[KLUG Advocacy] Re: Advocacy digest, Vol 1 #21 - 2 msgs

[advocacy@kalamazoolinux.org]

>Oh yes...I well remember what happened then. It seems as if some in the
>news industry doesn't understand at all what happened here in the US,

News industry, understand, US.  Thats an arbitrary collection of words, right? 
Or are you implying that some correlation exists between those terms? :)

>but want to kind of pass it off, like it really doesn't matter!

<RANT>  Really!  I thought beating-the-dead-horse would be a more acurate
description.  Its Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma City,  Oh, wait... Columbine, Columbine, Columbine, Columbine, etc...
etc...  Now we have 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 this, 9/11 that.  It is just dumb. 
Not to be insensitive, but (IMHO) alot of other things will cast a much longer
shadow into the future of humanity.  Things like the environment (the effect
recent legislation), the idea of intellectual property (again legislation),
racism (the middle east as an example) and nationalism (the US today, in part as
a result of 9/11).  That these "big events" are able to squelch just about all
else from the mainstream media for months is BAD.  Not that the media really
paid close attention to them anyway.  </RANT>

>>Came across this a few minutes ago.
>>http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/05/07/2234251.shtml?tid=3
>>Is this why M$ is scared of what's happening or going to happen in Peru?

Actually similair measures have passed in other countries, France being one if I
recall.  There were some up for consideration in England and Brazil as well. 
The question is if these 'acts' have any teeth.

It seems to obvious to me.  If I were an agency like the NSA, etc... I'd pretty
much demand open source,  so one knows what exactly the software is doing, and
even more importantly how it is doing it.  Corporations banter about security,
but VERY few take it seriously.  The road to hard-core security is to know every
step of a process,  and closed source can't provide that.  So that governments
(many of whom also happen to be poor) will gravitate toward open source
shouldn't be too surprising,  except we just don't expect them to act rationally.