This article over at The Register just shows how stupid US state laws can be. This Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is one of them laws. It states that Firewalls are illegal, and so is encryption. So, that means that most people with shared broadband internet access are doing illegal things. here are some parts of the article:

"Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destination of any communication from your ISP would be illegal — with no exceptions. </p>

"If you send or receive your email via an encrypted connection, you’re in violation, because the ‘To’ and ‘From’ lines of the emails are concealed from your ISP by encryption. (The encryption conceals the destinations of outgoing messages, and the sources of incoming messages.)

"Worse yet, Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology widely used for enterprise security, operates by translating the ‘from’ and ‘to’ fields of Internet packets, thereby concealing the source or destination of each packet, and hence violating these bills. Most security ‘firewalls’ use NAT, so if you use a firewall, you’re in violation.

"If you have a home DSL router, or if you use the ‘Internet Connection Sharing’ feature of your favourite operating system product, you’re in violation because these connection sharing technologies use NAT. Most operating system products (including every version of Windows introduced in the last five years, and virtually all versions of Linux) would also apparently be banned, because they support connection sharing via NAT."</font>

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So, am I  now a wanted felon? Hmmmm.