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US Entertainment Industry To Congress: Make It Legal For Us To Deploy Rootkits

An anonymous reader writes "The hilariously named 'Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property' has finally released its report, an 84-page tome that's pretty bonkers. But there's a bit that stands out as particularly crazy: a proposal to legalize the use of malware in order to punish people believed to be copying illegally. The report proposes that software would be loaded on computers that would somehow figure out if you were a pirate, and if you were, it would lock your computer up and take all your files hostage until you call the police and confess your crime. This is the mechanism that crooks use when they deploy ransomware."

4 of 443 comments (clear)

  1. RIAA tried this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The RIAA tried to get an amendment added to the Patriot Act in 2001 that would do the very same thing. This is domestic terrorism on different level, but terrorism just the same.

  2. Crooks by ZombieBraintrust · · Score: 5, Informative

    Director Richard Ellings, Deputy Director Roy Kamphausen, Casey Bruner, John Graham, Creigh Agnew, Meredith Miller, Clara Gillispie, Sonia Luthra, Amanda Keverkamp, Deborah Cooper, Karolos Karnikis, Joshua Ziemkowski, and Jonathan Walton.

    I wish news articles put faces these types of outrages. The above people are the commission.

  3. Re:Surprise is that this doesn't happen already by staalmannen · · Score: 5, Informative

    Does steam need root? I needed root to install it (like any piece of software) on Arch linux, but it runs at low privileges. Also if you run the windows version under Wine it is completely unprivileged and only active in your assigned WINEPREFIX.

  4. Re:Surprise is that this doesn't happen already by Thumper_SVX · · Score: 5, Informative

    Right... and it shows what happens when you assume. Steam runs as a regular application... the DRM is checked by the application since each game and sub-app is launched by the Steam client itself.

    It's probably one of the best-behaved apps I've seen on my Mac, Windows box or Linux box :)