Charles Curley's Weblog

Apparently a Nevada couple wandering about in the wilds of eastern Oregon were stranded for three days. While there was human stupidity at play in the stranding, this article is about another bit of human stupidity. The part of the headline that says, "GPS leads them astray".

No, gentle reader, their GPS did not lead them astray. They lead themselves astray.

Nor did their GPS "sen[d] them down a remote forest road." They sent themselves down it.

What the editor who wrote the headline and Jeff Barnard, the alleged journalist who wrote the story, missed is that they chose to follow the route the GPS receiver's navigation software selected.

I sailed for years and did my own coast piloting (and asked someone else to check my work). I not only carried responsibility for my own life, I carried responsibility for the lives of others. And for yachts worth hundreds of thousands of (1960s) dollars.

I've driven through eastern Oregon and northwestern Nevada, enough to know the country a bit.

I've been using GPSware like Roadnav and Tangogps for years. Of course I've also used Google Maps. Many of these programs will create a route for you; Roadnav will do it in real time as you drive, like many commercial GPS receivers. All of them are quite capable of producing bogus routes.

Rule 1: A navigation tool, any navigation tool, is no substitute for your native intelligence. If you plotted a course from Fishers Island to Block Island, and you came up with a course of 300 degrees, would you sail it? Not very far, you wouldn't, one way or another. If the GPS software says, "Take this Forest Service road", you can refuse to do so. They aren't paved, you know, and can get very rugged. You do have free will, you know.

That's bad enough. But what irks me most about this story is the author of the article and the headline writer both giving the Rhoads a pass by blaming the GPS, not them, for the error. No prize for guessing what the writers' excuse for such insipid moral failure would be. Screwtape would approve.

Do you regularly travel to the U.S. on business? If you take confidential information of any kind with you, take heed: US policy allows offers [sic] of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to search and confiscate computers, phones, personal digital assistants, cameras, digital music players and other data-storing devices. Operating under the U.S. Policy Regarding Border Search of Information, agents have also downloaded the contents of entire computer hard drives and other storage media for later review. (Note: similar situations occur at the borders of other countries as well.)

For many travelers, CBP reassurances that confidential data is handled carefully ring hollow. And travelers who resist searches, even by insisting that such searches would require a warrant and probable cause if conducted within the United States, can be detained, sent back to their country of origin or otherwise grievously inconvenienced.

These recent developments have many legal experts and others asserting that the "border privacy" playing field is undeniably tilted in favour of border agents.

This article suggests 10 steps you can take to shield sensitive information, like that protected by solicitor-client privilege, when crossing the border. Each one comes with caveats, the most important of which is that there are no guarantees. You should consult an IT security expert to help you choose the best options for your needs.

So says the Canadian Bar Association, in a practical howto on securing your computer.

A few thoughts....

• One way to handle the problem is: don't travel with a computer at all. Buy or rent a computer on the other side of the border. Or borrow one from a friend or colleague.
• Pull in a live CD such as Puppy Linux or Ubuntu, or the U.S. Air Force's Lightweight Portable Security, and use that. This works particularly well if you have VPN access to your home computers. Many live CD Linux distributions will let you generate (or download) a USB stick image as well.
• Store your VPN access information the old fashioned way, on paper. But scramble it or omit a bit of the information. Hide it in a notebook full of notes to yourself.
• Programs like the Free Software Foundation's shred (info coreutils 'shred invocation') are less effective on modern operating systems that cache hard drive data. See the caveats in the info page.
• A good flexible password generator is apg (man apg), short for "Automated Password Generator". It is available on most Linux distributions. It makes nice pronouncable passwords, as long as you like.