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Comment by loewenskind | Hacker News Reader

I hope the internet wins this "government vs. internet" fight. This kind of thing is so ignorant as to be insulting. The best DRM the industry has been able to come up with so far was broken before it was even released. Does the FBI seriously think that if they put in back doors that people wont get them? At that point all internet communications may as well be plain text.

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It is simply not true that "the best DRM the industry has come up with was broken before it was released". Examples of DRM schemes that remain unbroken, and continue to support their owners business objectives:

* The content protection scheme that binds DirecTV cards to paying accounts.

* The VM-based BD+ scheme that protects each wave of Blu-Ray releases, requiring disks to be cracked individually.

* The current incarnation of the iTunes video rental protection scheme.

This doesn't change my point. The things you list, if indeed they haven't been cracked, have a smaller amount of effected people than "all US encrypted traffic" and there is a lot more money at stack (e.g. all online banking). If there is a back door it will absolutely be cracked.

Unfortunately most people don't care or don't care to know.

On a side note, why not to have our own separate internet? I've been thinking about OpenVPN tunnels between dedicated servers and letting users connect to them over vpn links, of course. This would form a closed network with services inside. It's a sad commentary, but having privacy friendly network sounds like a breath of fresh air just 20 years after the Internet took off.

What you're proposing there sounds a lot like the Xnet in Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother [1]. But I do agree with your comment that it's a sad commentary about the state of government and regulation, that a private network like this sounds like a pretty good idea.

[1] Available for free straight from Cory Doctorow: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

Thank you for the link. Looks like a good read.

My idea of the network like this is more about privacy than anonymity. And it shouldn't be too hard to set it up. I am just bouncing the idea around to see what others think of it.

>Unfortunately most people don't care or don't care to know.

Hackers on the internet care. Pandora's "free and instant information" box has been opened, I don't think you'll ever be able to close it again.

"Joe Plumber" on the internet will also care the first time someone hacks his bank account because his bank was using one of these backdoorable encryption schemes for online banking.

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