The TSA's CLEAR program where people can spend $100 to be "pre-screened" at airports and bypass security had a security hit recently when a laptop (doesn't this get old) with customer data was stolen.

Well gosh, how could they ever have seen that coming?

Anyway, Schneier covers the story and links to the TSA's response as well as taking a moment to denounce the program again along with most of what the TSA is doing for airport security. Since I've met the privacy officer for the TSA and know he knows what he's doing, the only reason I can come up with for this is that they're not listening to him when he's telling them not to put this kind of data on laptops unencrypted.

Tags: Big Brother, Lost Laptops, TSA, Well Duh!

So there's a new website that allows people to exchange their loyalty cards with strangers so you "defeat" the tracking an profiling that stores do on you. Unless I'm missing something, this is a pretty dumb idea. Here's the e-mail I sent to them: If you're curious why store value cards and such are a bad idea, see Nocards.org for details. JTAG ERROR: No consumerist_ht index defined Tags: Well Duh!

I don't know a lot about this game other than it's very violent and has been banned from the UK. Reading about it doesn't make it any better: Wow, you couldn't make it more real if you tried. Parental groups in the US aren't necessarily determined to ban it and would be satisfied with just giving it an Adult rating. While this is a completely reasonable request and, as far as I'm concerned, a blatantly obvious decision, Take-Two (the game's producer) is fighting this for purely monetary reasons: Tags: Families, Gaming, Police, Well Duh!

The Patriot Act should never have been passed. We all saw the potential for abuse, but our "trust us" government assured us that it would never happen. Yeah, right. Now that the inevitible abuses have come to light, it would be nice if someone would face some consequences for a change. Like maybe Alberto Gonzales who lied to congress saying that there were no abuses during the hearing for the reauthorization of the Patriot Act. JTAG ERROR: No slashdot_ht index defined Tags: George Bush, Well Duh!

Maybe this has been around a while, but it's the first time I've seen it. There are utilities to unlock files that Windows won't let you delete because they are "in use".

The main suggestion in the article is a free utility called "unlocker" which will probably work well for normal users and I might add it to my list of tools for that reason. However, a commenter said that the Process Explorer utility will let you find the exact program that's using that file so you can close just it instead of unlocking every process at once.

Once I've experimented with them, I'll have one or the other on my tools page. Until then, feel free to go to the article and check it out yourself.

Tags: Tools, Well Duh!, Windows