets in Doom 3
It should have been easy. Bulb burns out in the bathroom. Decide to do the right thing and put an energy saver in there instead of a cheap incandescent job. Buy energy saver. Put energy saver in bathroom. Earn the undying gratitude of polar bears. Easy!
Not easy. I bought a soft glow bulb labelled “60W equivalent” in Tesco for about a million jillion pounds, I slapped it into the light fitting, and I switched it on. It made my bathroom look like something you’d expect dead bodies to be sawed up in. Bright doesn’t begin to describe it - it’s a vicious, bluey light that makes any room look like a pathology lab, or the toilets in Doom 3. Have you seen the film Sunshine? Remember the bit where the bloke opens up the blinds to let all the light in, and it all goes burny and scary and horrible? Or have you seen any film showing what happens when they drop an atom bomb on your shed? Turning on my bathroom light was pretty much like that. I’m scared to look in the mirror in case I’ve lost all my skin.
Maybe there are a few digits missing from the packaging and I’ve installed a 6000W bulb by mistake, or maybe it’s that energy saving bulbs are unnecessarily complicated and confusing. My money’s on the latter.
To be fair, energy saving bulbs are labelled so you know what you’re getting. Just compare the milliwatt figures and the number of lumens. If, like me, you neither know what millwatts and lumens mean in this context and can’t be arsed finding out, the labelling might as well tell you the bulb’s favourite pasta or the name of the manufacturer’s mother-in-law.
For what it’s worth, Philips Softone energy savers seem to do the job; everything else turns your house into a scene from Doom 3. It may be something to do with milliwatts and lumens, or it may be that Philips’ employees have superior taste in pasta.
Save the environment by, er, buying a new car
I know that the reasons given for tax increases are usually lies - the only reason is to boost government coffers - but the supposed environmental reasons for increasing car tax really bug me. I’ve got a knackered old Saab which is seven years old and therefore comes under the new regime, so from next year I’ll have to shell out a fifth of its value in car tax every year. Come to think of it, it’ll be more than a fifth because by next year it’ll be worth approximately 2p and the annual tax will be £300.
Given that the kind of car I need doesn’t change - I can’t fit a baby, a pram and a dog in a Smart - and that the tax is painful, that gives me two options. I can get an older estate car, or I can buy a newer estate car.
Older isn’t that green, because older cars pollute more. If I go back one year and buy an identical Saab, the petrol and the diesel versions both pump out more CO2 than my current car, because the engines were revised to make them less polluting in 2001. Other manufacturers aren’t any better. An eight-year-old Mondeo estate pumps out more CO2 than my seven-year-old Saab whether I go for the petrol or the diesel. And of course, as cars get older they become dirtier.
Newer isn’t very green either, because most of a car’s environmental impact is in its manufacture. So changing a car that’s running more or less okay in favour of a newer one is just wasteful, and kills polar bears.
Which leaves a third option: keep the car, pay the tax, and don’t change anything.
Only a cynic would suggest that that’s exactly what the government expects most of us to do…