

Laptops and Other Electronics May Be Seized on Entry to US - DanielBMarkham
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110407/sc_livescience/laptopsandotherelectronicsmaybeseizedonentrytous

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DanielBMarkham
For the record, I didn't submit this to start a flame war. I get the whole
concept of "if you cross the border, you're subject to a full search" -- after
all, that's the entire purpose of customs: to control stuff moving across the
border.

The thing here is that government took the guy's computer, _then sent it off
to some lab 150 miles away for analysis_. If I understood the article
correctly, the judges said that was fine to do, even without probable cause.

Since a notebook computer is a tool for my trade, I'm left with the conclusion
that not only can I be fully searched, but the government can also take my
tools away from me for a long period of time while they examine them. There's
no guarantee that the tools I left with will be allowed to re-enter.

Lesson? The U.S. government is effectively killing the personal PC, at least
as a centralized place to keep my stuff. Move everything to the cloud, and
make the notebook, phone, tablet, etc disposable.

Amazing. I must be missing something somewhere.

~~~
phlux
Here's an idea:

Take your primary hard drive out of your machine when crossing borders and put
some vanilla install of whateveer on the machine. Fedex the primary drive to
your destination or keep all your shit in the cloud.

Some years ago I did a design spec for what is now the atrix -- I wrote a
paper and tried to get some google eng contacts to work with me on the idea
that all machiens are jsut a KVM for your data - and that our primary data
device would be both our phones and datasets in the cloud...

Sadly, I couldnt convince them this was true then - but i is clear now.

So it would be great to have a /home/ on your mobile that you can sync to your
machine when they are close. If the machine dissapears, no big deal.

Here is how I would model that today:

You carry three devices - laptop, mobile and a USB stick and cloud storage.

Under normal operating circumstance, you work on your laptop as you would any
other time.

The mobile has some 32GB of storage -- this is a clean install backup of all
your installed apps.

The USB has a BASE install of your OS and whatever apps you can fit -- in a
live USB install.

All your personal data is in the cloud, such that if you lose any of the three
devices - none of your data goes with it.

Swap the HDD of the laptop when travelling to a clean install drive with no
data - do not sync till you get to the destination.

Should you lose your laptop, you can use the USB to run a live session on any
machine you can boot to it from.

