[ale] firewalls, encryption & NAT to be illegal?

[Dan Newcombe]

IANALE (either), but I gave it a quick scan.

It is way too vague.  One would hope that it would be written to apply to
people tying to trick the cable company into thinking they have digital
cable with a modded box, or blue boxes and the like, but there is way too
much ambiguity.

If I NAT a connection, is that just being safe or obscuring the point of
origin?   One could argue that the cable company would know that it came
from my IP address.  If it came from the NAT device or a machine behind
there, what difference does it make?   If I tried to make it look like it
came from my  neighboors cable modem, that is when this law should apply.

One scary thing that stood out was that it makes illegal documentation on
how to do all of this fraud stuff...so if this does include NAT, does the
NAT-HOWTO now break the law?

In a perfect world a case would come along against a firewall/NAT user who
had two machines, never used at the same time.  A good lawyer would show
how the person never consumed more resources than paid for (only 1 IP in
use, couldn't go over the capped bandwidth) and in addition, since the
fw/NAT was in place, was actually making it safer to surf the net for
their 10 year old.    To me that is too close to how cable TV goes.  It
used to be that you were supposed to pay for each tv in the house and
basically splitters were illegal and you could be fined.  Then the FCC or
congress ruled that when the cable enters the house the cable company
can't dictate what happens to it then (sure...they then offer premium
stuff on only the digital cable, making sure they get a box out of you :)

Oh well...enough early morning ranting.  To summarize - not aimed at
natting but has scary implications that it could be used that way due to
bad wording.

	-Dan
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