Michigan First With A Law That Could Outlaw VPNs

zaren writes "Holy frell, Taco, we're gonna be criminals! I was checking out Freedom to Tinker after reading the posting about that multi-state anti-VPN-style legislation, and I saw a new posting that says that Michigan has ALREADY passed such legislation, and it goes into effect on MONDAY, MARCH 31, 2003 . Guess I better tighten down the base station and batten down the hatches..."

Comments

First the RIAA and now this all in one day?

[ChaoticChaos]

WTF?! I can't rip CDs to MP3s anymore and now it's illegal to use a VPN?

Honestly, I'm starting to feel guilty as soon as I start using a PC. I must be breaking some law as soon as I sit down.

It's about time for the otherwise useless ACLU to start some legal action. Finally, they'll have something to pursue that's worthy of their time.

Also with effect 31 March...

[canthusus]

See http://www.michiganlegislature.org/mileg.asp?page= getObject&objName=mcl-750-335-amended

***** 750.335.amended THIS AMENDED SECTION IS EFFECTIVE MARCH 31, 2003 *****

750.335.amended Lewd and lascivious cohabitation and gross lewdness.
Sec. 335.

Any man or woman, not being married to each other, who lewdly and lasciviously associates and cohabits together, and any man or woman, married or unmarried, who is guilty of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than 1 year, or a fine of not more than $1,000.00. No prosecution shall be commenced under this section after 1 year from the time of committing the offense.

History: 1931, Act 328, Eff. Sept. 18, 1931 ;--CL 1948, 750.335 ;--Am. 1952, Act 73, Eff. Sept. 18, 1952 ;--Am. 2002, Act 672, Eff. Mar. 31, 2003 .

This is the amended version, newly revised, not some ancient statute they've never gotten round to changing. What did they change from last time? They doubled the fine.

Michigan doesn't seem to have made it to the 21st century yet.

FINALLY!

[pyrote]

Finally Microsoft windows is illegal!!!!

Any web browser can be used to access a proxy server making All web browsers illegal in Michigan. Since IE is so integrated into the software (that it can't possibly be removed), it makes all windows OS's illegal!

Of course this applies to all linux browsers, but we can remove those.

Ahh yes, the crap is piling up, and it aint the dairy cows.

Not concealing anything.

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

Every IP packet I pass through my ISP contains a source and destination IP address.

What else do they need to know?

"Your honour, at what layer of the OSI Network Layer model is this bill to be enforced?"

"Er, case dismissed."

Re:Not concealing anything.

[Tailhook]

In response to the posters point you quote the law, specifically that section labeled (c). What does that have to do with his point? His ISP provides IP service. He sends and receives packets via that service. Every damn one has a source and a destination. At what point is he in violation of the section you highlighted?

He violates no law, including this one, operating VPN tunnels via his ISP. He has the right to send and receive IP traffic. The law mentions nothing about the content of the traffic he sends or receives. Presumably he has permission from whoever is at the other end of the VPN to use it.

You, and the rest of you hypersensitive zealots, need to do better than highlighting some piece of legislation to make your point. It is plainly obvious to me that NAT, VPN, SSL, SSH, HTTP proxies or any of the other mechanisms you folks claim will be made illegal by this law are simply not.

But have your fun. It's what you're all about...

Re:Haha, This could be the end of NAT!

[pyrote]

Can't wait to pay another 5 bucks a month so my handicapped little brother can surf pokemon.

All this does is make the isp aware of how many machines I have.

A while back the ma-bells tried to charge for every phone you had in your house, and they succeded for several years.

This is another in a long line of atrocities commited by our elected representatives.

Re:Not one but two !!!

[MikeFM]

I still think all the geeks should collect in one state and make their own laws. I like Florida because it has nice beaches, warm weather, nude women, and the majority of it is uninhabited. Any state with few enough current citizens would do though. The only way to stop stupid laws like this is to have a political voice.. and being that we're outnumbered by morons we need to collect in a large enough group in a small enough region of morons so that we can be heard. Having our country controlled by corporate interests and religious fanatics isn't exactly good for our future.

make the dog vomit up its tail

[kubla2000]

This is easy for me to write, I'm in Europe so can't participate; however, there have been calls for geeks to politicise, to make their voices heard...

If every university and college student turned him/her self into the police on Monday morning for being in violation of this new law, the system would choke. It'd get a hell of a lot of media attention too. Something has to be done... these laws, largely unenforceable, continue to be passed... each one errodes the rights of ordinary people...

I simply can't fathom how a law this monomentally stupid has been passed... but it's got to be challenged. A mass protest would certainly expedite it and might prevent similar laws from being passed in other states where they're being considered.

The Ma Bell similarity

[BadDoggie]

It was "Ma Bell", not "ma bells" or "Baby Bells" (which were the resulting smaller phone service providers after the 1984 break-up) and the similarities are many.

Back in the bad old days (prior to Jan. 1, 1984), you could only get a phone from AT&T. They owned Western Electric, which was the only manufacturer of telephone equipment. They owned the lines (there were some exceptions where GTE had a local market). If you wanted a phone, you had to accept the whole package.

You had to lease your phones from them -- you couldn't buy them. You had to pay extra for DTMF (Touch-Tone [TM]). Your monthly bill was based on the base rate times the number of phones plus the base local call charge plus the incredibly overpriced long distance calls, which themselves worked on a minimum of three minutes and charges were rounded up to the next whole minute.

They stifled technology much more so than IBM, even when it hurt them. It became cheaper and easier for them to have customers using DTMF, but because people wanted it rather than the damned dialing wheels, they kept on charging premiums, which meant they had to keep those old number nine crossbars in the COs rather than (or in addition to) the electronic switches.

The whole idea of ringer equivalence existed so they could shoot a charge down your line and know how many phones you had. If it didn't match, they'd come over for a "technical visit". If they saw signs that you had more than the paid/claimed number of phones, they'd either hardwire the phone in the jack or remove other jacks. You had to let them; it was their equipment.

People used to huddle around a phone to listen and talk at the same time because Ma Bell wanted you to pay twice as much to have two people at home talk to a caller at the same time.

ISPs are trying this game, requiring you to use their hardware, accept their version of "normal use", and pay per computer rather than for the amount of data transfer so they can claim "unlimited" or "flat-rate service. It may be illegal based on the same decision which finally allowed people to buy their own phones, have as many as they wanted and use them as they saw fit.

This needs to be stopped quickly. Lawyers need to compare these laws to the Orders from Judge Harold Greene which stopped AT&T doing this, and have this bad legislation removed. You people in Michigan need to get started!

woof.

Re:The Ma Bell similarity

[BadDoggie]

It wasn't homework for me -- it was straight from memory, right down to the number nine crossbars (which made phreaking easy). Only after they disappeared were the phone companies able to run things like unauthorised tone detectors.

Another sick side of the stifling of technology was number tracing. It became a hackneyed device for all mysteries and thrillers, but the real-life side of it really did cause a lot of headaches. Ma Bell claimed they couldn't internally check connections. The police would have to call to prepare for a trace on a known line and Bell would send some poor schlub into the pits to physically trace a number.

A really good lineman with a lot of luck on certain equipment might have been able to find the line in question and track its connection within four minutes, hence the ubiquitous three minute minimum trace times in both film and reality. A lot of kidnappers and other criminals could have been caught were it not for Bell's refusal to acknowledge that they had the means to to immediately identify a call's path.

I forgot the obligatory link before: Bell System Property - Not For Sale". Surf around that site for lots of other information and neat stuff.

I haven't been able to find the Orders and Decrees from the actual case, but I'm pretty sure they're on-line somewhere.

woof.

Re:The Ma Bell similarity

[BadDoggie]

It's a "measure of power" only in the broadest sense. I'm gonna briefly get technical here and hope that you and maybe a couple other people notice this, since this story is more than 10 hours old.

One REN (Ringer Equivalence Number) represents a single ringer load of 7000 ohms (6929 Ohms resistance in series with 8F capacitance). U.S. (and most other) phones run at 48V (RMS) on-hook and 96V at ring.

Most phones ring at 20Hz and the REN carries the suffix 'A'; devices which ring at any (permitted) frequency have the suffix 'B'. The math gets complicated when you figure you're forcing 96VAC (RMS) down a few miles of occasionally looping copper, split out, to a device with leading and resistive components before a reactant load.

IIRC, most of Ma Bell's phones had 0.8A RENs. I don't have one here (nor any of the manuals -- I did say I was doing this from memory), so I can't check. But remember that you leased your phones from Ma Bell and they knew that the load you should have had. Generally, it was about 5600 Ohms times the number of phones. Even if you had paid for five phones, the difference in the load with an additional phone was notable.

Of course, in our house we only had "two phones", which we claimed we carried from room to room. We had a couple real old phones with much lower RENs (although we didn't know about the technical side until I became a phreak). Because my parents both worked back then in the 60s (not so common then), we were able to force Ma Bell's inspectors to visit Saturday. Friday night the rest of the phones disappeared into hiding places that even the LAPD with search warrants would have had a hard time finding.

Again, current RENs vary greatly, but back before 1984, there were standards. I was constantly hounded by my parents to disconnect my modem (300 baud acoustic) from the line when I wasn't using it.

Luckily, I got a job for a company that made, among other things, modems, and got a (then $3K+) 300/1200 jobber with an REN of 0.8 or so and which separated the phone pass-through from the circuit, allowing the modem to "replace" the basement phone.

I spent hours explaining that one to my father.

Are you people paranoid?

[JenovaSynthesis]

Ok you guys are just being a little to anal retentive with the words.

First off disguising origin. Anyone with half a brain knows you cannot get a location from an IP address. What they mean by it is IP Spoofing. If I'm a Comcast customer, I can't set my network to trick others into thinking I'm on Verizon, AOL/TW's, etc. If I am a Comcast customer, then I cannot disguise my IP to say otherwise. If the law needs my physical location, they can go through the legal channels and get it from Comcast.

CID blocking is iffy. I do not think this wouild be affected as it would force SBC and such to discontinue services like Privacy Manager. Second the biggest concern is telemarketing. The FCC is setting up the National Do Not Call list in July with enforcement in September. Why worry?

VPNs would be legal at this point because a) No state legislature is going to tell a corporation (Borders, the big 3 auto makers come to mind) that they can no longer use thier legit VPNs. And if they go after legit personal VPNs, one could claim discrimination based on that. Now if your ISP bans VPNs (which is thier right) then this law is moot anyways. b) Comcast et al do not ban VPNs to my knowledge nor do they ban use of NAT. I bet they love NAT because instead of charging you $10-15 for more IPs, they can charge you and others $40/mo for other individuals. Last I heard, Comcast only cares about multiple computers if they are hogging bandwidth or if non-customers are getting regular access (meaning sharing with neighbors via 802.11, etc.)

Can you think of any modern applications that this law is really targeting? Cell phone cloning and cable descramblers come to mind fast.

Re:Schools?

[pi_rules]

You didn't happen to miss the myriad of shootings that happened over the past few years, did you? A disgruntled student knows when taking a firearm into school that there is a 100% guarantee that nobody else in that building has access to a firearm. It's like shooting fish in a barrel!

Let a few teachers pack a gun under their shirt, or on their ankle. We're talking about college educated people who have decided to pick a career to help children rise to their full potential here, not Joe Blow off the street. School's a friggen danger zone. Some nut job wants to pop a few children in the head, where's he gonna go? A school! You're guaranteed to have to wait for the police to get there before you can get taken down. You'd have time to reload your pistol over and over again as you mowed them all down.

I think we should allow guns in school for the safety of the children. Personally, any gun-free zone is a horribly unsafe place if you ask me. If you disagree I suggest you slap a sign in your front yard saying, "This is a gun free zone!". If any would-be criminals are casing for a place to rob, or murder, it's probably going to be yours.

Think about the children!