Red Hat puts out Legislation Alert on the SSSCA

the_2nd_coming writes "Red Hat has announced a legislation alert for the SSSCA. They are collecting comments to hand to lawmakers. Get those comments in while you can, but make sure you give them some thought."

Comments

Re:Get behind this!

[tim_maroney]

According to this bill the TELNET protocol would be ILLIGAL to use, same with SMTP, any protocol which used plain text transfers would be ILLIGAL:...

Not even remotely true. First off, try the very second paragraph:

Subsection (a) does not apply to the offer for sale or provision of, or other trafficking in, any previously-owned interactive digital device, if such device was legally manufactured or imported, and sold, prior to the effective date of regulations adopted under section 104 and not subsequently modified in violation of (a) or 103(a).

In addition, this bill only applies when private sector representatives have achieved consensus on a security standard for a particular technology. Can you imagine that the Internet standard bodies would create standards that ban all the previous standards on which the Internet is founded and by which it runs?

It's not a good bill, but let's not lie about what it actually is. Sheesh. I mean, the first time this bill was mentioned here, some geek at a Linux zine was claiming it banned all open source software.

Tim