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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 CNN: While many web sites are hosted on microcomputers, mainframe computers continue to be a popular choice for hosting large sites and Web services.

IBM has continued to sell mainframe computers to clients that use legacy applications written for older computers.

Mainframe computers are also appropriate for running virtual servers. A single mainframe computer can run multiple virtual servers, each of which emulates a smaller computer’s operations. A virtual server can be shut down and restarted quickly, and can be described in an image file that is loaded by the mainframe’s virtualization software. In some cases, companies have found that a mainframe can replace several hardware servers while improving system availability.

ESPN announced yesterday that it was shutting down its mobile virtual network, Mobile ESPN, at the end of 2006. See these articles in Forbes and Gearlog for details.

I was wondering if anyone was buying these phones or using this service. I’ve seen their advertisements on ESPN all year, but I’ve never ever seen anyone who used these phones.

The target market had to be 21 to 30 year old men, but most of them already have a cell phone.

One analyst noted that ESPN should have marketed the service for a few more months, at least until the end of the college and professional football seasons. Every additional month would bring ESPN more opportunities to promote the service, and provide more potential customers who were at or near the end of their mobile phone contracts.

Very few people want to pay for two cell phones, especially from two different carriers.

Granted, the target market I’ve identified includes a lot of gamblers. Gamblers will buy almost anything if they think it will provide them an edge. Mobile ESPN is an attractive service for these men, as the service delivered text and video content from ESPN’s television networks directly to the customer phone.

Keep in mind that ESPN didn’t operate the mobile phone network. It bought minutes and network management from Sprint, and resold the service to its customers.

Now ESPN plans to license its mobile applications to other carriers. Good luck! There are other mobile virtual network operators in the US such as Disney Mobile, Amp’d Mobile and Helio.

Helio is a joint venture between EarthLink and SK Telecom, led by EarthLink founder Sky Dayton, and partnered with MySpace as its core content source. It’s hard to argue with the man who built the second-largest ISP in the United States, or with the News Corp social networking juggernaut.

But Helio seems to be in trouble. I haven’t seen anyone who uses their phone or their service. Quite frankly, Helio’s teenaged target market has even less disposable income than the Mobile ESPN crowd. Helio does offer a tradeup program that lets customers sell their handset to Helio, but the rules are seem too complicated for most 16 to 25 year olds to follow.

Helio’s latest announcement is a combination EVDO-WiFi card, combining the fastest cellular data service in the US with 802.11 b/g access. Helio is also developing devices with built-in EVDO-WiFI access for release next year. The card is just a stopgap measure.

Imagine a Helio branded PDA or laptop that can access MySpace wherever there’s a decent cell phone signal.

I could imagine an ESPN branded device - but ESPN has thrown in the towel for now.

Tech: Virtual project may one day let your work jump from computer to computer without interruption: “Likewise, the failure of the computer’s hard drive, now a major catastrophe, would be no big deal. The user could resume work on another computer until the hard drive was replaced, and then simply resume work on the repaired machine with the loss of little if any data. ‘If this thing in front of me gets blown up,’ Satyanarayanan said, gesturing to a laptop, ‘I shed no tears.’ ”

Tech: Feature Article: Bill Gates is kicking himself - he could have bought the patents years ago. “Acacia claims to own patents that cover virtually every aspect of transferring digitally encoded media from a server to a customer. A few examples: the downloading of songs to computers and MP3 players such as Apple’s iPod, the streaming of video to a PC, the digital distribution of motion pictures to hotel rooms, even the use of a TiVo digital video recorder. ”