full-disclosure - House approves spyware legislation

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Message-ID: <1375837240-1097197307-cardhu_blackberry.rim.net-17894-@engine37>
From: jasonc at science.org (Jason Coombs PivX Solutions)
Subject: House approves spyware legislation

The only thing this anti-spyware legislation does is protect companies from civil lawsuits for creating and deploying spyware or otherwise exceeding their authorization to make changes to and access the computers of you and me.

Police are never going to hunt and kill the companies and people who are responsible for spyware. The elements of the 'spyware' crime as defined by the proposed legislation are by definition a civil dispute. It does not matter if a bad site launches spyware when it is visited - because the act of visiting can itself be permission to install spyware.

Java applets and other things already autoinstall without warning. You cannot seriously believe that companies responsible for spyware will not point this out in their own defense.

Read the legislation. It is a sham that is blatantly designed to protect bad companies from financial ruin for the harm they are causing to people.

... Just another terrible abuse of people's ignorance of complex technical subject matter like spyware and complex, highly-evolved, often arbitrary, social systems such as the law.

Sincerely,

Jason Coombs
jasonc@...ence.org