Providers to record all users' surfing activity, IM conversations and email traffic indefinitely.

What the hell? This amounts to essentially wiretapping the entire Internet on a full time basis! I can't tell you how utterly tired of this fear based, let's just surrender all civil liberties so we can feel better about being scared pussy whipped pansies crap I am.

Sadly, this is the kind of crap the Dems tend to jump on, for whatever reason. If I were you, I would make a phone call or two, followed up by a strong letter of dissent on this one.

We don't need the burden of keeping all those records. It will hobble the Internet. As for the privacy and liberty concerns, where do I start? Could write all day on that one and not even break a sweat.

We've been through dumbing down the Internet for the kiddies. It's not over yet, but that one looks good for the moment.

We've been through the let companies choose what traffic to carry bit, and it's still a worry.

Now we are at the let's track everybodys reading so we can find the terrorists, or political enemies we don't like and nail them bit again.

This kind of stuff keeps coming up and we need to continue to push back, or risk making the net a very hostile place --hostile enough that maybe just staying off of it might not be a bad idea!

It's called the SAFETY --Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act

Text of bill here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.837:

The idea of creating an xxx domain was introduced to set the idea that we can just put all the unsafe content in one place to protect the kids.

That got shot down for a lot of good reasons, but one aspect of it was that we really had no assurance that bad content would only exist in the bad content domain. (You would think we would have learned something in the last 100 years...)

So now, like a lot of well intentioned, but misguided legislation of this kind, the idea is to keep records on everybody and everything so we can regulate it properly.

By all rights this should be a non-partisan issue in that nobody needs this burden when the issue is one of parenting, not records keeping.

Tell me the last time a database like this was created that was not exploited to the fullest by every regulator out there.

We don't need this folks, and it's catchy right now politically. Would be a big win for both sides to get this done, and for all the wrong reasons.

I haven't asked this for a while, but do call, write and tell your friends about this one. We won't like how this turns out. No matter what your stand on Pornography is, this legislation is not the solution.

Again, this is framed as a stop the kiddie porn bill, but it's requirements will affect every aspect of the Internet today. What you read, when you do it, on what computers, where, your e-mails to and from, will all be stored where it is easy to access them.

Access will be granted to government and law enforcement without your concent or knowledge and you won't have the ability to review these records to boot!

This amount of data will enable your government to completely and totally profile you to a degree you yourself would probably not be aware of. Think about that and the current political culture and tell me that does not just scare you silly.

(It does me)

We've got strong kiddie porn laws. We've got solid law about under age access to pornography sites that is on par with physical access today. That's about as good as it gets.

Those that really want to see the porn are gonna be able to do so. They will continue to be able to do so, despite this bill. The difference will be potentially your record tainted with porn, or your life being exposed completely to your government without them returning the favor in like kind.

Write, call, talk this up. It's no good.


Rep. Lamar Smith, web form, 202-225-4236

Cosponsors:
Rep. Steve Chabot, (202) 225-2216
Rep. Tom Feeney, (202) 225-2706
Rep. J. Randy Forbes, (202) 225-6365
Rep. Trent Franks, (202) 225-4576
Rep. Elton Gallegly, (202) 225-5811
Rep. Dan Lungren, (202) 225-5716
Rep. Mike Pence, (202) 225-3021

House Judiciary Committee Chair:
Rep. John Conyers, (202) 225-5126

Your local reps and senators are not a bad idea either.

It wouldn't hobble the internet at all; it would simply require ISPs to monitor traffic, which would be fairly easy for even small ones to do. They could simply look for known filenames of kiddieporn images or the addresses, on an automated basis.

There's no way anyone could manually look at every image you view via an ISP - completely impractical. The way I describe above must be what they have in mind.

In any case, it's unlikely to work. It's pretty easy to evade this sort of thing by changing file names or encrypting stuff. (Start encrypting images - yeah, that's a good thing to encourage so that then we can have an even HARDER time finding kiddie porn providers to prosecute them.) Sounds like the bill is not grounded in any sort of practicality - more of a "feel good" measure.

And don't bother writing to the cosponsors or to Conyers - unless you live in their district. Write to your own congressperson. I'm going to write to Earl and express my strong disapproval of this proposed bill.

Andrew

It would also at least double the cost of your monthly bill!

It certainly wouldn't double the cost of my monthly bill - it's probably require only one server for every some-thousand users, needing to add more the more users you have. Big providers like Earthlink, AOL, etc. would be able to absorb the tiny cost easily. It would hurt local ISPs perhaps, making them even less competitive.

Andrew

Nobody objects to efforts to stop kiddee porn (except the kiddee porn addicts), but the trouble with these things isn't the small added cost, but rather the future abuse from government entities. These kinds of things get thrown into law and then the abuse begins.

RICO is a prime example of government abuse of a well intentioned law.

With all of the open and vulnerable Pc's on the net it is far to easy to just route your surfing through an unsecure router/routers making the traceback fall on an innocent party. Lot's of people who pirate music and video's use this method to avoid trackbacks. They constantly change up devices and routes making it even harder to catch up with them. If making internet devices secure was a law on the other hand you would see less illegal activity as there would not be as many pathways to cover your track's with.
It should be against the law to have or maintain an open or vulnerable system on the WWW. It is just begging to be hacked and exploited and most likely will. Remember that most hacking is not to steal your credit card info but to pirate your bandwidth and use your IP for illegal activities and you would never know it is happening until the Fed's knock on your door! If you are running a web enabled router with the default password you are most likely hacked and in a database of unsecure pathways out in hackerland!

Make it a law that manufacturers sell these devices with good security on them enabled out of the box instead of "I'm stupid so plug and play me out of the box"! No offense but these things are easy to setup and put security on!

Here is a thought for all of you people with Windows XP home edition!
Question:
Do you know the Administrator password to your PC?
Answer:50% or more of you probably do not know that there is a default account "Administrator" with a blank password that anyone can access via safe mode. Once logged in there it is simple to access and view all documents on that PC. XP Pro at least make you set an admin password upon setup. If you want to secure your PC a little then reboot it and press the F8 key during startup. When you see the menu that offers boot choices select safe mode. Once logged in as administrator you can add a password to it through the control panel. Make double sure to record and keep this in a safe place and to tell any tech you have work on it what it is otherwise you could have real problems later on! And how many have usernames with a little Icon that requires no password at all to access the PC. Do you want just anyone who visits sitting there using your PC and back browsing your internet history.....I think some of you may not like Mom seeing the porn you've been surfing! So setup a misc account for misc users!

PS.....Think you have locked your PC's access to your kids......think again as they can get in via the previous method described and I gaurantee you your 14 year old probably knows more about your PC than you do! In some cases your 5 year old does! LOL

Darktemper, are you sure about XP Pro requiring a password while setting up the PC?

I'm running XP Pro on all 5 of my machines and I don't remember having to enter any password. Unless leaving it blank counts.

I just put a new hard drive in my son's PC and loaded it. It didn't require me to enter a password.

I loaded it with a full blown (not an upgrade) copy with service pack 2 already on the CD. (When I say copy, I'm not talking about a bootleg copy; it's a real MS CD)

Just curious.

Well we are an all Dell shop at work and everyone we get in that we do not throw a std ghost image on requires an administrator password on the initial setup. If not you can bet yourself that it does in fact exist and you can get to it via F8 and safe mode. You will not see it in the users list in control panel when not booted in safe mode. Blank is the default for the administrator logon....good security!!!

BTW...Safe mode and administrator can really safe your butt someday....very useful! My son's drive crashed once and he had his documents folder set as private. I could still access the drive when slaved in but it had bad sectors. In trying to access his files I could not and I could not change the privacy setting on the folder until I booted to safe with with administrator and from there you can take ownership and get back into those files! I have some pretty good utilities at work and to date have recovered about 95% of data from drives with problems. I even had a drive once that read 0 bytes used or available. The drive partition information somehow got destroyed. A little utility and after recovering that info the computer to this day is issue free!

BTW....Have I ever said: "I Hate Computers"?

I have about 200 of the most crankiest employee's I have to run heard over and then their human's show up and make matter's worse......Oy Vay!

Fatal Error.....Delete User!!!!!!

I hope your son learned the lesson that hard drives are inherently unreliable and crash every day, with no warning, and you can lose everything. I do IT support as a volunteer for a local non-profit, and as such I wind up doing "IT support" for the other volunteers - and I've probably replaced eight failed hard drives in the last year. About half of them were "partially failed," the rest completely dead and only a data recovery specialist could have gotten data off of them. Getting an external hard drive for backup is such a good idea! My rule is: always have at least two copies of every important file.

FYI, I usually use a USB hard drive enclosure to try to recover data from failing drives. You can also use a live Linux CD, which will defeat any sort of administrator password protection too.

Andrew

I second the Linux CD. The tools in that OS have gotten me out of I don't know how many jams.

FYI, the failure rate is higher for this latest generation of really large hard disks too.

USB drives are a godsend. Finally we have something that works as well as SCSI did, for external devices, but does not have the power, bulk and complexity it did.

It's also possible to build computers with all USB drives as well. Pretty cool, compared to internal stuff. Swapping OS environments for test, is as simple as moving a cable. I know, we've got boot managers, virtual machines and the like, but it does make for very simple computers that you do not have to ever open, more or less.