A day in the life II random header image

Crypto Boy strikes again

February 28th, 2008 No Comments

As you may know, the our border agents have started to require various travelers (i.e. the shifty-looking ones that try to cross borders) who happen to have tech gadgets with them to turn those gadgets on, login, mount encrypted drives, etc., so that those agents can make copies. I’m not planning to leave the country, but I’m also not interested in taking chances here.

Normally while the gross invasion of privacy of others bothers me, the actual fact of this sort of behavior does not, because I usually don’t travel with my various vitally private files (usually to do with cryptography) with me.

This has changed since I started using a USB key and portable applications to do what of my personal business I do at work. Until this morning, I had GPG, GPGShell and my GPG/PGP keys on my USB key that I use for portable computing. Now I don’t. The alternative was to keep that stuff on my USB key but put them in a hidden cryptography volume. I decided that was probably too fiddly and I didn’t need that stuff with me that badly.

But why would I think about it at all?

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Portable computing

January 7th, 2008 3 Comments

When I’m on-call and have to carry my work laptop from work to home and back (for remote support access), I try not to carry (in addition to my gym bag) my personal laptop along for the ride. Mostly I’ve been making do with my work computer, but it grates at me to have to use an application not under my direct control (i.e. installed on my work computer) to do my personal computing. Finally, it dawned on me that I could probably use applications designed for use on a USB key to fill this gap. And I can.

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