From www.freedon-to-tinker.com
The states of Massachusetts and Texas are preparing to consider bills that apparantely are intented to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (TX bill; MA bill) The bills are obviously related to each other somehow, since they are textually similar.
Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that "conceal from communication service provider...the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication". Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destinatin of any communication from your ISp would be illegal--no exceptions.
If you send or receive your email via an encrypted connection, you're in violation, because the "To" and "From" lines of the emails are connected from your ISP by encryption. (The encryption conceals the destinations of outgoing messages, and the sources of incoming messages.)
Worse yet, Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology widely used for enterprise security, operates by translating the "from" and "to" fields of internet packets, thereby concealing the source or destination of each packet, and hence violating these bills. Most security "firewalls" use NAT, so if you a firewall your're in violation.
If you have a home DSL router, or if you use the "Internet Connection Sharing" feature of your favorite operating system product, you're in violation because these connection sharing technologies use NAT. Most operating system products (including every version of Windows introduced in the last five years, and virually all versions of Linux) would also apparantely be banned, because they support connection sharing via NAT.
The states of Massachusetts and Texas are preparing to consider bills that apparantely are intented to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (TX bill; MA bill) The bills are obviously related to each other somehow, since they are textually similar.
Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that "conceal from communication service provider...the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication". Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destinatin of any communication from your ISp would be illegal--no exceptions.
If you send or receive your email via an encrypted connection, you're in violation, because the "To" and "From" lines of the emails are connected from your ISP by encryption. (The encryption conceals the destinations of outgoing messages, and the sources of incoming messages.)
Worse yet, Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology widely used for enterprise security, operates by translating the "from" and "to" fields of internet packets, thereby concealing the source or destination of each packet, and hence violating these bills. Most security "firewalls" use NAT, so if you a firewall your're in violation.
If you have a home DSL router, or if you use the "Internet Connection Sharing" feature of your favorite operating system product, you're in violation because these connection sharing technologies use NAT. Most operating system products (including every version of Windows introduced in the last five years, and virually all versions of Linux) would also apparantely be banned, because they support connection sharing via NAT.