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.

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000339.html
It has passed in Michigan, effective today!

Oh, man!

Like I said, perhaps the best way to stop people from downloading mp3s is to make the personal computer an illegal item. Or perhaps if we cut off people's fingers, they won't be able to type in search parameters into Kazaa.

For the love of God, WHEN IS THIS GOING TO STOP?

This is an another link to read. It comprises everything on this subject in one click!
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/arc...superdmca.html

I wonder if the RIAA and MPAA will remove their shields when this passes in their states? I did notice that governments are exempt from the bill's effects. I also wonder if they waited until everyone's attention was on the war to quietly pass this POS.

OMG this is so crazy I can't beleive it!!!

So say; a corporation with 5000 computers needing internet connection, each one of those would then need a real internet IP!

Instead of them sharing a single IP adress, which can be managed and locked down to be very secure, not to say that if someone would like to P2P programs could actually be stopped this way, but give everyone his very own IP adress instead, great idea!

I'm sure everything will be much more secure and easily managable... Not to mention the cost of 5000 IP adresses...

Basically, the bill has originated from people who don't understand computing. The wording hasn't been given proper thought, and checked with a person who has legal and technical experience.

This is typical of the kind of stupid crap that's becomming more and more common these days. A whole host of useful technologies have been curtailed, because of the misunderstanding of some bunch of suits.

Hmm, this is so stupid cant stop laughing at their stupidity. Here are some thoughts.

As Per mentioned above that would mean everyone would have to have a whole bunch of ipadresses. And with the IPv4 adressspace running short there is no way that is possible, and here in sweden there a even ISPs that built their whole network on NAT They will be put out of bussiness or at least have to raise their fees a lot.

Secondly, does theese guys that came up with this stupid idea ever look their front door when they leave for work? Whats next theyre gonna make keys illegal to? :P I wouldnt want strangers walking around in my house.

And is it realy illegal in that case to use proxies. Like what if someone used an abroad proxy. It would be damn much harder to trace maybe even impossible. That wouldnt serve their purposes at all would it

What will these guys think of next ???

How the hell are they going to enforce this ???

Morons, the lot of em !!!

One of the funniest law enacted....what are they comming up with next? Ban the use of file sharing softwares?

I didn't read the whole bill because its real long and I dont' understand that legal stuff too well. But does this mean stores can't sell routers or firewall software anymore? What about windows XP, are you not allowed use its built in firewall?

I am sure they would probably make a service pack or update to change this...But then of course people would have to download it and run it, which I am sure if that was last resort, most people wouldn't.
Then I am sure M$ would incorporate it into some other one so peopel wouldn't know.