Eirikur Hallgrimsson wrote:
>
> > > What if these policies were mandated by the government.
>
> In my paranoid moments, I expect to see this. I expect that it will become
> illegal for consumers to connect to the net with anything other than a
> proprietary, binary-only, crypto-signed, OS that supports copyright
> enforcement, and can't act as a server. Well, can't is a strong word, but
> you catch my drift.
And it will be driven by mad media reports of 'hackers' stealing your
money, trying to have sex with your kids, etc. Once again, a real but
limited danger used to others financial gain, if we don't watch it.
Broadband is tough to get and with limited suppliers unless we have some
kind of regulatory breakthrough or great leap in wireless or some such
tech. Until there is competition as there is in dialup we're going to
be subjected to these regressive restrictions. I believe that it is
shortlived unless some onerous influence like IP law becomes an issue.
Some efforts that many people applaud are responsible for some of the
problem also: on a typical dialup or broadband connection you are now
forced to channel all outgoing email through the ISP's email server in
the name of spam control. There is a registry of IP segments that
record which are end-user accounts which are blackballed by modern
MTA's. Other ISP's simply block all outgoing port 25 connections.
While spam is annoying, I am offended that I cannot setup legitimate
Internet email without being subjected to the limitations of the ISP's
MTA. This is in addition to the likelihood of filtering, monitoring,
etc. Someone sufficiently sophisticated can get around this but it's
still an issue. I wonder for instance why Imap doesn't directly support
an interface to send mail to an associated MTA. I'll have to add this
to my projects list: modify Imap to treat _outgoing as an output queue;
write an SMTP to Imap micro-server and run it at localhost for
Win32/Linux.
> Given the alternatives of developing a new social contract for intellectual
> property, and implementing a police state, I think it's visible which
> direction we are going. I just wish I knew how far down that path we'll get.
>
> Eirikur
sdw
-- sdw@lig.net sdw@insta.com swilliams@Jabber.com Stephen D. Williams Insta, Inc./Jabber.Com, Inc./CCI http://sdw.st 43392 Wayside Cir,Ashburn,VA 20147-4622 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax Dec2000
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:13:28 PDT