February 3, 2025

Reports from Today's Massachusetts Super-DMCA Hearing

A Massachusetts legislative committee held a hearing today about their super-DMCA bill. By all reports, the committee got the message loud and clear about the drawbacks of the bill. John Palfrey and Derek Slater were there and describe what happened.

ABA Group Tries to Understand WiFi

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing discusses an amazing document in which an American Bar Association panel lays out their view of the future of WiFi. High-order cluelessness pervades.

MPAA Circulating Model Super-DMCA Legislation

The Super-DMCA bills are based on model legislation that has been circulated by the MPAA. I now have the text of the model legislation (Word format; PDF), along with a summary of it also circulated by MPAA (Word format; PDF).

Predictably, the summary makes no mention of the ban on concealing message origin or destination.

Colorado Super-DMCA Delayed

The Colorado Senate’s consideration of their Super-DMCA bill, originally scheduled for yesterday, has now been deferred until April 7. There is some indication this may have been due to calls from constituents about the bill. In any case, the delay gives Colorado residents more time to contact their representatives and explain the problems with the bill.

Important New Internet Standard

Internet security guru Steve Bellovin proposed today an important new Internet standard, RFC 3514, which creates a new “evil bit” in Internet Protocol packet headers. The evil bit is required to be set in all malicious packets. RFC 3514 fully examines the ramifications of this innovative proposal, including a discussion of what existing systems must do to maintain their current behavior.

Definitely a classic in the genre.