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"Super-DMCA" Outlaws Ph.D. Thesis
zenquest writes "SecurityFocus reports in this article that a recently-enacted Michigan law makes the graduate work of Niels Provos illegal. (His honeyd project was discussed here a few months back.) According to the article, "Among other things, residents of the Great Lakes State can no longer knowingly "assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise" any device or software that conceals "the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service." It's also a crime to provide written instructions on creating such a device or program. Violators face up to four years in prison." Provos has had to move his website and research papers to a server in the Netherlands. Similar bills are under consideration in seven states, and have become law in six others. The EFF has more information about the individual states. So, does this mean that Caller-ID block now illegal, as well?"
This is outrageous, how far will the DMCA go before those in charge realize what it's doing to us. How much will it take before soemone decides to put an end to it.
Doesn't this outlaw NAT?
Think of all the poor little DSL routers out there.
Oh the humanity!!
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
You are aware that this law effectivly forbids selling/advertising/installing/providing support/etc' to any OS that contains firewalling and NAT components ? (i.e. Linux/*BSD/Windows >= 2k)
Does anyone know what the impetus behind these DMCA+ laws is coming from? They seem enough different in intent that I doubt it's the Disney+friends music world. They've already been passed in half a dozen states (including Michigan), and are under consideration in several more. I'm writing my state legislators, but I think the time has come to mount a campaign to roll back the DMCA in its entirety. It's clear (to me, anyway) that it's bad law. We were smart enough to undo prohibition, although it took about 12 years. Maybe we can correct this error more promptly.
Better yet, if this law really is as broad as claimed, most software for sending spam is now illegal in Michigan. It might even be illegal to operate an open relay, or to use one for spamming. Persuading law enforcement to go after a spammer on these grounds would be another matter altogether, I suppose.
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
Does it go so far to require the Telco to provide caller ID to everyone? Isn't charging for that information effectively blocking that information?
Suppose Ralan Alsky (just to pick a name at random) sends .. uh .. email, routed in such a way that you can't tell he was the originator. He connects with an open relay, possibly the Total Home Network, Coordination and Entertainment device in, say Gill Bates' (just to pull another name at random) house, normally used for counting the wilted stalks of celery in his refridgerator crisper drawer and monitoring dog poop rings in his front lawn (much less mysterious than crop circles, but there they are), the email is sent to thousands of worthy individuals (worth of being on some CD he loaded up with publicly posted email addresses from alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus) Ralan has devised a way to avoid indicating the origin of a missive, a Dell Optiplex GX150 in his garage, which promotes a certain salve, which when applied to a certain private part make a certain HOT penny stock worth 24% more in the morning and consolidates debt to a 2nd mortgage on an old pair of Nikes at 3.85% APR. Further, the affiliate who has paid Ralan for this service accepts calls at a certain payphone booth outside a Southfield, MI, 7-11 for the first 4 hours the missive has been present on the internet.
Now, I ask you in all objectivity, "should that be illegal?"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I do research on security and cryptography related technologies. I'm happy I don't have to deal with this kind of censorship and I wish to express my sympathy for Provos. He's not even american for fuck's sake. And Honeyd is probably used more for protection by admins than by hackers around!
I wonder, is he gonna get the phd after all??
Another scary example, scarier perhaps if not so blatant, is this http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,130 26,933055,00.html
I work for large academic Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) lab that for the most part works on DoD contracts. We are allowed to connect to work from home via secure ID cards and are encouraged to get a free single port router from work to use at home, these routers employ NAT for extra security.
Does that mean that people who work for organizations that do DoD work can no longer protect their home systems, and thus protect the governmental work systems?
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I think that the point is that he no longer has those documents in his possession. No documents, no crime. The documents in question were written before the law came into effect, and he apparently moved them immediately when it did go into effect. But being electronic documents, he should be absolutely certain that no unintentional copies remain on his computers.
This brings up an interesting question, if I live in Michigan (which I don't), would it be illegal for me to view the docs on the web? I mean, once having viewed them, I would have a cached copy on my computer.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
So does this also mean that slashdot has to
After all, the whole thing with AC is disguising the source of the post.
Worrisome, this is.
[note to moderators: Don't mod as "funny". This is truly serious tinfoil hat stuff. Think about it.]
- The people who would take legal action either don't care enough to spend the money, or would pay more in public relations for hassling someone doing something that is totally reasonable.
- The people enforcing the law realize how absurd it is (what they really realize is that it breaks a more fundamental law like the Constitution)
People don't just break laws they had nothing to do with, but they consciously sign in to contracts they couldn't explain to their friends without laughing, or crying as the case may be. I was just asked to sign a contract that would give away any IP I created during and for one year after employment that could be related to my company's business. That's basically everything I do. When I asked the recruiter about it, he said no one took it seriously, and "we do it to make employees think twice about everything they do." I'm not making this up. Laws are being used as weapons, and not for their intended purpose, which is to maintain order and justice.IANAL, but shouldn't anybody ticketed by a hidden radar speed trap be able to use this law to their advantage? After all, if the police are disguising "the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service," they're in violation of the law. Right?
All I can say to Michigan State police is have fun collecting every cable/dsl router (that usess NAT) in the state, including those at retail stores and warehouses. Oh, and hope you have enough room in jail for every person who owns one, the manager of the store where the bought it, the delivery boy who delivered it to the store, the truck driver who drove it into the state, and whoever decided to advertise the router in the state. And I am sure there are no routers that use NAT anywhere in any Michigan government office either... right...
A computer is a valuable tool, so use it and stop whining.
Third-party candidates are a niche player. They provide a proving ground for new ideas that eventually make it out onto the major party tickets, but otherwise it is extremely unlikely for one to get enough votes to hold any national office. This is as true today as it has been throughout history.
The real problem is that the majority of humans are, frankly, idiots. Most of the Americans on this board probably scored 99th percentile on tests. That means 99% of Americans are dumber than they are. It's hard for intellectuals to understand how so many people can be so clueless, but the reality is that you just have to write it off as human nature.
The founding fathers understood this. That's why we don't have the general public directly voting for laws. Our government was created with the notion of making us feel good about ourselves---like we're involved in the lawmaking---without actually giving us enough voice to screw things up.
The real problem is that in the early days, only the most intellligent people could run for office, because the political parties consisted largely of intellectuals. Over the centuries, it has become watered down, and now they're mostly composed of lawyers. Unfortunately, the public as a whole is too clueless to understand that this isn't how it's supposed to be, and thus the situation is difficult if not impossible to change.
The problem, then, becomes the need to set up a third party of intellectuals, but with sufficient charisma to actually win an election. This, sadly, is the big reason most third parties fail. They tend to be a bunch of kooks. Now if there were a third party created by slashdotters, it might be at the very least interesting, so long as onily those with social graces appear in public.
Thoughts?
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
And I mean Suck. They suck the life out of America. They suck the life out of every individual that is forced to work an average of 10 years during their lifetime (based on around a 15% income tax and a 60 year lifespan) in the service not of themselves, but of the federal governement. That is at least 2 months every year working for what? What free people would choose to do that to themselves? And still the federal government can't pay the bills that they are writing...
... and we wonder why? Because we have elected a generation of spinless whanabees. They are so used to believing their own lies, that when a big corporation goes to a congressman and says 'we need your laws to keep us in business', the congressman doesn't think 'is what they are asking consistent with an American value of freedom?'... no, they ask themselves whether the business is big enough to keep the coffers flowing.
Trillions of dollars in debts have been accumulating, yet we still play these stupid games. Oh it's the Dems fault... it's the Republicans. No, it's America's fault. America's fault for not seeing through the daily lies that our elected representatives now even seem to believe themselves. America's fault for believing the carpet baggers when they tell you they have all the answers to your daily struggles. America's fault for signing up for all those credit cards which you can never pay off. American's fault for their forgiveness, when the itinerant congressman or president tell you and themselves that the lies they told were better than the alternative. America's fault for not seeing through the scam of social security from the very beginning... It only works when the population is growing and most people don't live very long, still sound good to you?
Both parties have ceased representing the interests of citizens in the government, but instead try to banally represent the excesses of goverment back to us in patriotic terms.
Now we see all these restrictive laws being passed
With every iteration, laws become more restrictive more intrusive and more unintelligable. Until one day, noone can live a day of their lives without fear that somehow they are breaking some law and right and wrong are so far removed from the law that only your political connections or your subserviance will keep you out of harms way.
Big government is bad government.
And yes, I just did my taxes!
One of the best ways to protest this would be for everyone in Michigan who legally purchased a NAT box to go to the State prosecuter's office in Ann Arbor and turn themselves in. If 4 or 5 hundred admins came in and protested this, the resultant case load would insure that the prosecutors would want this law overturned if only to get this idiotic assault on our rights off the books. Granted, this is a big personal risk, but it might be time to head this off with a radical action.
Regarding your question of routers:
As I see it, there are two separate issues to worry about there. Living in Michigan myself, and not only using an IPtables/NAT script but also offering it to the public, I'm following this law with considerable interest:
The first issue: As a NAT user, I might technically obscure the "place of origin"... namely, local 192.168.0.0/24 IPs. But if I send spam from any of these machines, my public IP is still quite visible. Now, I would like to see this law applied to spoofing, bouncing off open relays/proxies, etc -- in those cases, you are indeed concealing the place of origin, and with malicious intentions.
What concerns me isn't the state government (yet), it's the ISP. Therein lies the second issue: theft-of-service allegations, via this bit about "concealing the existence". Ergo, a firewall/NAT/router splits one IP into something multiple machines can use, and I don't pay Comcast for each separately. Don't think they wouldn't try to sue you... see "Buckeye Cable".
Both of these are markedly different applications than in the original story, which goes to show how broadly this law could be interpreted.
on.
"That's why we don't have the general public directly voting for laws."
That's also why they didn't let people vote directly for the President or Senators. But state laws and the Seventeenth Amendment (respectively) got around those "problems."
"because the political parties consisted largely of intellectuals."
No, the whole intent of the design of the federal government was to avoid political parties outright. They felt that party politics were what caused their problems with the UK Parliament to begin with. Leaving the decision of Senators up to the state legislatures was supposed to ensure that anybody who makes it to the Senate has a broad multipartisan appeal, and the Electoral College was essentially intended to be a nominating committee to present the House of Representatives with presidential candidates to vote for (it was supposed to be difficult for the electors to communicate with each other in an effort to ensure that no presidential candidate got a majority outright).
The dictionaries HAVE shrunk!
My neighbor has one from about 1925 and it's about 8 inches thick and weighs a good ten pounds, the pages are thin like a bible.
Now, this is no troll, no flamebait, it's FACT.
There is one word that is considered by many to be offensive. It's the N word. BUT, in that huge dictionary he has there THREE PAGES of variations of that word in there that have nothing at all to do with the offensive word. I won't list any of them here but believe me, there USED to be a lot of words back then that people used on a regular basis that have been sent to the dust bin.
I collect OLD encyclopedia's, the older, the better and you can see history re-written over the years.
I have seen programs on the History Channel, I have even taped them, where on one program describing a world event (the program was recorded 10 years ago for instance) they say one thing, then on a newer version of the SAME program, just remade in the last year or two, history is totally different than what they were telling people 10 years ago.
People forget. They forget easily. They depend on the idiot box to remind them. "Oh, I remember now" as they sit there throwing popcorn down watching the "History" Channel.
There is a global agenda to mold minds and to win your heart and your soul.
ingsoc...