Freedom Lawyers of America

Re: Camera/Shy

Steganography tools have been available for a long time. Maybe this
software will be slightly easier to use, but the Cult of the Dead Cow
doesn't have a stellar reputation for actually delivering. The HK2K
conference looks really interesting though. For a glimpse of the future
you could do far worse than poring over its schedule, or that of the
similar DefCon next month in Las Vegas, which I'll be attending:

http://www.h2k2.net/panels.html
http://www.defcon.org/dcx-speakers.html

Re: Palladium

It's a big threat. True, Microsoft isn't the government, consumers
choose to buy their software. But government finds it much easier to
control large corporations and vice versa. It would be great for both
the national security state and favored business interests to have a
single "secure" platform. I put secure in quotes, because it would
offer security to the aforementioned interests, not the end user.

There are many fronts on which to fight this, including

Consumer choice -- Wean yourself and others from Microsoft software.
Multiple vendors make more work for would-be controllers. Even better,
free software/open source, which has very diffuse control points and
high resistance to the kinds of "features" that give some parties
security and control at others' expense. Even if you must use Windows,
try Mozilla http://mozilla.org for an IE and/or Outlook replacement and
OpenOffice http://openoffice.org for Word/Excel/PowerPoint. If not this
year, keep them in mind for next. Bad allusion to both a chapter title
in Shelly's book and a William Burroughs rant: with open source
software, there's no control button for authorities to push.

Politics -- Tell the officials you didn't vote for but who are in office
anyway to kill the Digital Millenium Copyright Act:
http://anti-dmca.org/

Legal -- Support the Electronic Frontier Foundation .
They're doing lots of important litigation in this area.

Real security -- Computer security is a huge problem, though Palladium
and laws passed by Congress are arguably an even bigger problem. If
you're a techie, check out people working on security that protects you,
your computer and your privacy, not that which gives away control. A
sampling: The work of , an open source unix
operating system fanatical about security, finds its way into many more
popular existing platforms. Capability security may be the answer if
valiant efforts to patch up existing security models ultimately fail,
see and . Finally, the only
people outside the security state I know of thinking about the real
security implications of technology probably only a couple decades away
(e.g., nanotech) are associated with the Foresight Institute
.
Mike Linksvayer http://gondwanaland.com/ml recommends http://bitzi.com
http://calorierestriction.org http://eff.org http://ideafutures.com

posted by FLoA  # 7/08/2002 07:03:23 AM