Here is my latest addition to the corpus of commentary on spyware. This week, your U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to consider legislation to ban it. The legislation is junk.
Why? Well, for one thing: it wouldn’t actually stop actual spyware. Considering how Congress did with suppressing spam through the CAN-SPAM Act, you kind of wonder how many times Congress is willing to lie to the American people. (Don’t start counting because, if you do, a few weeks from now you’ll still be counting and you’ll get an aneurysm and you’ll have to stop.)
Mine follows on fellow TLFer James Gattuso’s very good spyware piece and it marginally improves on a quick and dirty spyware rant I laid on y’all earlier. James and I agree: Carefully applying existing law to the online world is going to be superior to fresh statutes passed in haste each time a new Internet pathology emerges.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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