In yet another round of cyber-nazism, some shady figures from Massachusetts and Texas, no doubt in the pocket of some nasty organisation like the RIAA et al, want to introduce a bill even more ridiculous than the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
No doubt drafted by some suit who knows as much about computers as a penguin knows about astrophysics, this very sad piece of legal nonsense which you can read here, makes illegal a number of contemporary networking and security technologies such as Network address translation and firewalling. I don't think whoever wrote this BS knows how common these technologies are.
"Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology widely used for enterprise security, operates by translating the 'from' and 'to' fields of Internet packets, thereby concealing the source or destination of each packet, and hence violating these bills. Most security 'firewalls' use NAT, so if you use a firewall, you're in violation."
Man, this kind of thing is getting ridiculous.... Somehow, I think that these kinds of jokers, and other nutcases like the RIAA are not going to be happy until the home computer itself is illegal. That would certainly stop people from downloading illegal mp3 rips ;) .
More here.