billso.com

The Washington Post reported yesterday on allegations that US Customs agents have inspected and confiscated laptop computers, iPods, and mobile phones during passenger inspections. Passengers claim they were asked to provide passwords and open files. In some cases, mobile phones were inspected and returned with purged call logs. One person claims their laptop has been held for an over a year.

According to this article, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Asian Law Caucus have filed a civil lawsuit against the Federal Government, based on 20 complaints from Northern California residents. The goal is disclosure of the US government’s boder search policies. One sourse of concern is an apparent pattern of racial profiling, in which agents targeted Asian and Muslim passengers.

The US Department of Justice asserts that electronic equipment falls into the same category as a briefcase, and may be searched and confiscated for inspection.

However, the scenarios described in this article sound more like coercion or out-and-out robbery.

Of course, many corporate travelers have confidential or private information on their computers and phones. The Post article cites a Canadian law firm that sends corporate travelers headed to the United States with “empty hard drives”. There’s an operating system and a web browser on the laptop, of course, but employees access their email and documents through a secure Internet connection such as a virtual private network (VPN). This helps keep confidential data off the drive, as the law firm fears discovery by search more than a hacked Internet connection.

BoingBoing and the Consumerist each had articles about the Post report, although both blogs misidentified US Customs as the TSA.

Sadly, the activities alleged in this lawsuit do not surprise me. BusinessWeek recently reported on Indian IT outsourcing firms that have systematically underpaid IT workers who were brought to the United States on H1-B visas. These workers make tempting targets, as their outsourcing companies can send the workers back home for any reason. By the time some workers determined they would never get their back-pay, they were no longer in the US. It seems that only a few lawyers or client companies will step in to help these guest workers.

From VNUnet.com and UPI: Earlier today two undersea cables that carried Internet traffic to the Middle East, Africa and the Indian subcontinent was damaged. The outage is most noticeable in India, Pakistan, Kuwait and Dubai. Internet traffic has mostly be rerouted to slower cables, and the damaged cables may not be repaired for another week.

No word yet on how this has affected outsourced operations in India. A CNN report claims that Dubai’s financial sector, television stations and telephone services have been affected by the outage. CNN also quotes sources who state that the damage was caused by a ship’s anchor.

Heather Paulson of revenews.com posted a comment that software development firms and their clients are panicking a bit over the situation.

According to Reuters, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is discussing a possible expansion of his company’s facilities. Malaysia is the most likely location, as that country ranks number one in Google usage in Southeast Asia. The country is also close to Google’s existing offices in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.

A recent New York Times interview with OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch prompted today’s blog post. This is actually one of my favorite speedup tips for residential broadband users, and it should work for Oceanic Time Warner, Hawaiian Telcom and Clearwire customers.

Speed up your web browsing one simple change on your router or computer - for free!

The billso.com domain name is much easier to remember than its current IP address of 208.97.168.17, so one service that every ISP provides access to is the Domain Name System or DNS. The DNS is a remarkable distributed database that maps alphanumeric web addresses to the numeric equivalents. Without DNS, the Internet as we know it just wouldn’t work.

If you’d like to do your own lookups to see the IP addresses of other web sites, try this page.

From what I’ve seen, OpenDNS is certainly faster than other domain name services that I’ve tried. Here’s the company’s explanation. I’m not sure if OpenDNS works as well outside the United States, however. The company has a data center in London and will open another facility in Hong Kong, to complement its four data centers in the mainland United States.

It only takes a few minutes to change your computer’s domain name settings to the OpenDNS servers, as long as you have administrative rights on your computer. Just read the OpenDNS tutorial and make the appropriate choices. Be sure to reboot or restart your computer after confirming the changes.

If you have a router at home, you might consider changing the domain name settings on the router, instead of changing the settings on all your computers. Again, be sure to save or confirm the changes on your router.

Note: If you use your portable computer in your employer’s office, you should check with your IT staff before changing the domain name settings.

Many ISPs rely on domain name servers provided by an upstream provider. Some ISPs host their own domain name servers. In both cases, the response time for a user can lag for a variety of reasons. The slower the DNS service, the longer it takes your ISP to route your request for a web page to the right IP address.

Most ISPs let their users select their own DNS servers. While there are a variety of free and public DNS servers available on the Internet, most of them cannot handle a large number of simultaneous users.

Security is another concern. I wouldn’t trust an domain name server from a third party that isn’t my ISP or employer, unless there was a good reason to do so. After all, it is trivial for the server’s admin to substitute the IP address of a spoof web site for a popular domain name such as paypal.com or ebay.com.

OpenDNS appears to be trustworthy, so I feel confident that they are looking up the correct IP addresses. The service will also block phishing sites, adult web sites, as well as auto-correcting mispelled domain names like cnn.cmo - for most users, that name should probably be cnn.com, after all.

There are business that are built on misspelled domain names, however. Some call this practice typosquatting, and Valleywag has a brief discussion of this practice here.

I’ve already posted some articles about the Domain Name System (DNS):

• March 23: .xxx and the Domain Name System
• February 6, 2007: The story of .um
• February 6, 2007: Hackers attack .org computers

This article first appeared on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=48

URL: Dell facing slew of Chinese lawsuits over CPU switcheroo

To some consumers, it may seem like a minor change. Dell shipped the Chinese version of its Inspiron 640M portable computer with an Intel 200M CPU. The marketing materials indicated the model used a more expensive process, the 2300.

The major difference between the two processors is that the 2300 includes hardware support for virtualization. This allows the computer to run several different sessions and operating sessions at the same time with a minimal performance loss, when compared to older technologies such as emulation.

When used in a Macintosh, this technology allows users to run Windows, Linux, DOS, or almost any other operating system while they run the default MacOS.

Virtualization is also a key technology in server deployment. Dell, HP and other computer manufacturers sell large multiprocessor cmoputers that behave as many different servers. Each server runs in its own virtual session, so one large computer can replace several separate computers that were each dedicated to specific functions, such as e-mail, the Web, and transaction processing.

In a consumer-grade laptop, the loss of virtualization is not as as critical as it might be on a server computer.

However, word spread quickly through Chinese forums and web sites that Dell had advertised a more expensive processor than it actually shipped. In Windows, it is easy to check what processor your computer is using, by examining the System Properties box in the Control Panel. Try using the shortcut keys Windows+Break.
Dell managers blame a mixup between manufacturing and marketing, and have offered an apology and full refund to customers. The apology is crucial in Asian markets. However, some litigious Chinese customers have decided to sue Dell’s Chinese subsidiary for damages.