I've already waited the delay from the theater to the movie rental stores. What's another month?

I go by the "What's coming out and when" whiteboard in my favorite little movie rental shop anyway. From this perspective, nothing changes.

1. Make backup of laptop prior to travelling. Store "working" backup image at home on your main workstation.
2. Mindwipe the drive (zero it with formatting software particular to the drive - WD offers "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic", Seagate offers "Seatools")
3. Restore a pre-built image of the drive with only the software you need to do your work, including software to securely remote to your desktop at work (where the real work files are located.)
4. Pack laptop, backup software, and copy of factory image
5. Travel to foreign land.
6. If your laptop is searched, or is out of your posession and under the control of an agent of a foreign government, repeat steps (2) an (3) once you recover it. You can't trust it until you repeat those steps. Like a poster above, be concerned about the presence of keyloggers, sniffers, etc.
7. Use restored laptop at the work-site in the foreign country. Remote to your own workstation to pick up, or drop off any business files, agreements, data files, whatever.
8. Before returning, repeat steps 2 and 3 to protect your client's confidentiality and yours.
9. Return to your home country. If laptop out of your personal posession/control, or searched again on return, repeat step 2, then restore your "working" image when you get back to your own workstation.

Not only does this protect your confidentiality, but it may also help protect you from search/seizure when data you have on your hard drive contravenes local laws in the foreign country. For instance, here's a wikipedia link that may be of interest to travellers: List of books banned by governments

Were you to have one of the publications on your hard drive in digital format, and were travelling to a country that banned import of it, you could find yourself in legal difficulties.

Spore... That would be the game that had the 3-installation limit when it was released, which was such an offensive practice that I decided I'd never buy or install this piece of garbage, and would return for refund (unopened) any copy given to me as a gift.

EA can continue to suck it.

> (c) any evidence that the hard-drive has been 'wiped' or erased since the initiation
> of the litigation.

So as long as you wipe or erase the hard drive before litigation begins, or before you become subpoena'ed (aware of the litigation), you're protected if you destroyed any evidence of your activities?

Perhaps a VMWare or other virtual operating system is in order then. Download, burn to optical, revert the guest image.

Perhaps NewYorkCountyLawyer could confirm the viability of this method?

Something about not being forced to testify against yourself. No sense in leaving your equipment capable of testifying against yourself either.

I suspect this is merely a boilerplate change to cover the legal status of ownership/possession of the users' content on the backup media when accounts are deleted. The new terms were quite poor, because they were too broad and vague in what they permitted the company to do, the users interpreted this is the worst possible light, and we have the situation you now see. (It is important to note that the users were not incorrect to interpret the terms in the worst possible light! One should always look at worst-case interpretations of a legal contract.)

The old terms were likely insufficient, and placed the company at risk of a lawsuit for retaining data (on any media, in any form) that the user had deleted. In reality, it is not feasible to search out all copies of a user's content on all live and backup media to over-write it if they delete their account.

By taking ownership in perpetuity, the company mitigates any legal risk from maintaining backups, and the old backup data could be destroyed over time through the process of backup media destruction or re-use in another backup process.

Now the lawyers will have to revisit the boilerplate language, remove it, and craft a new legal framework to cover this situation with much more in the way of specifics (maximum length of data retention, method of data destruction, possibilities for restoration before the maximum time elapses, liability of the company toward the user if the obligation for deletion is not met by the maximum stated time, etc...etc...)

This is how terms-of-service documents get so long and unwieldy, folks.