On Thu, 2003-04-24 08:44:00 +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote in message <20030424074400.GD28253@mail.jlokier.co.uk>: > William Lee Irwin III wrote: > > Well, my walking out of computing is tied to complete prevention of > > kernel hacking on commodity hardware, so you've not lost anything yet. > > I only really care if it's no longer possible to get a commodity system > > to run Linux on at all, not about crypto dongles. > > It only gets _really_ bad when it becomes illegal to make your own > hardware :( We're basically already at that point. IIRC, I've read an article about something called "Super-DMCA" which prevents you (beside other things) to build up "systems" that could scrambl/encrypt sounds for pretected transmission (think VoIP over ssh or something like that in hardware). Even right now, you don't simply have (everywhere on this globe) the right to build a simple piece of hardware protecting your phone calls... This said, it _may_ even be illegal from this point of view to create a "new" general-purpose computer as it could be used for this purpose. Though, IANAL. MfG, JBG -- Jan-Benedict Glaw jbglaw@lug-owl.de . +49-172-7608481 "Eine Freie Meinung in einem Freien Kopf | Gegen Zensur | Gegen Krieg fuer einen Freien Staat voll Freier Bürger" | im Internet! | im Irak! ret = do_actions((curr | FREE_SPEECH) & ~(IRAQ_WAR_2 | DRM | TCPA));