Well this is definitely a case to watch as it appears it will go all the way to the Supreme Court. Here is the quick scenario. The case arose when Kevin Boucher, a Canadian citizen with legal residency in the US, was traveling from Canada back to Vermont on December 17, 2006. He and his father were stopped by customs …
You like Yellow Dots from your Printer?
Well, I had read about this a while back, but a recent Slashdot post brought it to my attention again. Did you know that the US Government convinced printer manufacturers to encode every page of a document with a pattern of yellow dots to identify the printer (and user)? If that doesn’t give you an uneasy feeling about surveillance than …
BestBuy and the $54 million Laptop
As I reported previously, the GeekSquad and BestBuy has some serious issues going on such as the porn incident. Unfortunately for them, it serves as bad publicity. Fortunately for me, it drives more business to me. The most recent thing is losing a laptop, and I have to agree with the lady who filed the suit. It’s not about winning …
Port 25 Email Blocking
Over the years, this issue has come up time and time again. Most ISP’s (internet service providers) now block port 25, which is the outbound email (SMTP) port. In the name of trying to “help block spam”, they make it a huge headache for customers who use their own domain or another email provider. If you call Bellsouth or Comcast …
WESLA Federal Credit Union – Website Down
It appears that www.wesla.org (WESLA Federal Credit Union) has some serious issues going on. The site has been down for a couple of hours at least. At 3:55pm CST, a client of mine IM’ed me over GoogleTalk about it. More than just the homepage is down as well – looks like the whole site. There are several things that can …
I HATE Unsolicited Urban Legends!
————————Note: This blog is about the subject in general – not meant to be taken personally by the one who just sent me the email.———————— Ok everyone. Please STOP sending this crap to me. I can only hit “reply all” and send refutes about these urban legends so many times before I get really tired of it. I realize that …
Analog Television – Do you need a new TV?
I’ve been asked about this issue several times. To keep it simple: No you don’t have to buy a new $1500 HD television before February 17, 2009, and throw away your old TV. What is happening is that the over the air (OTA) television stations will no longer be broadcasting in analog. They must begin broadcasting digitally. That’s all it …
Encrypting Your Data – Think about it
Imagine that police arrest an individual for a simple traffic infraction, such as running a stop sign. Under the search incident to arrest doctrine, officers are entitled to search the body of the person they are arresting to ensure that he does not have any weapons or will not destroy any evidence. The search incident to an arrest is automatic …
The Broadband Scandal
You know that broadband internet coverage in the United States sucks right? Huh – you mean you thought it was so cool that you can now get a 1.5Mbs DSL connection? Bellsouth/ATT offered you 6Mbs Extreme? Have you checked your upstream connection lately? That is why it is technically known as aDSL. The “a” stands for asymmetric – as in …
Told ya bottled water was a waste of money
I’ve been on my soapbox about this for a long time now. People want to gripe about the cost of a gallon of gasoline, which has to be drilled, refined, shipped, heavily taxed, etc. However, nobody thinks twice about paying $5 per gallon for bottled tap water. 1 liter ~ .25 gallons $1.19/liter x 4 = $4.76/gallon (approximately) Just doesn’t …