Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!

Jan-Benedict Glaw
2003-04-24T07:51:21Z

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On Thu, 2003-04-24 08:44:00 +0100, Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>
wrote in message <20030424074400.GD28253@mail.jlokier.co.uk>:
> William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> > Well, my walking out of computing is tied to complete prevention of
> > kernel hacking on commodity hardware, so you've not lost anything yet.
> > I only really care if it's no longer possible to get a commodity system
> > to run Linux on at all, not about crypto dongles.
>
> It only gets _really_ bad when it becomes illegal to make your own
> hardware :(

We're basically already at that point. IIRC, I've read an article about
something called "Super-DMCA" which prevents you (beside other things) to
build up "systems" that could scrambl/encrypt sounds for pretected
transmission (think VoIP over ssh or something like that in hardware).

Even right now, you don't simply have (everywhere on this globe) the
right to build a simple piece of hardware protecting your phone calls...

This said, it _may_ even be illegal from this point of view to create a
"new" general-purpose computer as it could be used for this purpose.

Though, IANAL.

MfG, JBG

--
Jan-Benedict Glaw jbglaw@lug-owl.de . +49-172-7608481
"Eine Freie Meinung in einem Freien Kopf | Gegen Zensur | Gegen Krieg
fuer einen Freien Staat voll Freier Bürger" | im Internet! | im Irak!
ret = do_actions((curr | FREE_SPEECH) & ~(IRAQ_WAR_2 | DRM | TCPA));

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