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Nominations Open For "Most Likely to be Shut Down By Government"
The corporate overlords at SourceForge asked me to name a Slashdot category for their upcoming
Community Choice Awards and to let you guys select the winner. I have named my category "Most Likely to be Shut Down by a Government Agency." We're going to run this like we do an Ask Slashdot call for questions — post your nominations into the comments here. Use moderation to send up good ideas. In the upcoming days we'll post another story where you can vote on the actual winner. Nominations need to include the project name, a link to some sort of official website, and a paragraph of why you think they deserve to win. The project that wins will gain fame, notoriety, and maybe a cease and desist order that they could print out and frame if they had that kind of time.
They started trying in the 90s under Clinton's reign, with Al Gore as the point man. Luckily resistance from people and businesses was enough to kill the Clipper Chip and Key Escrow. over 10 years later, I guess it's time for another round of facists to try it again.
For what it's worth, I thought it was funny.
If you feel strongly about a project feel free to comment in support of said project.
We will do our best to try selecting the most popular/controversial projects for the eventual poll that will allow you to actually vote.
I don't have the link on hand, but the funny thing was that many cops went on record in support of the speed trap websites because it accomplished what they were trying for anyway (just to get people to slow down).
Not sure how much you are trolling and how much being sarcastic, but for the enlightenment of people who know little about the subject ...
The government (and court-approved) excuse for regulating the broadcast airwaves is that the radio spectrum is a limited resource, therefore public, therefore not private property.
Out of the presumption that the nanny state is required to regulate the airwaves for the public good comes the corollary that regulation has to include preventing unauthorized transmitters and receivers, and that is why Software Radio is a prime candidate for outlawing.
Software Radio relies on the fact that computers nowadays are fast enough to dissect received signals and format transmitted signals completely in software in real time. You no longer need hardware frequency selectors. The hardware only has to receive or broadcast the general signal, and software formats the specific frequency desired.
Of course this scares the bejaysus out of the government. It would mean any computer and minimal hardware could bypass all government regulation. Consider all the recent spectrum auctions where telecom giants paid billions of dollars for exclusive access to specific frequencies -- along comes software which would let anybody broadcast on or receive from any signal desired without having to pay for specific hardware dedicated to specific frequencies. One small hardware investment, free software, and you have eliminated the need for all those many telecom-specific pieces of hardware for each purpose.
Certainly there is need for some standardization of frequencies and protocols, but studies have shown the current system is no longer necessary. Ultrawideband and frequency hopping may even make interference a thing of the past and reduce the need for regulation to general protocol specs, such as apply to phone lines and allow faxes, modems, answering machines, and so many other ubiquitous devices to connect to land lines without heavy handed regulation.
Infuriate left and right
see 47 C.F.R. 15.121(a) (a) Except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, scanning receivers and frequency converters designed or marketed for use with scanning receivers, shall:
(1) Be incapable of operating (tuning), or readily being altered by the user to operate, within the frequency bands allocated to the Cellular Radiotelephone Service in part 22 of this chapter (cellular telephone bands). Scanning receivers capable of âoereadily being altered by the userâ include, but are not limited to, those for which the ability to receive transmissions in the cellular telephone bands can be added by clipping the leads of, or installing, a simple component such as a diode, resistor or jumper wire; replacing a plug-in semiconductor chip; or programming a semiconductor chip using special access codes or an external device, such as a personal computer. Scanning receivers, and frequency converters designed for use with scanning receivers, also shall be incapable of converting digital cellular communication transmissions to analog voice audio.
(2) Be designed so that the tuning, control and filtering circuitry is inaccessible. The design must be such that any attempts to modify the equipment to receive transmissions from the Cellular Radiotelephone Service likely will render the receiver inoperable.
Properly encrypted data is indistinguishable from random noise, so they would have an issue determining that your encrypted partition is in fact encrypted and not just empty space. I.e, for such a law to work they would have to effectively make it criminal to not zero erased data.
Furthermore, with some clever tricks you could insert your encrypted data into the noise of an audio sequence. Assuming you could make it look sufficiently similar to the type of noise you normally get when you record audio, it would then be virtually impossible to distinguish a noisy recording from a good recording with encrypted data injected into it.
So no, unless they want to ban you from storing and transmitting data that contains even a random component ( and every sound recording, every photograph, every video feed contains some noise ) they can't ban encryption. They might be able to make it sufficiently hard to do it to deter most people from using it, but completely preventing it won't be possible.
Now what they COULD do , and what is far scarier, is they could ban general purpose computers, requiring all computer manufacturers to only make devices that run signed code only, and they could then include large quantities of spy ware into them, which phone home every 10 seconds , prohibiting you from even shutting them off.
Apparently some guy named George thought of this scenario some time ago and blew the whistle. Most voters don't seem to worry about it however.
If you use data from the same one-time-pad twice, it quickly turns from "a theoretically unbreakable cryptosystem" into "one of the weakest cryptosystems ever".
If you don't use data from the same one-time pad twice, then it's pointless to use one one-time pad to send another one-time pad, because every N bytes that you receive for the next key is just replacing N bytes of your last key that now can't be reused to send any other data.