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UK Law May Criminalize IT Pros
An anonymous reader writes "More worrying news from the UK. This time, a bill meant to fight cybercrime may make it illegal to use or make available network security tools available, just because they could be used by hackers." From the article: "Clayton cited the Perl scripting language, created by Larry Wall in 1987, as an example of a useful technology that could fall foul of the law. 'Perl is almost universally used on a daily basis to permit the Internet to function,' said Clayton. 'I doubt if there is a sysadmin on the planet who hasn't written a Perl program at some time or another. Equally, almost every hacker who commits an offense under section 1 or section 3 of the CMA will use Perl as part of their toolkit. Unless Larry is especially stupid, and there is very little evidence for that, he will form the opinion that hackers are likely to use his Perl system. Locking Larry up is surely not desirable.'" A note that this is equally confusing but separate from yesterday's story about the UK government wanting private encryption keys.
They already want to ban pointy knives, so why not hammers?
u rope/27knife.html?ex=1274846400&en=cef76721be98494 c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/international/e
I know a lot of Americans are confused by the British political system, so I'd like to explain it to them.
First of all, the Labour Party has very little to do with the general, working-class labourers of the UK. So don't think of them as being liberal, or supportive of workers rights.
In the US political system, they're most like the Republicans. Basically, they're neo-conservatives. That means that they threw out what might have been the most beneficial of conservative ideals, and instead replaced them with the worst of the liberal convictions.
Unlike actual conservatism, they take a strong stance against personal freedoms. They are supportive of near-paranoid domestic surveillance and incomprehensible legislation designed to limit liberty.
Unlike actual liberals, they do not care what is best for society as a whole. They are often very supportive of corporations, and are often willing to use their power to mislead the public if it will help bring financial profit to their corporate supporters.
Hopefully that clears up the situation somewhat. We have to realize that even if they claim to be "conservative", neither the Republicans (in America) or Labour (in the UK) actually are.
Let them know it's horsecrap before businesses have to start moving out of the UK to survive.(!)
It was passed by the House of Commons earlier this month, and will be considered by the House Of Lords over the next couple of months
Once again we must rely on the Lords to stop the knee-jerk stupidity of the Commons foisting more draconian laws upon us. Let's hope they continue to do their job.
At the risk of bordering on repeating the hammer/etc. analogies: "Nothing is intrinsically good or evil, but its manner of usage may make it so." Saint Thomas Aquinas
This story is ridiculous! It is implying something totally different from what the law actually states in order to attract horrified readers. I bet the website is getting massive amounts of hits at the moment, but lets look at what the bill actually says:
"A person is guilty of an offence if he makes, adapts, supplies or offers to supply any article --
(a) intending it to be used to commit, or to assist in the commission of, an offence under section 1 or 3 [of the Computer Misuse Act]; or
(b) believing that it is likely to be so used."
This is a common-sense sense law which recognises software for what it is: a tool. It looks almost identical to the law which applies to other tools capable of being used to commit offences, i.e. knifes, hammers, axes, pieces of wood etc.. You don't see the police arresting people who use these, unless they use them to commit (or attempt to commit) a crime, so why would they suddenly arrest anyone who writes a pearl script?
I think it is good to see a government finally recognising software like the useful tool it is, but one which (like most tools) can be intentially misused to cause harm.
The problem is part b. As TFS said, Larry has to know that evil h4xx0rZ are likely to use Perl as part of their attacks. Therefore, he's guilty under part b of the proposed law.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.