There’s Evil Afoot:   Everyone from Microsoft to Sun to the BSA to Amazon has filed with the FCC to object to “troubling” restrictions in Cox and Comcast’s broadband service agreements, which prohibit everything from WANs to any type of server. (This coming in the middle of the FCC ‘reevaluating’ all the legislative steps that the Clinton administration made to ensure competition and guarantee affordable, widespread broadband access.) It’s nice to see the tech companies display such enlightened self-interest, but where is the consumer represented in this flurry of filings? That’s right, we’re not.

You may think this assessment of Palladium is excessively paranoid. It is not. I cannot think of a single piece of legislation that has ever appeared before Congress, or any case before any Court of this land, that stood to negatively impact more people’s rights and freedoms than this technology initiative from Microsoft and Intel does.

The RIAA has bought another piece of legislation, this one legalizing all the things they’re already doing to disrupt distributed p2p networks. Interesting fact: the sort of things they’re doing to disrupt these networks, such as spoofing, would not have worked on Audiogalaxy, with its massive built-in peer filtering. Which is why they killed it. See also: this excellent review of Audiogalaxy alternatives.