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Mandatory Security

2001-09-09 07:44:04+00 by Shawn 4 comments

A new story reported on Wired is looking a bit scary for mom-and-pop computer companies. The SSSCA aims to provide civil penalties for creating or selling a computer device that "does not include and utilize certified security technologies", and provide federal penalties (up to five years in prison and fines up to $500,000) for anyone with a networked computer who disables this mandatory copy protection.

[ related topics: Politics Web development Invention and Design Current Events ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:32:38+00 by: Larry Burton

It's looking scary for the open source community in general. Whatever standard is approved of will most certainly not be open source and there will be licensing fees involved. All operating systems will have to incorporate this standard and to do so will be forced into paying the licensing fee which could be a substantial amount.

Microsoft stands to become the major benefactor of this bill. If you can view a Powerpoint presentation and want to see what they are up to on this you might want to look at http://www.microsoft.com/winhec/presents/Security.zip

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:32:39+00 by: whump

If the bill becomes law, that's it for America as an economic playa. China will be happy to pirate DVDs until the cows come home. And what's Shrub going to do about that? Threaten war over a pirated copy of "Titanic"?

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:32:39+00 by: TheSHAD0W

Wanna hear something -- REALLY SCARY?

In my expert opinion, any rights protection system pervasive enough to effectively halt the traffic and display of pirated content can ALSO be used as a censorship device. Potentially embarassing news-flash on World Net Daily? No problem; just edit the master rights list and claim the content of that page to be unauthorized. Pooft! The page disappears. You can't email it; email must be screened for content as well. And any system designed to circumvent those protections, even to protect one's First Amendment rights is automatically illegal. I've sent an email detailing the problem to Rep. Ron Paul. We'll see if he is able to do anything about it.

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:32:39+00 by: canis

Whump: 's funny, I remember Bruce Sterling suggested in "Distraction" that China would eventually just broadcast all of America's IP via satellite to as much of the world as wanted it...