Tips on travelling with a laptop | Hacker News Reader

Tips on travelling with a laptop

successfulsoftware.net

12 pointshermitcrab13 comments

Laptop bags, laptop locks, encryption software, back-ups, mobile Internet access and everything else you need to know about running your online business on the road.

I would argue that simply encrypting the "sensitive" files leaves too much room for human error. Yes, the majority of crooks would not spend a lot of time looking for such material, but in the off chance they do, would you really want your entire business destroyed? Full disk encryption with a 20+ character password is the only way to go for laptops, in my opinion.

Also, if you're running windows, full disk encryption actually speeds up most tasks. On my linux box, boot time slowed down, but 200 MB random reads (typical for starting large applications) were actually only slightly slower:

  before: Timing buffered disk reads:  246 MB in  3.00 seconds =  86.24 MB/sec
  after:  Timing buffered disk reads:  246 MB in  3.00 seconds =  81.96 MB/sec

The truth about encryption:

http://xkcd.com/538/

The alt-text speaks the truth.

>>> It turns out that most of the New Zealand ISPs have restricted SMTP access to prevent spam.

Is this true? Do New Zealand ISPs block all connections to SMTP servers? If so, this is quite outrageous and would solve nothing. Relaying email and connecting to an SMTP server that generates email messages are completely different things. Besides most decent SMTP servers get client connections over SSL these days which would make them harder to block.

Heck, I know quite a few US ISPs that do that - as well as some WiFi hotspots. Usually it's just a block on outbound connections on port 25, and you can get around it by using a different port (587 typically works, and is semi-standard).

Another workaround is to forward your mail to Gmail, so you can have the choice of using your mail client or Gmail. At our company some people did this and ended up dropping their native client completely.

Won't it look as if it come from @gmail.com instead of @mydomain.com? If so, that isn't ideal.

mobile business is going to force tax reform. what incentive will people have to run a profitable business in a country with crappy tax laws when it can easily be run off a laptop from anywhere?

Their entire social network they've built there.

people currently move from out of state to silicon valley, this will be the logical extension.

Well, at least if you're a US citizen, it doesn't matter. You have to pay tax regardless of where you generate the income, or where you're living.

linkbait spam

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