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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 today’s Honolulu Advertiser web site, here’s a bit of interesting news.

According to a study by Edmunds.com, Hawaii has the highest automobile ownership costs in the country. The company’s press release is posted here. Edmunds.com based this study on its True Cost to Own benchmark – an online calculator that provides results for specific models is available here.

The figure of US$59,457 covers five years of car payments, insurance, fuel, maintenance and depreciation.

California car owners paid $110 less.

In today’s print Advertiser, the lead story focused on the mass transit selection process. I’ve changed my thinking over the last year, and now prefer the guided buses instead of rail. The bus routes are much easier to build, and the bus system would be easier to maintain. I’d rather spend my commute time reading than driving.

From LA Weekly: the Los Angeles Unified School District attempted to roll all of its employees to a single payroll calendar. The conversion has been a disaster, as LAUSD managers failed to follow a basic tenet of information systems migration – parallel conversion. Keep running the old system running until the new system works!

It was January when the district’s new, $95 million payroll system started spewing out erroneous checks, underpaying some people, overpaying others, and creating such chaos that administrators now pay special counselors to deal with the psychological trauma.

The blunders persist despite $37.5 million in fix-it cash, and teachers are ratcheting up the pressure by boycotting faculty meetings and holding rallies. They marched on September 25 outside the LAUSD offices — “We won’t take it no more!” hundreds chanted…

Wikipedia’s article on parallel adoption is actually helpful, with a decent reference list of supporting articles. This concept is discussed in the IS 6100 textbook in chapter 12 on page 476. Both terms have similar meanings.

At the end of the day, employees expect an accurate paycheck

Parallel testing is all but required when a company moves large amounts of data processing to a new system. Developers rarely anticipate every possible exception that might affect a new information system.

Skype, the popular peer-to-peer VoIP service owned by eBay, was unavailable yesterday. Long-standing errors in Skype’s client software shut down the company’s supernodes, which took down the entire service. See this New York Times article for more background.

Convenience is all about timing

eWeek reported today that Skype is slowly coming back up, but millions of users are still unable to access the service.

Skype is releasing situation reports on its blog – here is the most recent post.

eBay had moved its North American office telephones from landlines to Skype, which didn’t help matters much yesterday. I discussed some of the business reasons behind this decision on December 13.

For eBay and many small companies that had based their telecommunications strategy in Skype, yesterday was a bitter lesson about redundant systems and failover. As two analysts noted in the eWeek article, Skype is not a landline replacement. The Financial Times pointed out today that disappointed Skype users may go back to less convenient, more reliable options.

Reliability is valuable

Systems will fail. Skype had four years to fix the problem that emerged yesterday. At Los Angeles International Airport last weekend, 20,000 passengers were stranded when a single network interface card (NIC) on a workstation caused a major LAX network to crash within 70 minutes. See SlashGear, CrunchGear and Consumerist for more details.

Bloggers including Mark Evans and Allen Stern discussed one interesting reswult of the outage – it really does appear that Skype matters.

Yesterday’s Honolulu Advertiser ran a story about the possible local effects of the subprime mortgage crisis.

The article ran above the top fold of the front-page, which was a surprise. For the last 5 years, almost every housing market headline I’ve seen in the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin has been relentlessly upbeat and positive. Local residents and mainland investors have been snapping up old and new properties at a furious pace across all the major islands. International investors are also a big part of the local market, as Hawaii is still an attractive place to own a second home.

Of course, both papers have reported about our traffic woes. West Oahu is choked in gridlock, as local governments struggle to widen roads and add essential services, even as new housing developments continue.

I’ve been reading Ben Jones’ Housing Bubble Blog for the last 6 months. He posts quotes and discussion from mainland newspapers, and the bad news has been coming for a while. It’s well-written, and I highly recommend it.

The Advertiser’s article focused on subprime mortgages, but the implications are clear. This morning’s New York Times included a story about the tightening market for jumbo mortgages – home loans that are above FreddieMac and FannieMae limit of US$417,000. One New York buyer was quoted an 8% rate on a million dollar loan a few days ago. When he decided to accept the offer three days later, the rate had risen to 13%. This quote comes from the Times, and also appeared in the Housing Bubble Blog:

“In California, it has shut down the purchase market,” said Jeff Jaye, a mortgage broker in the Bay area. “It has shut down the refi market.”

If rich people are having trouble getting loans for mainland properties, the Hawaii market will certainly be affected. The Federal limit for conventional mortgages is 50% higher than mainland limits, so a jumbo mortgage in Hawaii for a single-family home starts at US$625,500. According to Bankrate.com, today’s quote for a Hawaii jumbo mortgage is 7.09%, slightly higher than the mainland rate of 6.97%.

A quick calculation reveals that the monthly payment for a minimal Hawaii jumbo 30-year mortgage would be US$4199.34.

The housing market has been a key factor in Hawaii’s economic growth during the Bush administration. However, during the last month I’ve seen more and more cars and trucks with temporary magnetic signs advertising home buying services. That’s a sign that refinancing is becoming difficult to find in Hawaii.

I’ve also seen balcony banners on at least 3 downtown Honolulu high-rises advertising units available for sale. It’s startling to see these sales pitches as I drive down the freeway, and it’s anecdotal evidence that Hawaii’s housing market is changing.