Red alert! For the last six months, EFF, our supporters, and dozens of other groups have been sounding the alarm about several #BadInternetBills that have been put forward in Congress. We’ve made it clear that these bills are terrible ideas, but Congress is now considering packaging them together—po...
It's insane how governments keep trying to ban encryption, even though large chunks of the economy depend on the ability to exchange encrypted data. The same with criminalizing VPNs, on which pretty much every internet-connected business depends.
It's so exhausting the constant fascist anti-privacy laws there are. You stop one, 5 more pop up in its place. Eventually some are going to pass from sheer exhaustion.
We fought for net neutrality for like a decade and a half and then Ajit Pai just killed it like a monarchy with supreme power and fucked off into retirement.
That made me so mad. It was so openly botted and gaslit. Not a single human being was against it that wasn't part of a megacorp monopoly. It was just objectively bad. Just shows we straight up do not have a democracy, our votes meant nothing despite being one of the most widespread campaigns against it. I remember it was even the front page of google search to vote against it. That's how you know how bad it was.
The first step is to make it illegal to sideload "illegal" apps. It's the step that sounds reasonable that less informed people might agree with or at least not protest. The next step is to arbitrarily decide what makes an app illegal. By that point, it's too late to protest the actual law.
It's like the law in Florida making the punishment death for sexual assault on a child. That sounds fine until you realize that their legislature has announced their intent to make wearing clothes opposite your gender in public into sexual assault on a child.
Unilateral restrictive laws, without specific stipulations or conditions, even innocent sounding ones like this, are one bad actor away from being changed to a political weapon.
What should be your reason? Why is wanting the right to use whatever software I want not a good reason?
Software is not weed, it is not an automatic assault rifle, it is information. You could literally speak the binary encoding of the software aloud if you had enough time, and I'm pretty sure freedom of speech is a right everyone has.
First: it doesn't say "illegal", it says "prohibited". Could be (and probably is) talking about apps prohibited either by the device manufacturer or apps that are otherwise legal but copied from another device (i.e. loaded through a 3rd party app store)
Second: the use of the "illegal" app should be the illegal thing, not the side-loading of it on your device. In your analogy, growing any plants in your house at all would be the new restriction, on top of weed being illegal (for now)
The internet poses a threat to the status quo - my local library will never stock anything written by Emma Goldman or Noam Chomsky, but, thanks to the interent, this information is pretty much at my fingertips.
They don't like that - it's far too democratic for a status quo that wants to pretend it's democratic while ensuring that we never understand the idea of democracy in any way that doesn't keep them in power and in the money.
Well considering the EFF is based in the US, the second sentence of the article mentions the AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union, and halfway through the page is a link to Tell Congress which links to a page to look up your representatives with your UNITED STATES Postal Service zip code, I'm gonna let you put on your thinking cap and figure this one out.
Remote government employees and contractors are required to use a vpn to connect to their work network. Any tech savvy business is using vpns to secure their remote employees work.
I don't know what greedy idiot came up with this bill or is lobbying for it but the only ones with vested interest in violating your privacy like this is maybe big tech and isps.