Firewalls set to become illegal in many American states – including Florida, naturally.
According to Prof. Felten at Freedom to Tinker, soon the simple act of buying a router to hook up your family PC’s to the Internet could land your butt in jail. Legislation has been introduced in Texas, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alaska, Tennessee and Colorado that makes it illegal (to paraphrase the Texas bill) for anyone who “manufactures, assembles, imports, exports, distributes, advertises, sells, or leases, or offers for sale or lease a communication device or plans or instructions for assembling or manufacturing a communication device or unauthorized access device, with the knowledge that another person intends to use the plans or instructions for an unlawful purpose, to obtain or use a communication service without obtaining the authorization of the provider or making a payment to the provider in the amount normally charged by the provider for the service; or conceals from a communication service provider, or from any lawful authority, the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication.”
So, unless you read the fine print of your ISP’s Terms of Service carefully (and constantly, since it can change without notice), you could be criminally prosecuted for:
- Sharing a connection to the Internet with your kids
- Moving your cable TV or modem connection to a different room
- Putting up a firewall to “conceal” communications from the outside world
In fact, technically, this outlaws Windows XP because it has firewall software built-in. It is even conceivable that you may be prosecuted for setting up a wireless access point on your home LAN, paying the cable company for the extra connections, but not sufficiently securing access from war drivers. In fact, that link I just made to the war driving kit – which is intended to be used to help find and plug security leaks *cough* – makes me a crook.
It doesn’t matter that the proposals say things like “with an intent to harm or defraud a communication service provider.” Lawyers can make it look like you intended to funnel your life savings directly to Osama bin Laden when you downloaded that Britney Spears MP3.
I don’t mean to get hysterical. These are still just draft bills. There is still a good chance that the manufacturers of these devices (Linksys?) will put up a stink. but it disturbs me that almost identical legislation seems to be popping up in several states at once. What nefarious no-brain is behind this?
Wow, that’s utterly effed up.
They can have my firewall when they pry it out of my cold dead hands.
Christ on a damn cracker.
Here
More Stupid Legislation
Got a router at home? Solonor has a “heads up” for you….
There’s no way ISPs want this. To have to provide unique IP addresses to each computer that connects to the ISP’s service? That’s not going to be feasable any time soon. And as far as ISPs are concerned it isn’t each “computer” that matters it’s each CPE that the modem sees. So if you’re behind a firewall or router, my cable host table only sees one device and only gives out one IP and is happy. Now you put something brainless like a hub there instead of a router and you’re going to have to start paying me every month for an additional IP address, but otherwise, more power to you. Just don’t complain about having to split that 1.5mb download amongst all 20 computers you hooked up to your D-Link piece of shit. 😉
I think this is aimed at people setting up WiFi and letting the whole neighborhood use the connection. It still doesn’t make technological sense. So what? You’re letting 10 people share the same pipe. No skin off the ISP’s nose. Except thats 1 person paying you and 10 people using the service… This isn’t coming from the people at the cable company that have a clue. It’s coming from the accountants and lawyers.
Isn’t that also anti-Virtual Private Networks? If so, there goes telecommuting.