twitter's Journal: UK Moves to Outlaw "Hacker Tools"

New guidance rules for the UK's controversial Computer Misuse Act do not allay fears of impracticality or a free software ban:

the government has come through with guidelines that address some, but not all, of these concerns about "dual-use" tools. The guidelines establish that to successfully prosecute the author of a tool it needs to be shown that they intended it to be used to commit computer crime. But the Home Office, despite lobbying, refused to withdraw the distribution offence. This leaves the door open to prosecute people who distribute a tool, such as nmap, that's subsequently abused by hackers.

Don't say you were not warned in 2004:

I also expect a serious effort, backed by several billion dollars in bribe money (oops, excuse me, campaign contributions), to get open-source software outlawed on some kind of theory that it aids terrorists.

and warned in 1997:

Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.

free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggersyou could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

The UK is being abused first, but the US will follow soon enough. This is just the next step in "IP" law one upsmanship.