there's 1 way to fix it. setup a coalition of hackers to make 1 huge attack at the lawmakers lol.
usualy falling victim to hackers will make them think twice about making firewalls illegal.
there's also this article here
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1033071,00.asp quote:
As of this moment, the security level of the Internet has taken a big hit. And it's not because of a new worm or some nefarious hacker collective; it's because of a set of badly conceived laws that have been passed by several states.
These measures, referred to as Super DMCA laws (see Freedom-to-Tinker's Super DMCA page) are badly designed laws promoted by the Motion Picture Association of America. Super DMCA legislation has already been passed in Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wyoming.
Now Super DMCA has claimed one of its first victims, the award-winning open-source application LaBrea, which is designed to stop the spread of worms such as Nimda across the Internet. Tom Liston, the developer of LaBrea, has stopped distribution of the program for fear of prosecution under the Illinois version of this law.
Why would a program that stops harmful worms from spreading run afoul of a law that is on the surface intended to stop cable theft? Because, like the less-damaging federal DMCA law, Super DMCA is overly broad and lacks common sense (see Peter Coffee's column on these laws).
One of the common aspects of these laws is that they make illegal any device or program that can "conceal or to assist another to conceal from any communication service provider or from any lawful authority the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication." Aside from LaBrea, this makes a whole set of common IT programs and hardware illegal, from firewalls to VPNs to privacy applications.
So if you live in one of these states, you are now breaking the law if you run a firewall. And if you're an IT admin that has all of your internal systems running on NAT, you could face as much as five years in prison and up to a quarter-million-dollar fine.
Tom Liston's LaBrea, which I named the most useful application of 2001 and which was also a finalist in eWEEK and PC Magazine's 2002 I3 Awards, clearly violates the letter if not the spirit of these laws.
Some would say that Liston probably wouldn't face any legal action, but under the federal DMCA, several companies and individuals have faced legal consequences for actions that had nothing to do with the original intent of the law. Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was even jailed for a time under the DMCA.
this could also mean no more computers in schools or libraries. without a proxy or router to separate 1 IP into hundreds, each school would have to subscribe several hundred times to the internet company and the bill would be too high for any school to possibly afford.
good bye education system :rolleyes:
[ May 06, 2003: Message edited by: ShawnD1 ]
