On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 12:21:34 CDT, Jerry Pasker said:

I like Part XIII, Subsecton 115. "Thing." myself.

Actually, that serves a very important purpose - it codifies the concept that a string of ones and zeros can represent something with actual value. If it wasn't there, a defendant could argue that they didn't steal/forge a bank account withdrawal authorization, they just copied/created a stream of bits.....

On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 10:36:04AM -0700, Randy Bush wrote:

the whole thing as a piece. it looks to be a, likely well-meaning, attempt by a gang of bureaucrats and a fancy consultant to put the universe in a glass jar and preserve it. from end user, to net operations, to infrastructure, to administration, to law.

There is one thing in here which has great amusement appeal to me: g. ensure compliance with accepted International technical standards in the provision and development of electronic communications and transactions; The protocol police! It sounds like they're going to create an Industry Forum (GHANOG?), which may produce a "voluntary industry code." About like our housing code in the US. That's going to be fun to watch. -- David W. Hankins "If you don't do it right the first time, Software Engineer you'll just have to do it again." Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. -- Jack T. Hankins

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006, Randy Whitney wrote: > Could you be more specific? Are you talking about "Part VIII > DOMAIN NAME REGISTAR" or something else? Not presuming to answer for Randy, just for myself: This follows one of the typical failure-modes of technical legislation, which is that it contains quite a few good ideas (cryptographic signatures should be deemed to fulfill the role of signatures, nonrepudiatable electronic delivery should be deemed to constitute delivery, etc.) which are re-worded in less-specific "more accessible" language by lawyers, chopped into very small bits, mixed and blended until uniformly unrecognizable, and allowed to ferment until twelve times larger. These things typically create a bit of a baby-with-the-bathwater conundrum for people who think they know what _should_ be done, since many of the things that _should_ be done are in fact buried in the legalese, and starting over from scratch with the same seeds would, like as not, yield a very similar bloated bloated end-product, with another year or two wasted in the mean-time. Which all comes down to the old maxim: you can't legislate stupidity out of existence. Or, perhaps, legislation, by its very existence, brings some stupidity into existence. Less is more. -Bill