The Ohm Project is back on line.  Many thanks to the community at DailyKos and all the encouragement and concrete assistance they provided when we made them aware of our plight back on July 10.

Kudos as well to our new webhost, Computer Tyme Web Hosting.  We appreciate both the special effort they put forth on our behalf and also their commitment to Free Speech.

And a big Colbert "wag of the finger" to WelcometoInter.net, the pusilanimous German webhost who shut us down with no notice and no opportunity to download our site.  The jerk even had the nerve to send us a bill for next month's service three days after he pulled the plug.  May he and his "German police" friends get what they deserve.

So here's to a small victory for free speech and a free Internet! 

Oh yeah.  9/11 did change everything.

Remember the 90s?  It was the dawn of an era of globalization and easy, instantaneous movement of information.  The hero of this new age was the "road warrior" who jetted around the globe solving problems, selling Infomation Age products and making deals.  And the warrior's chief weapon was the state-of-the-art laptap crammed with all the features and data needed to accomplish the task. 

Not any more.  The Patriot Act, zealous U. S. Customs and TSA officials and a Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling giving a green light to warrantless searches and seizures has made traveling with a laptop very difficult.  And if you carry sensitive data on that laptop these days, you're a fool.

The Baltimore Sun reports that U. S. Customs officials are routinely seizing 5-10% of the laptops brought back into the country by U. S. citizens returning home after international travel.  There's no warrant or reasonable suspicion required, just a program to randomly expropriate laptops and keep them for 2 weeks or longer for "random inspection of electronic media."  The "program," in effect for the last few years, is also being applied to digital cameras, cell phones and PDAs.