Possibly OT :-) New Canadian Voice in Digital Rights Issues

[Walter Dnes]

On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 08:15:14PM -0500, Meng Cheah wrote
> Possibly OT :-) New Canadian Voice in Digital Rights Issues

  Actually, I think this is very much on topic for this list.

  1) Bell and Rogers, and the other big telcos/cablecos tend to lean
towards Windows.  In some places in the USA, there are ISPs whose mail
servers will only interoperate with Outlook or Outlook Express.
Expensive monitoring equipment will disproportionately drive the little
ISPs out of business, leaving only the Windows-oriented biggies.  That
would obviously be bad news for us.  When hardware without backdoors is
outlawed, software without backdoors will be next.  Windows has a
gazillion backdoors, so Bill Gates would have no worries.  Linux/BSD/etc,
on the other hand, can be virtually impenetrable.  Nosey governments
would be very unhappy with that.

  2) France is considering legislation mandating DRM in all software.
It would effectively outlaw linux as we know it or, at the very least,
make programming a government-licenced/regulated activity.  As I said
before, the alleged goal of the legislation is to protect the
"intellectual property" of a bunch of scantily-clad-seventeen-year-old
screeching sluts, and some potty-mouthed rappers.  However, the side-
effects are very bad for open source.  For the full article, see...
http://iht.com/articles/2005/12/09/business/openside.php

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> In linux /sbin/init is Job #1
My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca
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