Criminalizing Encryption

by metavalent

As promised and warned time and time again over the past 15 years, Slashdot now reporting that once again Cable Packet Shaping is Causing Network Slowdowns.

Sure, we’ve seen many smaller misadventures of this type in the past, but if you think that MPAA and RIAA meddling is evil, or that telecom reconsolidation after the 1996 Revolution is evil, you ain’t seen nothing, yet. Once encryption is rendered  utterly unusable on the public internet, by virtue of such lame excuses as the ones used by Rogers Cable, you can pretty much say goodbye to that private conversation with your sister about whether or not to have an abortion, with your online peer-therapist about how your anti-anxiety medication is working, or any of a million other topics that are certainly NOT your ISP’s business, at all.

But by all means, go right on ahead and consider this disturbing ISP behavior as an obtuse and arcane technological tangent affecting only those dorky geeks. Comfort yourself that it’s not worthy of your attention, it’s no big deal, just another pointless rant by some Old Fogie with nothing else to do but complain, right? After all, you know those Old People – always complaining about their knees and never adding anything creative, interesting, much less of cognitive or commercial value, right?