Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Yay Brazil!. They're making it illegal to use DRM to prevent "fair dealing" with copyrighted works, or access to works which are in the public domain. It's also legal to "crack" DRM if you're only doing it for the purpose of "fair dealing".

-- David Woodhouse

For years we've been bombarded with scare stories about terrorists wanting to shut the Internet down. They're mostly fairy tales, but they're scary precisely because the Internet is so critical to so many things.

Why would we want to terrorize our own population by doing exactly what we don't want anyone else to do? And a national emergency is precisely the worst time to do it.

-- Bruce Schneier on the "internet kill switch"

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Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 17, 2010 15:19 UTC (Sat) by Lukehasnoname (subscriber, #65152) [Link]

I have great respect for Bruce. His quote is along the same lines as many other people I've talked to, Slashdotters, and myself.

1) The kill switch is either granular (able to shut down small areas) or sweeping (all or nothing).

-Sweeping shutdown would be worse for the population than almost anything that would 'require' such action.
-Granular capability is a dangerous power for the government to have, as they can shut down portions of the net for information control purposes as well as any supposed legitimate cause.

I don't like the idea of the government deciding who gets to speak and who doesn't. I KNOW, that's not the stated intention. But even the stated intention doesn't make much sense to a LOT of educated IT folk.