Holiday in Xiamen - Laptop Question

[RobGMun]

Ok, this is probably a question close to the bone.

There is a UK series called 'Paul Merton in China' it was very interesting to me and when i go to Xiamen my chinese gf wants to see it. There are sections in this series that have paul giving the authorites the slip and filming something the chinese govenment didn't want him to see. I have the video files on my laptop.

I will be traveling to Xiamen via Hong Kong in Feb. If i get stopped at customs and they look at my laptop would this be BIG trouble to me?

What about ripped mp3 files from my CD'S?

[liuzhou]

No problem. They aren't going to look at your laptop.

[CapnKernel]

If you have stuff that you don't want others to see, you can use some software to create an encrypted drive. It will show up as a drive letter, similar to a USB disk. You can also create one of these ON a USB disk or a DVD you have burned.

The one I use is called TrueCrypt:

http://www.truecrypt.org/

It's free and very easy to use. It also lets you have two encrypted disks in the same container. That way, if anyone asks you about it, you can give the password to the "harmless" one, and the existence of the secret one is not revealed.

As a practical example, I store photos of my passport, credit cards, traveller's cheque numbers, account passwords and other important financial details in an encrypted disk on the memory card in my phone. If I lose my wallet, all my important info is close at hand. And if I was to lose my phone, the information can't be used by anyone.

Hope this helps.

Mitch.

[imron]

Whether you want to encrypt the information on your hard-disk is really a separate matter to the issue at hand.

Like Liuzhou said, they are not even going to look at your laptop.

[cdn_in_bj]

As a practical example, I store photos of my passport, credit cards, traveller's cheque numbers, account passwords and other important financial details in an encrypted disk on the memory card in my phone.

That's a really good idea. And depending on your phone, you can set it so that whenever you make changes to the contents of the encrypted volume on your pc, it will automatically sync the updated volume to the phone.