Ho John Lee’s Weblog

I’m quite pleased that the British authorities managed to foil the attempt to blow up multiple airliners last week. On the other hand, I’m probably not alone in wondering how long-haul business air travel is going to work out.

If a ban on all liquids, gels, and personal electronics stands, a lot of air carriers will need to start competing on in-flight service again. In recent years, I normally bring my own water, food, work, entertainment, and a change of clothes for air travel to China and India. On a trip to India, it’s about 30 hours in transit, which is a lot of time to watch the 6 movies that United usually rotates each month, along with putting in a full day or so of work. I usually fly United since their Asian routes are all based here, but I wouldn’t want to rely on them for food, water, and entertainment. Might be time to book on Singapore Airlines, which flies with a huge video- and audio-on-demand library and Nintendo video games, never seems to run out of food or water, and consistently provides attentive cabin service.

Given the growing number of data theft cases, I’m also hesitant to put my Thinkpad in a checked bag which I’m not allowed to lock (per TSA). Some people are suggesting that airlines rent computers onboard, but this isn’t going to help much until either

• You can remove your data and applications and carry it with you
• You can connect to your data and applications online from the cabin

Putting the risk of using someone else’s hardware aside for a moment (sort of like an internet cafe in the sky), you might need a convenient, security-screenable media to carry the bulk of your personal data with you. Perhaps flash memory in another year or two. I know of people who carry portable environments on USB flash memory keys, but you have to be fairly motivated to deal with it at the moment. If notebook computers get pushed into checked luggage, I’m certain we’ll see at least one more high profile data leak, in which someone happened to steal the wrong notebook that had data it wasn’t supposed to have on it.

The other direction would be to use web services for applications, files, and storage. Some people already work that way, but it usually fails badly if you don’t have a reliable and relatively fast network connection. A permutation of this might be to have the airlines become a sort of internet service provider, and cache copies of your data onto the airplane’s local network server for in-flight use, which get pushed back to the primary server when you land.

I’m glad I don’t have any overseas travel scheduled for a while.

Update Sunday 08-13-2006 22:18 PDT: more on the prospects for air travel from Michael Parekh, Jeff Jarvis, and Fred Wilson.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Travel, Personal Technology, Security, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.