Re: implications of recent legal trends

[rjonkman () ittc ukans edu (Roelof JT Jonkman)]

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Stuart,

This is beyond the scope of the ids charter....

Hey wait a minute, there is an interesting analogy here subscription cable
channels, near as I know legally you're not allowed to decode those. However
you would advocate that should be legal so the people that hack up the encoding
schemes do a better job. (Actually back in the netherlands it is legal to
decode signals in your house, as long as you don't use it for other than 
in house use, this maybe considered a loophole.) Another good one is 
cellphones, it is arbitrarily trivial to modify scanners to snarf the bands
cellphones use. However by law its prohibited to do this. In this case you
could argue that the industry shaped up, and implemented a system that was 
sufficiently less vulnerable to fraud and trivial tapping.

Given the above two examples I would be not surprised at all that the 
politicians would decide that it will be illegal to publish and or manufacture
software that would exploit an existing piece of infrastructure. It would 
probably open up a legal path for pursuing authors and or users of such tools.

We are on the technical end of this, most of the politicians are on the
other end. The recent dos attacks weren't quite intrusive enough to bother
the average user. However the day that attacks start to bother the average
user, you can bet that decisions will be made that will impede the flourishing
internet security industry. They simply turn into votes for whoever drove the
bill through the senate.

roel
"I have opinions, my employer does not."