Red alert! For the last six months, EFF, our supporters, and dozens of other groups have been sounding the alarm about several #BadInternetBills that have been put forward in Congress. We’ve made it clear that these bills are terrible ideas, but Congress is now considering packaging them together—possibly into must-pass legislation.
The first step is to make it illegal to sideload “illegal” apps. It’s the step that sounds reasonable that less informed people might agree with or at least not protest. The next step is to arbitrarily decide what makes an app illegal. By that point, it’s too late to protest the actual law.
It’s like the law in Florida making the punishment death for sexual assault on a child. That sounds fine until you realize that their legislature has announced their intent to make wearing clothes opposite your gender in public into sexual assault on a child.
Unilateral restrictive laws, without specific stipulations or conditions, even innocent sounding ones like this, are one bad actor away from being changed to a political weapon.
First: it doesn’t say “illegal”, it says “prohibited”. Could be (and probably is) talking about apps prohibited either by the device manufacturer or apps that are otherwise legal but copied from another device (i.e. loaded through a 3rd party app store)
Second: the use of the “illegal” app should be the illegal thing, not the side-loading of it on your device. In your analogy, growing any plants in your house at all would be the new restriction, on top of weed being illegal (for now)
What should be your reason? Why is wanting the right to use whatever software I want not a good reason?
Software is not weed, it is not an automatic assault rifle, it is information. You could literally speak the binary encoding of the software aloud if you had enough time, and I’m pretty sure freedom of speech is a right everyone has.
No, they want to make it illegal to install an illegal app.
It’s like saying: “Lol wut? They want to make it illegal to grow weed in my home?”
Now, I am NOT for this bill regardless, but that shouldn’t be your reason.
The first step is to make it illegal to sideload “illegal” apps. It’s the step that sounds reasonable that less informed people might agree with or at least not protest. The next step is to arbitrarily decide what makes an app illegal. By that point, it’s too late to protest the actual law.
It’s like the law in Florida making the punishment death for sexual assault on a child. That sounds fine until you realize that their legislature has announced their intent to make wearing clothes opposite your gender in public into sexual assault on a child.
Unilateral restrictive laws, without specific stipulations or conditions, even innocent sounding ones like this, are one bad actor away from being changed to a political weapon.
Forgive my ignorance, I am an idiot. I did think about that part.
Way late to this, but:
First: it doesn’t say “illegal”, it says “prohibited”. Could be (and probably is) talking about apps prohibited either by the device manufacturer or apps that are otherwise legal but copied from another device (i.e. loaded through a 3rd party app store)
Second: the use of the “illegal” app should be the illegal thing, not the side-loading of it on your device. In your analogy, growing any plants in your house at all would be the new restriction, on top of weed being illegal (for now)
What should be your reason? Why is wanting the right to use whatever software I want not a good reason?
Software is not weed, it is not an automatic assault rifle, it is information. You could literally speak the binary encoding of the software aloud if you had enough time, and I’m pretty sure freedom of speech is a right everyone has.