US Government Wants To Meddle with DRM

[Bob Russell]

There is a proposal being floated by Congress to mandate a single standard for DRM. That's hard to believe until you realize it's being proposed by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) -- the same individuals who sponsored a bill that would have made it legal for companies to enforce their own contol over downloading by jamming personal PCs.

Predictably, the music industry rejects the concept and feels it can come to it's own resolutions just like other technologies have done. The average consumer might like the idea until they find out which one is chosen, and all the limitations it brings for new technology and products.

Whatever the government gets their hands on is sure to be followed by regulations and taxes. And you know what they say about taxes... "If you want to kill something, tax it!"

More information at the original article from Internet News. (Via Engadget)

[hacker]

Originally Posted by BobR

Whatever the government gets their hands on is sure to be followed by regulations and taxes.

Let us not forget that they also want to ensure that whatever encryption is put into place, has enough regulation to allow it to be "decrypted" (or opened back up with a government-held "master key", i.e. a back-door like those discovered in Microsoft Windows), in the case of an (ahem) "terrorist incident" or a search & seizure of equipment (without a warrant of course, thank you Patriot Act).

Anyone that breaks the government's own encryption is seen as a criminal and a terrorist, but the government wants to regulate how strong encryption is, so THEY can go ahead and break it at their own leisure. Nice.

Lucky for me, my systems and data is encrypted with a set of keys that would take the sum power of every computer invented since the beginning of time until the end of time to decrypt. By the time 200 years of decrypting keys passes, the data they get won't be any use anyway, and I'll be long dead. It doesn't take an enormous key to ensure this level of encryption, and we should all be getting very familiar with strong encryption methods and incorporating them into our daily activities.

"If you want to kill something, tax it!"

This is becoming more and more true every day. Its scary that just because something hasn't been taxed yet, means that someone is already working hard to find out how to tax it. They'd tax air if they could find a way to quantify it and bottle it.

How ironic that we're the most-taxed country in the world, and one of the biggest reasons for us ceceding from England hundreds of years ago... was to avoid being over-taxed.