AAX Re:an interesting take on small business IT

[James McIntosh]

In the Graduate Students' Union pub Tuesday night, I mentioned the 'AAX'
article, which discusses a lobby group's advocating the outlawing of
'firewalls', as currently operating.

Fact and opinion article, recommending against Microsoft operating systems, 
in favour of Linux, BSD Unix, or OS/2, with reasons:

Andrew Grygus - Automation Access - AAX:

At 11:03 AM 2005/05/03 +0300, Peter <plp-ysDPMY98cNQDDBjDh4tngg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>more or less in the context of yesterday's discussion:
>http://www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit029.html
>Peter

This is a very long article, close to 200 pages.

I think that everyone in our group should read it.

One of several thousand tidbits of information it supplies is that there
is, astonishingly, a lobby group of mainly movie studios trying to outlaw
the use of 'fire-walls', as currently operating.

The lobby group wants movie studios to be able to penetrate any barriers
around your PCs, to do an intensive, all-pervasive inspection of the
contents of your computer systems at any time, to detect any and all
illicit 'pirating' of their copyrighted recordings.

'Fire-walls' which would lock them out would be illegal, if their laws are
ever passed.

I don't think that their laws will ever be passed, but they might pressure
'fire-wall' designers to redesign them to permit movie studios to use
special protocols to slip through the 'fire-wall' in order to do their
complete inspection/audit to hunt down those people who have 'pirated'
their recordings.

When they inspect your recordings, they cannot know whether you also own a
legal copy of their movie, and are using the traditional 'fair use' of a
legally-acquired recording; they will assume that you are a criminal. The
traditional 'fair use' will be endangered.

P.s.: They would also outlaw IPV4, requiring use of IPV6, to enable them to
pinpoint the 'pirated' recordings more precisely.


James ('Jim') E. McIntosh   416-292-8126   <jemcinto-cpI+UMyWUv+w5LPnMra/2Q at public.gmane.org>

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