Be careful with that new laptop - it might make you miss your flight
Posted 13 March 2008 at 8:17AM by Ian Betteridge in IT systems and support
There's an utterly fantastic story on the Wide Awake Developers blog about someone whose MacBook Air so confused security people at an airport that they held him up long enough to miss his flight.
Unused to computers which don't have hard drives, let alone ones which lack lots of ports, the security staff seem to think that the machine might be a security risk - even though one of their members is trying to tell them that it's a new Mac.
It's easy to laugh at the security people involved, but this actually raises a very serious point: with the fast pace of technological change, how are security people supposed to know whether a piece of new equipment is dangerous or not? After all, they are not technical experts. They are trained not to take risks - and few passengers would want them to do so.
It's not just laptops, either. An iPhone, for example, doesn't look a lot like any other phone, and it would be easy to mistake it for an iPod if you didn't know about them. And more and more devices are likely to have a similar sort of physical look, as we move towards using touch screens on all devices, instead of physical buttons.
So perhaps we need to start having better-trained security staff. Of course, this means paying them more, which will in turn push the cost of flying up. But isn't that a price worth paying to keep you secure on your flight, while not inconveniencing you at the gate?
Tags: bt, bt broadbandoffice, iphone, mac, macbook air
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Comments
2. At March 16, 2008 11:04 AM, Richard wrote:
Shame he missed his flight, but if you must carry obscure bits of electonic "kit" what do you expect?
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1. At March 13, 2008 11:35 AM, Carl wrote: