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I actually never watched CSPAN before yesterday, but now it is the only channel you can get anything out of without the glitz, the presumptions, the propaganda. Caught a very nice speach by some senator from West Virginia yesterday. Enjoy: The Arrogance of Power

A list of US House Representatives
(remember it is always best to write snail mail to your reps. Email is trashed to easy.
http://www.house.gov or here Write your Rep

And here are the Senators

Senate Listings

I examine financial institutions (credit unions) in the area of IT controls and policies and procedures. I can tell you that the GLB Act basically specifies 3 things.
They are:
-all data is private, you must keep it secure
-vendors handling your data must keep it at least as secure as you are required to
-I can't remember the 3rd at this time of night

Anyway, if I found out during the exam that the party who performed an "audit" only did a simple port scan, I certainly wouldn't hesitate in letting the credit union know that they were taken advantage of and their "security audit" was most likely unacceptable and could not be relied upon as showing due diligence in execution of their duties. I've had some extremely small credit unions tell me that their DSL Internet connection has a firewall....a Linksys cable/modem router and ZoneAlarm Pro! and they were serious!

Due to varying circumstances, I give a lot of leeway in what is required of these financial institutions. I don't necessarily require them to have an IDS or a firewall. It all depends on their particular circumstances. However, if there is even a possibility of remote access, I scrutinize their setups and make recommendations on what they can do to improve the situation and cover their asses.

Ipsos reported that 19% of Americans over 12 years old traded files in 2002. That is a lot of votes. If all you people would write your senators and representatives about repealing the NET Act maybe they would.

I told mine I'm against the DMCA, it makes me a criminal and if all David Rocci did was sell mod chips allowing people to use devices they BOUGHT in whatever way they wanted then he should be released. I mentioned that piracy is WRONG and should be ILLEGAL. But doing what I want with things I pay for (eg. fair use) is MORAL, and should be LEGAL.
The only way you're going to keep the guys with guns from hauling you off for your Linux DVD player is to get the bad laws changed.

Bill number 6568 isn't in the database, either. And the two Senators for Washington State are Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray (according to the Senate's site.

Or maybe just horribly bad reporting (but probably not). The Library of Congress website has no record of either Senator Finbeiner (not to mention the fact that "Kirkland" is not a state) or of Bill 5734. I could also find no record of the author, Paul Queary, at the Associated Press site.

Ask Joe Biden? You've got to be kidding. He's still a senator from Delaware!. Yeah, he lost the Democratic nomination for President in 1988. So did Gary Hart.

Nothing of major consequence happened to Biden. The people of Delaware have continued to elect him.

Under the Senate e-mail system, it is only possible for me to respond to messages from Oregonians. If you are traveling or on active duty, please fill out the form with an Oregon address and provide your current address within the message. If you are not from Oregon, I urge you to contact one of the Senators from your home state.

During my unemployment tour "02-03", I've watched Wyden fight for some good causes on CSPAN. He is the guy who pushed for more oversight in the Office of Total Information Awareness program. He also has exposed the anti-consumer tactics of the oil industry. Why aren't there more like him around?

During my unemployment tour "02-03", I've watched Wyden fight for some good causes on CSPAN. He is the guy who pushed for more oversight in the Office of Total Information Awareness program. He also has exposed the anti-consumer tactics of the oil industry. Why aren't there more like him around?

A review of Sen. Wyden's site does not reveal any draft of the bill in question. However, based on comments in the article, it sounds like a good idea.

This is the same Sen. Wyden who has sponsored a Senate resolution on consumer's rights to use digital content. A link to the PDF here.

The advantage of mandatory labelling for consumer devices that have anti-copy technology installed is that the consumer can know, at a glance, whether the device in question will allow him or her to make fair use of digital content he or she has purchased.

Obviously, the Hollywood crowd would prefer such a bill never see the light of day, since it would make devices with anti-copying technology potentially very unpopular. I can imagine that Sony wouldn't be thrilled.

At the same time, I can foresee that this is the kind of domestic issue that could easily get buried under the current foreign policy and economic crises.

the more bandwidth hungry of you, here's the link of the Senator's site w/ pictures.

While the use of proprietry software and the lack of a paper trail can't help, the problem appears more fundamental. It you turn elections over to private companies to run, which is really what you are doing if you use these voting machines, there are huge conflicts of interest. Take Senator Chuck Hagel who won the last two elections, against expectations, where 80 percent of the votes were counted using machines supplied and run by a company he indirectly owned.

Even if there is no impropriety going on in this particular case, their is certainly the appearance of impropriety. The question of who makes, owns and runs the voting machines appears even more important than the software and proceedures used by them. Rather worryingly the use of exit polls in the 2002 election was almost non-existent, so there was no indepedent check on the results. Potentially the people who control the voting machines control the result of an election.

Not sure of how to contact your senator (or who he/she is)? United States Senate

This is a good step!

I just got done writing 4 letters to my Congressmen about the Pariot Act 2 and war with Iraq. I know it is easier to post online about how something should be done, but it only took about an hour to go out, get stamps and envelopes, and write.

Perhaps take this as a chance to thank your Senator/Representative for voting against this (if they did!), and maybe even let them know your views on the Patriot Act 2, etc.

Find your Senator

Find your Representative

Remember what Sen. Feingold said about a *return* to an era of invasion of privacy and harrassment.

Sorta off-topic, but man Russ Feingold is a class act. If he ran for President, I wouldn't just vote for him, I'd campaign for him.

Now is the time to write your elected congressmen from the House and Senate and let them know that they should not decrease funding to NASA because of this, but they should increase funding. NASA has been working financially with one hand tied behind their backs since Challenger, and cutting funding further would likely cause even more accidents to happen. Get out your pens and paper and help keep NASA alive!

Agree? Disagree? Tell someone who can do something about it.
http://www.house.gov/writerep for your US Representative.

http://www.senate.gov for your US Senators. (Senators' e-mail addresses are usually 'senator_${senator_last_name}@${senator_last_name} .senate.gov'.

For all of them - be sure to include your name and address, so they know that you live in their district. More likely to take you seriously, then.

The full text of the bill, as proposed, is available here in PDF format.

Note that this is not the first time that he has done something like this before.

The full text of the bill, as proposed, is available here in PDF format.

Note that this is not the first time that he has done something like this before.

The full text of the bill, as proposed, is available here in PDF format.

Note that this is not the first time that he has done something like this before.

Yes, but fraud and error are common to *all* methods of registrations, not uniquely motor voter.

Anyone from Chicago (me) can tell you that multiple voting ("vote early, vote often") and dead people have gone on for a long time, and often that's not fixed because it benefits the politicians in power. Registration by mail has been available for some time in many states (also now required by motor voter, I didn't know that); at least at the DMV, you have the registrant face-to-face with ID in their hand. I'm intrigued by the critics who say the state can't verify identity (as opposed to eligibility to vote) at the DMV -- who the hell are the states passing out driver's licenses to? Terrorists, in the case of 9/11. Their uncertainty as to identity is a separate problem.

Voter eligibility must be verified, usually after the form is submitted, which is why most states require you to register, say, a month before the election. (ND doesn't require registration at all!) Whether they do their duty is up to them. That some complain about motor voter because they are now "overwhelmed" by applications from their own citizens is shameful. As for the ones who examined their rolls and found multiple registrations and dead peopl, well, good -- isn't examining their rolls what they're supposed to do anyway? Shouldn't they question their own procedures if such contamination continues? How is motor voter to blame for their carelessness, and how many of the bogus registrations predate motor voter? The critics drone on about how terrible registration fraud is -- and I agree -- while assuming rather than proving the act's causality.

Politicially, I can tell you that most of the (quiet) resistance in Congress to motor voter was from Congresspeople fully aware that greater registration would hurt their party (greater registration and turnout reliably favor Democrats -- quite reasonably, opponents of the law charged supporters with being politically motivated, and I'm sure they partially were). The fraud complaint was an insincere or inconsistent argument that goes more to altering some specifics of the law, not its fundamental thrust. Perhaps the best argument IMHO was that Congress shouldn't be telling the states how to handle its voting registration, though I think the law strikes an appropriate balance given historic federal intervention in voting practices to fix state tendencies to erect hurdles to maintain the status quo.

To give you an idea of the political nature of the resistance, some states read the NVRA as requiring them only to register people for federal elections, misleading some to half-register and be able to vote only a partial ballot!

More details. At a minimum the act makes life a lot easier for people like me who move from state to state and appreciate uniform requirements. I doubt the law is perfect, esp. as it is still quite young, but endorse of the basic premise that registration should be simple and convenient, as well as accurate. Increasing registration may or may not yet be producing more voters, but I can say from experience that the potential for get-out-the-vote drives is much greater when most people are eligible rather than being precluded by something they forgot to do a months earlier (and get-out-the-vote people can skip the extra get-people-registered drive). The only way to overcome voter apathy, the principal cause of low turnout, is to draw more and more citizens into the process so that voting becomes easy, familiar, and desired.

Bah, carpetbaggers should not usurp 'representative democracy' - they are not 'one of us' at the councils. A good example of a useless politician who used his family fortune to buy an office is senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. But if a people want to hire outsiders like Hillary (with brand name recognition if not loads of cash to buy media attention with) to do their bidding it's up to them. People just parrot what they see on TV and what their media hero's are paid to say with little critical or investigative thinking anyway.

It remains a key feature of IT that the skills involved allow entry to such a wide range of differing industries that there's practically no reason for someone to feel they're at a dead end. The video game industry, is in many ways, a case in point: although not wonderful - the salaries are generally so bad it makes analyst programming look positively well paid - it's a great entry point for any programmer with imagination who wants to use programming skills that are normally cut off at other levels. Database management is well known, dynamic web page building is understood and there are limits to what you can do: but video game development is different - algorithms are always being bettered, and the very good can end up pushing video game development into another sphere, creating types of application previously unenvisagable.
It's ironic that this happens and yet it's considered a poor-man's profession. Programmers in this field are generally poorly treated, with poor contracts, little chance of advancement, and little cross-skillification that would allow a programmer to move into a more respected arena. This is, in part, because it's an entertainment area, and in part because for every superskilled programmer who is able to push the arena into a new paradigm, there must be a hundred who can barely put together a bunch of assembler instructions to copy memory from one place to another without it taking five times as long as it ought to, and containing bugs.

This quagmire of the more innovative area of programming being hampered by a low perception of the people involved and the skills they bring to the table will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them you value programmers who have the imagination and skills to create entirely new technologies for the manipulation of complex graphics, and who have the cut needed to understand the essentials of good game play. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to create wonderful new games but that if good programmers are put off by poor working conditions and salaries, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how poor working conditions detering the best of the best harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on elite computer game programmers.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

Not to mention, one of their former execs is a senator herself. Senator Maria Cantwell from Washington state.

Interestingly enough, all she has to say about her days with Real are as follows: "Having immersed herself in high tech issues while in Congress, Maria joined a software start-up in 1995 and helped the business grow to create 1,000 jobs in Washington state.".

Hidden checkboxes? This doesn't surprise me in the least. I haven't used the RealPlayer virus^Wsoftware is years because of the spam. In fact, when I last installed it, I specifically remember a.) requesting that I not be emailed anything from RealNetworks, and b.) shortly thereafter receiving an email or two per week from Maria Cantwell, former RealNetworks executive and current U.S. Senator.

A quick trip to Google shows some shenanigans typical of a politician. With people running RealNetworks like that, no wonder the software is so (IMHO) abysmal...

Jokes about the RIAA aside, which has indeed asked for laws to allow it to do exactly what you deem jokeworthy, the fact is that most people consider their PCs their own property but not their own responsibility. The view appears to be that it's ok for someone to leave a machine on the Internet available for anyone to take over, that the person who puts it there has no responsibility, and that anyone who complains, tries to get it fixed, etc, is in the wrong.

Friends, I know that we all consider those who crack computers to be the ultimate culprits in any situation where a computer is damaged, but that doesn't mean that people shouldn't take responsibility their own parts in allowing this to happen. Someone who quite blatently leaves his or her keys in their car and parks outside bars would not be viewed by most people as completely blameless in the event that a drunk staggers out, takes the car, and drives it into a shop window.

Leaving a machine unsecured and unmonitored on the Internet is a sure-fire way of ensuring it is hacked and used to attack other machines. We know this. Yet people continue to do it. They do not secure their machines once hacked, and they allow their own machines to attack others once hacked. This is negligence, pure and simple.

This quagmire of negligent sysadmins not securing their machines, not allowing their machines to be shut down by victims yet not willing to consider the consequences of their failure to secure their machines and to turn off machines that attack others will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that negligent sysadmins who are happy to keep their computers connected to the Internet all of the time but aren't willing to take basic, simple, security precautions to ensure they play with others are a danger to the security of the Internet, a menace to other 'net users, and cause billions of dollars of damage every year. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by groups like Security Focus, BugTraq, and even the efforts made by Microsoft to secure their systems and provide easy ways of keeping their products secure, but that if those responsible for computers that are on the Internet do not make use of the tools and features made available to them, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how incompetent system administration harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on whether or not they are willing to propose laws that provide proper deterents to poor system administratorship and allow those attacked by poorly managed machines to fight back.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

If you want to participate in government instead of bitching about how corporations run everything, contact your Congressman or your Senator.

The Internet's Achilie's heel is it's awesome complexity and size. The result is that it's very east for a group to appear, do damage, and then disappear, and never be traced. Worse still, the ease with which this can be done is itself an incentive - a downtime of DNS, or of a Microsoft server, or of Yahoo, is seen as unimportant, easy, and untracable, and people - for whatever reasons, be they sociopathic, vengeful, curious, or egocentric - are attracted to perform these kinds of acts.

It's difficult for any reasonable person to know where to begin solving these issues. Traditionally, nailing down machines and networks so they are more secure has been seen as the best approach, but there's little anyone can do about having bandwidth used up by unaccountable "hacked" machines, as is seemingly more and more the modus-operandi.

Attempts to trace crackers are frequently wastes of time, and stiffer penalties for hackers are compromised by the fact that it's hard to actually catch the hackers in the first place. The situation is made worse that many of the most destructive hackers do not, themselves, set up anything beyond sets of scripts distributed to and run by suckers - so-called "script kiddies".

Given that hackers usually work by taking over other machines and coopting them into damaging clusters that can cause all manner of problems, less focus than you'd expect is put onto making machines secure in the first place. The responsibility for putting a computer on the Internet is that of a system administrator, but frequently system administrators are incompetent, and will happily leave computers hooked up to the Internet without ensuring that they're "good Internet citizens". Bugs are left unpatched, if the system administrators have even taken the trouble to discover if there are any problems in the first place. This is, in some ways, the equivalent of leaving an open gun in the middle of a street - even the most pro-gun advocates would argue that such an act would be dangerously incompetent. But putting a farm of servers on the Internet, and ignoring security issues completely, has become a widespread disease.

There is a solution, and that's to make system adminstrators responsible for their own computers. An administrator should be assumed, by default, to be responsible for any damage caused by hardware under his or her control unless it can be shown that there's little the admin could reasonably have done to prevent their machine from being hijacked. Clearly, a server unpatched a few days after a bug report, or a compromise unpatched that has never been publically documented, is not the fault of an admin, but leaving a server unpatched years after a compromise has been documented and patches have been available certainly is. Unlike hackers, it is easy to discover who is responsible for a compromised computer system. So issues of accountability are not a problem here.

Couple this with suitably harsh punishments, and not only will system administrators think twice before, say, leaving IIS 4 out in the wild vulnerable to NIMDA, but hackers too - for the same reasons as they avoid attacking hospital systems, etc - will think twice about compromising someone else's system. Fines for first offenses and very minor breaches can be followed by bigger deterents. If you were going to release a DoS attack into the wild, but knew that the result would be that many, many, system administrators would be physically castrated because of your actions, would you still do it?

Of course not. But even if you were, the fact that someone has been willing to allow their system to be used to close the DNS system, or take Yahoo offline, ought to be reason enough to be willing to consider such drastic remedies. Castration may sound harsh, but compared to modern American prison conditions, it's a relatively minor penalty for the system administrator to pay, and will merely result in discomfort combined with removal from the gene-pool. At the same time, such an experience will ensure that they take better care of their systems in future, without removing someone who might have skills critical to their employer's well being from being taken out of the job market.

The assumption has always been made that incompetent system administrators deserve no blame when their systems are hijacked and used for evil. This assumption has to change, and we must be willing to force this epidemic of bad administration to be resolved. Only by securing the systems of the Internet can we achieve a secure Internet. Only by making the consequences of hacking real and brutal can we create an adequate response to the notion that hacking, per-se, is not wrong, that it causes no damage.

This quagmire of people considering system administrators the innocents in computer security when they are themselves the most responsible for problems and holes will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Write also to Jack Valenti [mpaa.org], the CEO and chair of the MPAA, whose address and telephone number can be found at the About the MPAA page. Write too to Bill Gates, Chief of Technologies and thus in overall charge of security systems built into operating systems like Windows NT, at Microsoft. Tell them security is an important issue, and is being compromised by a failure to make those responsible for security accountable for their failures. Tell them that only by real, brutal, justice meted out to those who are irresponsible on the Internet will hacking be dealt with. Tell them that you believe it is a reasonable response to hacking to ensure that administrators who fail time and time again are castrated, and that castration is a reasonable punishment that will ensure a minimal impact on an administrator's employer while serving as a huge deterent against hackers and against incompetence. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to patch servers by competent administrators but that if incompetent admins are not kept accountable, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how poor security harms all three. Let your legislators know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies concerning maladministration of computer systems connected to the public Internet.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

Slashdot is like that. Anyone can become moderator - as long as they haven't been unlucky in metamoderation (which many of us who have always tried to be fair have) and moderation ultimately favours the trolls who set up a new account every week, post karma whoring stuff to raise their karma and then moderate according to opinions rather than to whether articles are any good.

Dealing with this issue would involve an overhaul of the Slashdot moderation system, but therein lies a dialema: while moderators who abuse the system have the upper hand, those who would do a good job are modded so that they can't ever get the karma necessary to moderate. Worse, the abusers have multiple metamoderation accounts too and can get good moderators kicked out of the system altogether.

This quagmire of poor moderators destroying the opportunity for good moderators to prevail will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that Slashdot is important to you, but that good moderation is a necessity. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to improve Slashdot's moderation system by Rob Malda and others, but that if the problem of poor moderators being out of touch and out of control is not resolved, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how poor moderation harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on Slashdot moderation.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

It's difficult for any reasonable person to know where to begin solving these issues. Traditionally, nailing down machines and networks so they are more secure has been seen as the best approach, but there's little anyone can do about having bandwidth used up by unaccountable "hacked" machines, as is seemingly more and more the modus-operandi.

Attempts to trace crackers are frequently wastes of time, and stiffer penalties for hackers are compromised by the fact that it's hard to actually catch the hackers in the first place. The situation is made worse that many of the most destructive hackers do not, themselves, set up anything beyond sets of scripts distributed to and run by suckers - so-called "script kiddies".

Given that hackers usually work by taking over other machines and coopting them into damaging clusters that can cause all manner of problems, less focus than you'd expect is put onto making machines secure in the first place. The responsibility for putting a computer on the Internet is that of a system administrator, but frequently system administrators are incompetent, and will happily leave computers hooked up to the Internet without ensuring that they're "good Internet citizens". Bugs are left unpatched, if the system administrators have even taken the trouble to discover if there are any problems in the first place. This is, in some ways, the equivalent of leaving an open gun in the middle of a street - even the most pro-gun advocates would argue that such an act would be dangerously incompetent. But putting a farm of servers on the Internet, and ignoring security issues completely, has become a widespread disease.

There is a solution, and that's to make system adminstrators responsible for their own computers. An administrator should be assumed, by default, to be responsible for any damage caused by hardware under his or her control unless it can be shown that there's little the admin could reasonably have done to prevent their machine from being hijacked. Clearly, a server unpatched a few days after a bug report, or a compromise unpatched that has never been publically documented, is not the fault of an admin, but leaving a server unpatched years after a compromise has been documented and patches have been available certainly is. Unlike hackers, it is easy to discover who is responsible for a compromised computer system. So issues of accountability are not a problem here.

Couple this with suitably harsh punishments, and not only will system administrators think twice before, say, leaving IIS 4 out in the wild vulnerable to NIMDA, but hackers too - for the same reasons as they avoid attacking hospital systems, etc - will think twice about compromising someone else's system. Fines for first offenses and very minor breaches can be followed by bigger deterents. If you were going to release a DoS attack into the wild, but knew that the result would be that many, many, system administrators would be physically castrated because of your actions, would you still do it?

Of course not. But even if you were, the fact that someone has been willing to allow their system to be used to close the DNS system, or take Yahoo offline, ought to be reason enough to be willing to consider such drastic remedies. Castration may sound harsh, but compared to modern American prison conditions, it's a relatively minor penalty for the system administrator to pay, and will merely result in discomfort combined with removal from the gene-pool. At the same time, such an experience will ensure that they take better care of their systems in future, without removing someone who might have skills critical to their employer's well being from being taken out of the job market.

The assumption has always been made that incompetent system administrators deserve no blame when their systems are hijacked and used for evil. This assumption has to change, and we must be willing to force this epidemic of bad administration to be resolved. Only by securing the systems of the Internet can we achieve a secure Internet. Only by making the consequences of hacking real and brutal can we create an adequate response to the notion that hacking, per-se, is not wrong, that it causes no damage.

This quagmire of people considering system administrators the innocents in computer security when they are themselves the most responsible for problems and holes will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator [senate.gov]. Write also to Jack Valenti, the CEO and chair of the MPAA, whose address and telephone number can be found at the About the MPAA page [mpaa.org]. Write too to Bill Gates [mailto], Chief of Technologies and thus in overall charge of security systems built into operating systems like Windows NT, at Microsoft. Tell them security is an important issue, and is being compromised by a failure to make those responsible for security accountable for their failures. Tell them that only by real, brutal, justice meted out to those who are irresponsible on the Internet will hacking be dealt with. Tell them that you believe it is a reasonable response to hacking to ensure that administrators who fail time and time again are castrated, and that castration is a reasonable punishment that will ensure a minimal impact on an administrator's employer while serving as a huge deterent against hackers and against incompetence. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to patch servers by competent administrators but that if incompetent admins are not kept accountable, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how poor security harms all three. Let your legislators know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies concerning maladministration of computer systems connected to the public Internet.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

At the same time, this is a useful project - clearly, Ethernet is a common communications infrastructure component, and is probably one of the most flexible. This type of technology means that someone can plug a (commodity?) component into an unquestionably commodity network infrastructure, something not really available right now. There's no need to rewrite the home because the best place for the CD deck is in one room, and one place where the output might want to be listened to is another.

These two issues are important - a problem has been solved with open components, and it would be impossible to solve that problem without that open infrastructure. Yet various groups, lead by the MPAA (and to an extent cheered on by the RIAA, the representative of the recording industry which has concerns about unauthorized copying) have promoted laws that remove that ability to problem solve. In the end, the output of copyrighted material producers is being compromised by these actions, but this doesn't stop them as there's an assumption that open technologies are bad, and that technologies need to be centrally controlled and contain technologies to prevent not merely uses of copyright material that are clearly unfair to the content producers, but also of uses of that material that the producers have not heard of.

One company, Microsoft, has already proposed and demonstrated technologies that would make projects such as the above impossible. Content would not be copyable onto unprotected commodity components in Palladium, a digital restrictions mechanism that uses encryption and authorization at the hardware level to divide a world into "trusted" and "untrusted" realms. While Microsoft argues their technology is voluntarily, a content producer can restrict use of their content to only those who sign up for the technological restrictions.

This is a block on innovation. It's a block on personal freedom. In the end, it will cause damage not merely to consumers but also to those who produce content. We face a future of stagnant information growth, resembling more the state of Brewery development in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, than the technology industry during the same period.

Palladium is backed by entertainment industry promoted laws such as the DMCA, that make it illegal to bypass access control mechanisms, such as Palladium's Digital Restrictions Mechanisms.

This quagmire of a paranoid entertainment industry crippling the future both of content production and technology will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Write also to the Jack Valenti, the CEO and chair of the MPAA, whose address and telephone number can be found at the About the MPAA page. Write too to Bill Gates, Chief of Technologies and thus in overall charge of Palladium, at Microsoft. Tell them you understand the concerns content producers have about unauthorized copying, but that without an open technological infrastructure, the value of content will be lowered, and as the bar to entry into content production is raised more and more innovation will be sucked out of the industry. Tell them that technologies such as Palladium, DVD CSS, and other technological locks, will damage both the content and technology industries in ways that go well beyond anything reasonable. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to create new ways of viewing and hearing content but that if those technologies are closed, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how digital restrictions harms all three. Let your legislators know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies towards legally enforcing clearly damaging restrictions management systems.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

The bad behaviour of many CEOs creating crooked startups, picking apart viable companies, swindling employees and stockholders, and producing goods that aren't worth the money spent on the packaging, has lead to a damaging image so that all CEOs, regardless of whether they fall into that category, or are the kinds of nice ones that appear on the cover of Fortune magazine as people who have turned companies around, attend every employee party and are considered "down to earth", "one of the team", "a close friend to every employee", and who introduce back massages as a part of keeping their employees happy, are regarded as evil dishonest individuals, who do not deserve the multimillion salaries they're paid. This in turn puts people off wanting to become CEOs - after all, who wants to earn $57,000,000 a year plus stock options if it means not only having give two thirds of that to the tax man, leaving you with a measily $20,000,000 or so, but also means being assumed to be a common white collar criminal, always on the take, except when you're on the front cover of Fortune?

This quagmire of people not wanting to be CEOs because the taxes leave them with only a few million dollars as salary, and because CEOs aren't always the most popular people around, will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them CEOs are important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to cut taxes for the top 5% earners in the country to make being a CEO a more attractive proposition but that if the reputation of CEOs keeps being sullied by exposes and court cases for the really crooked ones, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternative jobs. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how CEOs being treated badly harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policy on the treatment of CEOs.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

It's ironic that this happens and yet it's considered a poor-man's profession. Programmers in this field are generally poorly treated, with poor contracts, little chance of advancement, and little cross-skillification that would allow a programmer to move into a more respected arena. This is, in part, because it's an entertainment area, and in part because for every superskilled programmer who is able to push the arena into a new paradigm, there must be a hundred who can barely put together a bunch of assembler instructions to copy memory from one place to another without it taking five times as long as it ought to, and containing bugs.

This quagmire of the more innovative area of programming being hampered by a low perception of the people involved and the skills they bring to the table will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them you value programmers who have the imagination and skills to create entirely new technologies for the manipulation of complex graphics, and who have the cut needed to understand the essentials of good game play. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to create wonderful new games but that if good programmers are put off by poor working conditions and salaries, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how poor working conditions detering the best of the best harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on elite computer game programmers.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

I was just thinking about how much people like you and I are played by this "Western Government". The deal is, I went to my state's web site to try to figure out how to run for Senator, Governor, etc. Yes, maybe I'm not old enough yet, but there was still no information! The best way (only way) right now is to be an intern and watch over some guy who did that too and move up.

What if you're just a simple decent qualified person who wants to run for Selectman/Mayor/Rep/Senator/Governor/President? I went to the Senate's web site, for instance (and many others using google) trying to find out HOW TO RUN! This information is just not on the internet (at least not for my state.)

Just yesterday I thought it would be sweet if there was a web site people could go to to see how to run for political leadership in their state. At least paperwork and deadlines would be greate, but procedures, rules, and regulations in addition, would be excellent!

Seriously, at least 100 million people in the USA are qualified to run for those positions I mentioned (at least by the age rule set in the constitution.)

I want to see competition, I want to see REAL people running! What would REALLY be sweet would be a law by the Senators to make States maintain a web site like I described and one that would also show WHO is running and what they DO and what they have DONE. This would be so sweet. And each candidate would have his own web site hosted (or just linked.) FAIRNESS IN EVERY WAY!

Nobody votes because theres a bunch of bums we don't know anything about who have a gazillion of ties and responsibilities, once in office, to the people who got them there!!!

This would be a pretty cheap way for equal spending that everybody keeps pushing for, good for communicating at least with voters that have access to the internet (the majority.)

The GPL was created for a specific aim - to ensure that there would be a base of software that is, for want of a better term, free to the end user. That means that the end user need not care about how the software is created and the aims of the person creating it, but is able to use the software for their own personal use to the best of its capabilities. If the software needs to support something new, they can change it. But in itself, this promotes a non-collaborative paradigm. And this creates - as you can see from some of the heated discussions of GPL vs BSD/X11, etc, discussions on Slashdot - an ironic dichotomy where the aims of those who use GPL'd software may be at odds with those of the original developers, almost my definition.

This quagmire of free software frustrating a small minority of those who are uninvolved in its development who in many ways wish to remove the very freedoms the GPL provides to users of their own derived software will not go away by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them you believe that collaboration and the use of derivation is something you want to encourage. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by the free software and open source communities, but if the freedoms they introduce end up being compromised by incompatable derived software that removes those freedoms you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how we need to work together to create a world where collaboration and derivation is a norm that can be relied upon to exist. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on your legislator's policy towards free and open software.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

Laws are not made to be broken, they're made to make living a little easier. If you have problems with the laws on the books, and believe they're not helping, you need to raise your voice. Make your government aware of your misgivings. It's YOUR government damn it. You may have decided to let it run itself these last few years, but ultimately the founding fathers made sure that the government would be, in some way, answerable to you - be that, arguably as originally intended, on a State by State level, or, as it is now, on a more pluralist democratic level (yes, as long as the legislature is answerable to the populace, it's a democracy. You don't need more than that, all this BS about rule by plebicite is just that: BS)

Speeding may or may not be something you believe should be outlawed. Clearly, if you believe it should be, you must call for more appropriate and stict enforcement of this law - if everyone is forced, through widespread non-compliance such that compliance is itself dangerous, to disobey that law, then the only way it can be made to work is to create mechanisms that enforce it properly. Similarly, you may be of the opinion that selective or patchy enforcement means that the law is itself wrong, that the ends do not justify having the law in the first place, and that the law should itself be taken off the books. But without you declaring it a problem, and demanding your government deal with this, the government will assume you consent to the laws we have as they're written.

This quagmire of government inaction over inappropriately implemented laws regardless of the consequences will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman [house.gov] or senator [senate.gov]. Tell them either to enforce the law or take it off the books, depending on what you believe. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to protect your safety, or that you're fed up of taxpayers money being spent on enforcing unenforcable laws, but if money keeps being thrown at half-assed half-implemented solutions that you either agree or disagree with, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how half implemented laws harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on whether or not they either implement the law fully, or abolish it, depending on your point of view.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

I agree. Seanator McCain is very conservative. He is hawkish on the Iraq issue, and conservative on social issues such as abortion. And where these social issues intersect with tech issues, he will favor a conservative social stance. (Take, for example, his sponsorship of a resolution designating October "Children's Internet Safety Month", a term of dubious nature which could easily fit any one of a number of different positions.)

I myself am very liberal, and disagree with him on many such issues.

Nonetheless, John McCain is a man that I respect very much. I believe that, unlike come of his colleagues, he does his very best to serve the people. His long and vigorous struggle for campaign finance reform provides ample evidence, as do his efforts to curb wasteful spending, even in areas traditionally favored by conservatives, like Defense. He has also shown his willingness to work with Democrats on bipartisan issues. For these reasons, I respect him one hell of a lot more than Bush, or Cheney, or Hollings, all of whom spend more time serving their corporate cronies than their constituents. McCain and Senator Russ Feingold are, to my mind, the finest statesmen currently serving in Congress.

As I say, I disagree with Senator McCain on many subjects. Given his record, however, I think he is likely to handle this appointment in a way that the tech community will approve of. I suspect that he will put up a vigorous fight against the CBDTPA, on the grounds that it's a textbook case of special interests trying to buy legislation.

One thing I'm sure of: it's going to be an interesting ride!

I agree. Seanator McCain is very conservative. He is hawkish on the Iraq issue, and conservative on social issues such as abortion. And where these social issues intersect with tech issues, he will favor a conservative social stance. (Take, for example, his sponsorship of a resolution designating October "Children's Internet Safety Month", a term of dubious nature which could easily fit any one of a number of different positions.)

I myself am very liberal, and disagree with him on many such issues.

Nonetheless, John McCain is a man that I respect very much. I believe that, unlike come of his colleagues, he does his very best to serve the people. His long and vigorous struggle for campaign finance reform provides ample evidence, as do his efforts to curb wasteful spending, even in areas traditionally favored by conservatives, like Defense. He has also shown his willingness to work with Democrats on bipartisan issues. For these reasons, I respect him one hell of a lot more than Bush, or Cheney, or Hollings, all of whom spend more time serving their corporate cronies than their constituents. McCain and Senator Russ Feingold are, to my mind, the finest statesmen currently serving in Congress.

As I say, I disagree with Senator McCain on many subjects. Given his record, however, I think he is likely to handle this appointment in a way that the tech community will approve of. I suspect that he will put up a vigorous fight against the CBDTPA, on the grounds that it's a textbook case of special interests trying to buy legislation.

One thing I'm sure of: it's going to be an interesting ride!

I agree. Seanator McCain is very conservative. He is hawkish on the Iraq issue, and conservative on social issues such as abortion. And where these social issues intersect with tech issues, he will favor a conservative social stance. (Take, for example, his sponsorship of a resolution designating October "Children's Internet Safety Month", a term of dubious nature which could easily fit any one of a number of different positions.)

I myself am very liberal, and disagree with him on many such issues.

Nonetheless, John McCain is a man that I respect very much. I believe that, unlike come of his colleagues, he does his very best to serve the people. His long and vigorous struggle for campaign finance reform provides ample evidence, as do his efforts to curb wasteful spending, even in areas traditionally favored by conservatives, like Defense. He has also shown his willingness to work with Democrats on bipartisan issues. For these reasons, I respect him one hell of a lot more than Bush, or Cheney, or Hollings, all of whom spend more time serving their corporate cronies than their constituents. McCain and Senator Russ Feingold are, to my mind, the finest statesmen currently serving in Congress.

As I say, I disagree with Senator McCain on many subjects. Given his record, however, I think he is likely to handle this appointment in a way that the tech community will approve of. I suspect that he will put up a vigorous fight against the CBDTPA, on the grounds that it's a textbook case of special interests trying to buy legislation.

One thing I'm sure of: it's going to be an interesting ride!

I agree. Seanator McCain is very conservative. He is hawkish on the Iraq issue, and conservative on social issues such as abortion. And where these social issues intersect with tech issues, he will favor a conservative social stance. (Take, for example, his sponsorship of a resolution designating October "Children's Internet Safety Month", a term of dubious nature which could easily fit any one of a number of different positions.)

I myself am very liberal, and disagree with him on many such issues.

Nonetheless, John McCain is a man that I respect very much. I believe that, unlike come of his colleagues, he does his very best to serve the people. His long and vigorous struggle for campaign finance reform provides ample evidence, as do his efforts to curb wasteful spending, even in areas traditionally favored by conservatives, like Defense. He has also shown his willingness to work with Democrats on bipartisan issues. For these reasons, I respect him one hell of a lot more than Bush, or Cheney, or Hollings, all of whom spend more time serving their corporate cronies than their constituents. McCain and Senator Russ Feingold are, to my mind, the finest statesmen currently serving in Congress.

As I say, I disagree with Senator McCain on many subjects. Given his record, however, I think he is likely to handle this appointment in a way that the tech community will approve of. I suspect that he will put up a vigorous fight against the CBDTPA, on the grounds that it's a textbook case of special interests trying to buy legislation.

One thing I'm sure of: it's going to be an interesting ride!

I agree. Seanator McCain is very conservative. He is hawkish on the Iraq issue, and conservative on social issues such as abortion. And where these social issues intersect with tech issues, he will favor a conservative social stance. (Take, for example, his sponsorship of a resolution designating October "Children's Internet Safety Month", a term of dubious nature which could easily fit any one of a number of different positions.)

I myself am very liberal, and disagree with him on many such issues.

Nonetheless, John McCain is a man that I respect very much. I believe that, unlike come of his colleagues, he does his very best to serve the people. His long and vigorous struggle for campaign finance reform provides ample evidence, as do his efforts to curb wasteful spending, even in areas traditionally favored by conservatives, like Defense. He has also shown his willingness to work with Democrats on bipartisan issues. For these reasons, I respect him one hell of a lot more than Bush, or Cheney, or Hollings, all of whom spend more time serving their corporate cronies than their constituents. McCain and Senator Russ Feingold are, to my mind, the finest statesmen currently serving in Congress.

As I say, I disagree with Senator McCain on many subjects. Given his record, however, I think he is likely to handle this appointment in a way that the tech community will approve of. I suspect that he will put up a vigorous fight against the CBDTPA, on the grounds that it's a textbook case of special interests trying to buy legislation.

One thing I'm sure of: it's going to be an interesting ride!

I agree. Seanator McCain is very conservative. He is hawkish on the Iraq issue, and conservative on social issues such as abortion. And where these social issues intersect with tech issues, he will favor a conservative social stance. (Take, for example, his sponsorship of a resolution designating October "Children's Internet Safety Month", a term of dubious nature which could easily fit any one of a number of different positions.)

I myself am very liberal, and disagree with him on many such issues.

Nonetheless, John McCain is a man that I respect very much. I believe that, unlike come of his colleagues, he does his very best to serve the people. His long and vigorous struggle for campaign finance reform provides ample evidence, as do his efforts to curb wasteful spending, even in areas traditionally favored by conservatives, like Defense. He has also shown his willingness to work with Democrats on bipartisan issues. For these reasons, I respect him one hell of a lot more than Bush, or Cheney, or Hollings, all of whom spend more time serving their corporate cronies than their constituents. McCain and Senator Russ Feingold are, to my mind, the finest statesmen currently serving in Congress.

As I say, I disagree with Senator McCain on many subjects. Given his record, however, I think he is likely to handle this appointment in a way that the tech community will approve of. I suspect that he will put up a vigorous fight against the CBDTPA, on the grounds that it's a textbook case of special interests trying to buy legislation.

One thing I'm sure of: it's going to be an interesting ride!

Some relevent links:

• McCain's Low Power FM Bill Press Release
• Prometheus Radio Project, a key LPFM advocacy group

Neither organization would consider McCain's 2001 year to be "highly conservative." The American Conservative Union rates senators on this page. A higher rating means more conservative. For example, Arizona Republican John Kyl scores a 100 (very conservative) while California Democrat Barbara Boxer scores a 0 (very liberal). Senator McCain scored a 68 in 2001. In 2000 he scored 81 and his lifetime rating is 84. He is obviously becoming more liberal by these ratings.

McCain wasn't the lowest scoring Republican, as Sen. Spector from PA and both the Maine senators scored lower. McCain also scored higher than any democrat, the most conservative of whom is GA's Miller, with a score of 60. For reference, Sen. Lott scored 96 and Sen. Frist scored 100, while Sen. Daschle scored an 8 and Sen. Kennedy scored 4. So, by ACU standards, he is one of the more liberal Republicans in the Senate, though he should not be called a liberal.

The Americans for Democratic Action have a similar system, but they score it oppositely: a rating of 0 = very conservative and a rating of 100 = very liberal. You can see a .PDF file of the 2001 ratings on this page. Sen. McCain scored a 40, higher than the lowest Democrat (Sen. Miller of GA) who scored a 35. By ADA reckoning, McCain was tied for the most liberal Republican Senator (with Spector (PA) and Sen. Snowe (ME)).

His Stances and choices usually support what the Democrats want, and often exceeds their wildest dreams.

Give us some examples.

The McCain-Feingold-Cochran Campaign Reform Act. This act was assailed by many conservatives as being unconstitutional and giving incumbants free reign in their campaigns.

The problem here, is that only the rich can afford an easy to use web publishing package like FrontPage running on Windoes XP/2000. Everyone else is forced to use a free but hard to use knock-off like Linux to make their voices heard.

Opening up the ability to publish could, as you suggest, be done by providing everyone in the country with a free copy of FrontPage. However, the ability to publish is limited if that that you publish can only be seen on, say, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and it would not be beyond Microsoft to modify FrontPage to do just that, restricting content only to that small elite who can afford Windows 2000 and Windows XP with Internet Explorer. A better solution would be to develop the tools: make those provided by Linux the equal to, or greater than, anything the competition can provide. The "cheap knock-offs", as you put it, would then be open to everyone.

This quagmire of content controlled by an elite will not disappeaar by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that the only way to open up the information revolution and provide the ability to openly criticise government to all is to provide open, capable, web publishing software to all for free. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done in the Free Software and Open Source domains, but if more resources are not devoted to improving the output of these groups you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how providing free, high quality, web publishing sofware can help all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on open web publishing software.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

Your government throws money at all types of security "solutions" right now because it believes that is what you want it to do. It believes that, given the events of the last 14 months, you are frightened enough to break Franklin's famous principle about trading freedoms for security. It will do anything to make you feel safer, not only by making you safer, but by throwing tax payer dollars at pointless and socially dangerous projects such as "odor identification systems", as well as more infamous projects such as the face scanning technologies used in Tampa that were found to misidentify a large percentage of the population.

This quagmire of government spending to make you feel safer regardless of the consequences will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them not to do anything. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to protect your safety, but if money keeps being thrown at more and more invasive and ultimately pointless security measures you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how them doing stuff all the time just for the sake of being popular harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on whether or not they can summon up the political courage to spend an entire term getting nothing done.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

The agenda of Yahoo is the same as it is for all the giant corporations, ie Microsoft, WalMart, AT&T, Sam Adams, AOL Time Warner, etc; it's to turn you into a wage earning slave exploiting your production on one hand, while controlling what you spend with the pitiful money they give you.

This quagmire of big business and big gubmint working together to exploit you must end. But it will not happen by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator, or to the Bush Family Evil Empire at the White House. Tell them that personal freedom and privacy combined with decent working conditions, a fair wage for a fair day's work, and decent, affordable, universal health care, are important to you - that you should have the rightt to control that that you store on your own disks. Tell them that you are appalled at Yahoo!'s and the pResident's efforts in this area, but that in the absense of full disclosure, you will have to find a less secure and intelligently run country to live in. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how a corporate state run for greed's sake that exploits the workers destroys all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on his or her policy on the rights of ordinary, hard working, people.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

Most countries have taken this approach. In America, the FCC has taken on a role not merely of allocating frequencies but of controlling, insofar as they constitutionally can, what travels over them. The absurd limits on the 2.4GHz band, created in part not to help foster private telecommunications but to make microwave ovens legal, mean that communications over these bands have to be ultra-local in scale and have lead to conflicts between household and office equipment that should not exist. When my microwave oven is on, despite the heavy shielding, my Seimens Gigaset phone's reception is audibly impaired. I gather a common complaint is that 2.4GHz phones tend to interfere with 802.11* wireless networks too. And all because of artificial scarcity.

In the UK, until the mid-eighties, it was virtually impossible to use any kind of wireless device without a licence. An opening up made portable telephones and similar devices possible, but innovation was hampered for the longest time because of this.

A genuine opening up - with some restrictions for some bands to reduce the chances of a destructive tragedy of the commons, but otherwise an unrestricted unrestrained environement - of large amounts of the spectrum, possibly insofar as practically possible going for the long term goal of opening up 90% of the airwaves, would create opportunities both for localised and long distance communications to a degree currently unthought of. Private, community owned, relay networks could create sane and affordable telephone provision, last mile provision for Internet type networks would become easier and could work on a broadcast rather than point-to-point model. Devices designed to operate within homes could work without a maze of unintelligable cabling - your TV and receiver could receive digital signals directly from a DVD player anywhere in the house, as long as the signals followed agreed upon standards. It'd be ironic to see "plug and play" type functionality built into every household media device to free itself from the use of plugs and sockets.

At the moment, the government and FCC has no incentive whatsoever to do any of this. Governments have recently (last 20 years or so) seen rationing the electromagnetic spectum as an opportunity to raise stealth taxes. In an era where everyone looks at their income tax bills and blames the government, but looks at their cellphone bills and blames the cellphone companies, it makes sense for them to lighten the load on income taxes by moving to indirect taxation such as that generated by auctioning spectrum. This is a disasterous policy as not merely does it undermine the innovation that could be fostered in an environment of free spectrum, but it constitutes a form of regressive taxation as certain types of communication becomes more and more important and necessary because of network effects. I've known employers that refuse to employ people for certain types of job who will not supply a working cellphone number.

The spectrum will not open itself. The government needs to act, and act in the public interest, not what it can get away with to raise funds on-the-sly. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to the FCC, your congressman or senator. Tell them that innovation and freedom is important to you, and that it's important that the airwaves be opened up to foster a genuinely innovative and progressive culture where communications are unhampered by artificial scarcities, monopolies, and restraints. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done into creating a large ISM band, but if these efforts fail, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed wireless technologies, to get around the bottlenecks the current ISM bands impose. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how opening up the airwaves can help all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on his or her policy on opening up the airwaves.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.