[Todd says this legislation is about "commercial accountability," but it does not apply only to commercial sites. It applies to open source and free software downloads as well and could put those developers in prison unless they're careful. But the broader point, that perhaps I didn't make as strongly as I should in the column, it is not the business of the U.S. government to set social policy of this sort. I'm sure I can think of lots of mandatory-labels-backed-by-jail-time that would be helpful for me if they were appeared on software, but in a free country, it's not the business of Congress to require them. --Declan] --- Reply-To: "todd glassey" <tglassey@private> From: "todd glassey" <todd.glassey@private> To: "Declan McCullagh" <declan@private> References: <6.0.0.22.2.20031103131349.021ef808@private> Subject: Re: [Politech] Last week's column: "A new tech battle brews in D.C."[ip] Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2003 15:28:37 -0800 Declan - Wow - a browser being secure... and well - what can I say. I spent 200 plus hours over the last 8 weeks patching Microsoft Machines to make them 'safe to be connected to our campus network' and then I spent 20 hours just patching my home system. Day after day at the Microsoft WindowsUpdate site... fixing code that supposed already passed a serious testing and professional audit. So - I understand the point of the government not protecting us from ourselves but since the average mortal has no idea what a patch is or how to apply one this is an issue - and I have to ask you - what is wrong with making SW vendors responsible for telling people that their products could jeopardize the integrity and privacy of those people's systems. So I don't get this one, the pushback I mean, this is not about copyright or DCMA or DRM - its about informing people that have no possibility of knowing what's in the code they install, that this code may have problems. Its about saying to people - hey the code you are about to install may open this machine to various forms of attacks, do you know what you are doing? and really now - is that such a big deal or more importantly - is it wrong? My ethics say no way. What this legislation is about is commercial accountability and one doesn't like it - my feeling is that one should sell ones wares somewhere that will anyone ship garbage and get away with it. :-) Todd PS - think of Bill and Steve possibly being led away in silver bracelets for shipping a bad copy of DCOM or Internet Explorer.... _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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