Foghorn Fritz, the CBDTPA, and the revenge of the Wave-oids (Re: Secure peripheral cards)

[R. A. Hettinga]

At 9:45 AM -0500 on 3/22/02, Roop Mukherjee wrote:


> Wave.com touts this security system called Embassy.

By the way Wave has been around since the flood, and their primary MO has
always been exactly what Fritz Hollings, who Rush Limbaugh likes to imitate
with a Warner Brothers 'Foghorn Leghorn' voice, is trying to pass a law to
do.

That is, end-to-end (end-to-monitor, actually) is-a-person book-entry
settlement of content transactions originally over dial-up lines and cable
boxes, and now over the internet itself.

Huber wrote a glowing article about them in Forbes as early as 1992-3, IIRC.

Wave was started by a former chairman of some large chip-firm (National
Semi?), essentially wanted to create a law-mandated chip monopoly.

He actually wanted to come speak at FC97, if we comped his fee, and then
didn't send any of his "scientific" people when we told him it was a
peer-reviewed conference with proceedings published in Springer-Verlag LNCS.

During the internet stock bubble, his investors, self-described
"Wave-oids", would haunt the investor web-chats and shout down anyone who
talked about actual revenue as a "short" focused on the Next Big Thing in
Entertainment Technology. Long before the bubble popped, Wave was delisted,
then re-listed, but I don't know where it is now...

If there was any chance that Foghorn Fritz Hollings' little bit of probably
unconstitutional legislative lunacy is going to win, of course, the Wave
boys, and their respective oids, are going to make out like bandits -- if
some other digital "rights" "management" system doesn't buy its place to
the front of the line first.

It would be real interesting to see whether anyone at Wave actually
contributed to Hollings' campaigns, or whether this is dumb luck.  In honor
of Pournelle's dictum about not crediting to conspiracy that which can
easily be attributed to stupidity, I'd probably choose the later, but you
never know...

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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