Actually, there are a lot of reasons why I support the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One such reason, is that they’re one of the few organizations fighting for our Fair Use rights. Fair Use provides some basic rights allowing greater creativity and expression of ideas. It also is the legal basis for technologies that we take for granted like the VCR, Tivo and iPod.
And like so many other freedoms, Fair Use is under attack. What are you going to do about it?
I’m trying to understand what is so important to secure that the US Congress is not only considering mandating certain security methods, but that those methods be a secret from the general public. Nuclear weapon control systems? New kind of stealth aircraft? Some kind of spy satellite? Maybe some new way of tracking down terrorists?
Turns out it’s none of those things. Instead, this bill has to do with limiting what Americans can do with TV shows. You know, like taping them on a VCR/TiVo or perhaps fast-forwarding thru commercials.
Basically, Congress is looking to force companies which decode digital TV signals to impliment DRM technology called VEIL. But you and I can’t read the specification about VEIL or know what it does… well not without signing a legal agreement promising not to discuss or disclose anything about the technology and forking over $10,000 in cash. Even then, you only get the information on how to decode VEIL data, not the other way around.
The end result is we have no idea what this technology actually does, how reliable it is, how much it will increase the cost of TV’s that consumers buy or even if this technology is extensible enough to adapt to new media or requirements. Basically, it’s a government mandated way of one company of generating millions if not billions of revenue since every TV manufacturer who would like to sell to Americans would have to license this technology from them.
I’d ask what ever happened to Congress looking out for consumers instead of business interests, but frankly, that hasn’t been true for years. Anways, to read more, check out Ed Felten’s blog.
Because apparently this prosecutor in Canton, OH thinks hitting F5 on your keyboard to reload a web page repeatedly is a *felony*. You know, the same sorta thing like rape and murder.
Ok, so maybe conspiring with your friends on the internet to “crash the webserver” of your high school by overloading it with requests is something we shouldn’t encourage in our youth. But come on, you can’t tell me we all haven’t done worse things in high school. You’d think that in a world where kids are bringing guns to schools, gangs are rampant and children are experimenting with alcolhol, drugs and sex at younger and younger ages school administrators and law enforcement would have better things to do then making an example of an 18yr old with a bad sense of humor. But I guess Canton, OH is such a utopia that even the slightest mistake requires a heavy hand.
*Sigh*
