(4) This Nation faces a shortage of trained, qualified information technology workers, including computer security professionals. As the demand for information technology workers grows, the Federal government will have an increasingly difficult time attracting such workers into the Federal workforce.

Shortage of workers who want to work for minimum wage perhaps?

(6) The Nation's information infrastructures are owned, for the most part, by the private sector, and partnerships and cooperation will be needed for the security of these infrastructures.

I found that interesting since it was once owned by the public sector. And what comes with partnership & cooperation?

"(f) DEVELOPMENT OF INTERNET PRIVACY PROGRAM. -- The Institute shall encourage and support the development of one or more computer programs, protocols, or other software, such as the World Wide Web Consortium's P3P program, capable of being installed on computers, or computer networks, with Internet access that would reflect the user's preferences for protecting personally-identifiable or other sensitive, privacy-related information, and automatically executes the program, once activated, without requiring user intervention.".

Gee, kind of like passport?

Written by tilly
I believe that if this bill passes, I will never again work in IT. My having written this letter will by itself be sufficient to guarantee that. You see, I remember Ed Curry, and see no reason to believe that my case would be any different...

Along with all the Sun, Oracle, IBM, etc... employees. If MS is the only game in town, the demand for engineers will probably go down. The demand for support specialists on the other hand...

Some other thoughts:

Anyway, I'm afraid I'd have to move to another country or find work in another field if the thing passes. I can't see it passing in the form it is now. That's not to say that a scary version still won't get through.

Yes, multistate switches are still digital. Digital means having discrete well-defined states, as opposed to a fuzzy continuum of states. A multi-POSITION switch is digital. A variable resistor knob is analog.

DNA is digital. The ribosomes read it as a set of instructions. Does this law outlaw life itself?

—John

Because Microsoft can no longer attain their goals through the free market, it makes perfect sense that they would attempt to legislate them into being.

I do remember Ed Curry. It's a very disturbing memory. But I'm heartened by the opposition to UCITA, another unreasonable law that was supposed to be really good for us.

Senator Hollings seems to think he's an "Innovator in Technology." I'll be contacting my Senator to point out that Senator Hollings is exactly the opposite. I've had enough. The DMCA and UCITA were bad enough, but this is way over the top.

I think your analysis is correct. Whether or not competing companies will band together remains to be seen.

I think that even if it does go through, it won't be so bad. Combine the general apathy and stupidity of the general populace with MS's inability to get it right and you have a system that just won't work. People will decide it's too much hassle, and not buy. Companies will look at the offerings and say "you have got to be kidding".

I know that it will be law to use microsoft products, but if you think that your average computer user cares about law then you should log onto gnutellanet and do a search for mp3.

Of course a lot of people are going to get hurt in the meantime, but that is a constant.

Incidentally I think the resistance to MS will be quite high, ironically from within the government. As soon as the Department of Defence figures out that MS will have the keys to their computers, they will go out of their mind.

Well, good luck fighting this one down, and remember the price of freedom.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

It won't just be against the law to use these products, it will be illegal to distribute them in any form whatsoever.

Hitting the users won't have much effect as it is too hard and expensive to do large numbers of small prosecutions.

Hitting the distributors is MUCH easier. Who will you work for if only Microsoft is allowed to distribute software? And note that market would be defined I believe as "publicise in any form regardless of whether the product is free or not". And that's not even opening the whole can of worms designed thing.

(3) INTERACTIVE DIGITAL DEVICE. -- The term "interactive digital device" means any machine, device, product, software, or technology, whether or not included with or as part of some other machine, device, product, software, or technology, that is designed, marketed or used for the primary purpose of, and that is capable of, storing, retrieving, processing, performing, transmitting, receiving, or copying information in digital form.

"The future will be better tomorrow." ... from the collected wisdom of George W Bush.

This is true, and yet... look in your local paper. Is there anyone offering to mod chip your playstation or DVD drive to read all country codes? Remember the old times when you went to your local user group to get copies of programs that could copy protected games? Going back to sneaker net will hurt, but it can be done. And even better, if we all have proper encryption then how will anyone know what those 650Mbs are? Unless the government sticks clipper back in.

It would also hurt to lose some of the fantastic developers the the OS community has, but Linux was developed outside America, and can continue to do so. In the meantime, you can download a copy or /msg me and I'll send you a copy.

Down here in Gods own country, the government has passed bizarre copyright laws that make it safer to be using GPL stuff than commercial stuff. More power us.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

... what does that do to languages like Perl which are intended to be used largely to manipulate plain text?

More to the point perhaps, what does that do to languages (like Perl, or Python for that matter) which are plain text? The implications make me shudder vomit and possibly want to move (geographically) to avoid this. If that's even possible.

-- Frag.

Okay, Tilly. I've read and reread. Now I'd like to distribute your thoughts. Can I mirror?

/me goes off to reformat my one windows machine, and wonders if premchai21 knows of a good international real estate agent...

I am doing my level best to make that do the rounds. Any more help that way is just fine and dandy with me.

"Seriously, the camel's nose is inside the tent and the camel is coughing up snot on the inhabitants of the tent. Be afraid."

Ah, so that's what they mean by a Perl hacker.

(sorry :)

cLive ;-)

Times change, technology changes, businesses must adapt to these realities or die. We can not legislate away reality, no matter how hard we might try.

Digital media combined with inexpensive storage and transfer technology create a radical change in the way that information is distributed. Where distribution and duplication used to be expensive and difficult, they are now so inexpensive as to be nearly free. Companies whose business models rely on the difficulty of copying and distributing information are going to suffer if they do not change how they do business. It does not matter how many artificial barriers we create to hinder the flow of digital information, it will flow. The best thing that we can do is try to understand the nature of the changes that are occuring and help these companies adapt.

The radical changes in the cost structure of media development and distribution create opportunities for entrepeneurs and the potential for the generation of incredible wealth. Consider Open Source Software, (see http://www.opensource.org/) powerful empowering technology is being created by people who freely share their work, this is only possible because of the new cost structure. IBM is willing to back this model with $1 billion. They expect to make money by providing services to software users. Under this approach we generate stand to generate incredible gains, as IBM improves an Open Source software program, *everyone* who uses it benefits. If Hewlet Packard uses the same software, and further improves the software, IBM and HP and everyone benefits.

The world of software has begun to adapt to the new realities of the digital revolution. It is not surprising that those who made the revolution adapt to it first. More traditional media have not yet found a model that works. They will, and when they do, it will be radically different from how we do things now. It will be an approach that accomodates and accepts the human desire to share. It will enrich us all.

If we pretend that these changes are not occuring, if we fail to recognize their inevitability, if we create and enforce draconion laws that cost us our liberties, we will lose an unprecedented opportunity to enrich our country and the entire world. We will lose our economic power, we will lose our political power, and we will have lost our basic freedoms.

TGI says moo

Read the bill. Read the "no sunshine" and antitrust parts of it.

It is dead obvious that this bill is a power grab by someone, who intends to become a heck of an abusive monopoly in anything resembling software.

Once we have realized that, then we only need figure out whose power grab it is. After that our natural allies are anyone and everyone in that monopolist's way. The bigger, more powerful, and more influential, the better.

I think I make a pretty good case that the company which stands to seize power here is Microsoft. And AOL happens to be one of the biggest companies standing in Microsoft's way. That makes AOL a powerful party with a vested interest (if they only realize it) in blocking this bill.

Does that make sense?

FWIW, it could be a cabal of service providers trying to become the only ones involved in ecommerce. So MS plus the RIAA is possible. MS Media Player already has some of the security features mentioned to prevent piracy of RIAA goods.

Personally I think the RIAA is into it somewhere already. The bill mentions devices as well as software (IIRC). Software only laws would allow portable mp3 players to be used to pirate songs. This bill clearly prevents any device capable of doing that, whether it has software or no.

Plus it feels more like a RIAA grab. MS has never really cared about laws (UCITA aside and many more companies than MS benefit from that one). MS just does what it wants to, when it wants to and how.

The RIAA, OTOH, has a history of changing laws to accomodate their own plans (eg copyright extensions). This really sounds like their old 'ban video players, they'll destroy the industry' line, but with knuckles this time. ____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.