Judge Rules Defendant Must Decrypt His Laptop Hard Drive

Judge Rules Defendant Must Decrypt His Laptop Hard Drive
I wrote about the case against Sebastien Boucher, charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border, in late 2007. He used PGP to encrypt his hard drive, and refused to give it up. At the time, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that the Boucher had a Fifth Amendment right to keep his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) key, well, private. But a different judge has reversed that ruling.
Kim Hart: The Download
There's no shortage of events in the Washington region that bring together tech-minded people to mingle and hopefully make deals. But once they arrive at a crowded venue and obtain a frothy beverage, how do they make sure they meet the right people and get the most out of the evening?

MacChat: Safari 4 more polished than Chrome

MAC users might still be awaiting their own version of Google’s web browser, but Apple may have just removed any incentive they had to “go Chrome”.

Last week’s release of a public beta of Apple’s Safari 4 browser incorporates several Chrome features, and then someSafari now touts 150 features all up, according to Apple.

Safari 4 beta takes its cue from Chrome, and before that Opera, in moving its tabs to the titlebar, above the address field. This is more logical, as the address field, buttons and bookmarks are now contained within the active tab, but it may take some getting used to for longtime Safari users. Already command-line hacks have emerged, enabling users to move the tabs back to their previous position.

Safari 4 beta introduces some familiar Apple visual effects. The new “Top Sites” feature displays a wall of your most frequently visited pages, in the curved black reflective style of Front Row and Apple TV. You can customise the number of pages displayed, and pin your favourites there.

And you can now flip through your recently visited web pages using the CoverFlow view from iTunes and the OS X Finder.

One of the biggest improvements in Safari 4 beta is browsing speed. Its “Nitro Engine” delivers a massive performance increase, with HTML loaded three times as fast as IE and Firefox. And as javascript becomes increasingly important in the new breed of web applications, Safari 4 beta has a major advantage, with javascript rendering times a whopping 30 times faster than Internet Explorer, three times faster than Firefox and 1.2 times as fast as Chrome.

Importantly, Safari 4 beta is the first browser to score a perfect 100 in the Acid 3 test for open standards support.

Other noteable features of Safari 4 beta include support for OS X’s VoiceOver screen reading technology, full-page zooming with OS X Multi-Touch support (with the option to enlarge text only), smart address and smart search fields that throws up multiple options or recent search terms as you type, and a full history search that indexes the content of web pages you’ve visted.

So far from the browser wars being over, it appears they’re just now hotting up, with the cool upstarts Apple and Google getting serious about taking on the dominant players, Microsoft and Mozilla.

Safari 4 beta is a free download for OS X Leopard/Tiger and Windows Vista/XP at http://www.apple.com/safari/download.