JimH,
Sorry if I was out of line with the intrusion countermeasures comment, but it's what I felt. It was mostly tongue-in-cheek, as the "On a more serious note" preface to my next sentance indicated, but it was, I believe, a valid opinion.
Nobody has the right to go plucking through my hard drive on a self-indulgent digital witch hunt. They do not have the right to launch what amounts to a denial-of-service attack on me. It becomes exponentially more intolerable when the RIAA can pay millions of dollars to politicians so that they can write their own legislature which allows them to do so without warning and without a warrant.
This proposed law, when paraphrased, says "Here in America, the authorities can't come into your home through the door without a court-issued warrant; they can, however, enter through your internet connection, without a warrant, and with little to no probable cause."
If employees of the RIAA come to my house, bash down my door, unplug my internet connection, and start deleting files, they will be met with a shotgun. If instead they choose to do it through my internet connection, I will be lamenting my lack of a virtual shotgun. That's where my fantasy of intrusion countermeasures sprung from.
I ask you, unless you volunteer the information, how will the RIAA know that you are sharing mp3's? Will they port-scan you, looking for services running on whichever ports KaZaA uses? Will they begin to circulate mp3 files that are imbedded with a sub7-sytle bot, that will search your drives for mp3's and then "call home" if it finds them? Perhaps the bot'll just delete them outright? Perhaps they'll use it to log your keystrokes (don't worry, they'll ignore your credit card numbers and passwords... they just want your mp3's) to monitor for occurences of "mp3"? It is not possible to obtain that kind of information without using virus-like or hack-like methods. Oh, and did I mention that if -you- do any of this stuff that it's against the law? Thus my outrage. Thus my desire to give them a retributional (*not* pre-emptive) virtual pimpslap.
Charlemagne 8, my reference to "this intrusive, overzealous, and misguided organization" is referring to the RIAA, not Congress. How soon will it be until they find a way to make -honest money- from mp3 (and other file) sharing, rather than writing more and more legislature which is becoming increasingly blunt, ignorant, and obtuse? They continue to try to stick their thumbs in the **, but they ran out of thumbs long ago (most of them were already otherwise occupied, hehehe).
Perhaps they should hire more marketing agents and less lawyers.