Boing Boing: A-Hole bill would make a secret technology into the law of the land

If the controversial Analog Hole bill makes it into law, US technologists will have to obey a law whose most important details are a trade-secret.

… The idea is that any time you attempted to make a digital recording, your device would seek out the VEIL watermark and respond to any special instructions (e.g., “No recording allowed”) it discovered there.

But what the hell is VEIL? No one really knows. The sole commercial deployment of this technology to date has been in a Batman toy (why this makes it fit to be included by law into every American recording device is beyond me).

Copyfighting Princeton Prof Ed Felten called the company that makes VEIL to find out how the technology works. Their answer? They’ll tell Ed how VEIL works only if he pays them $10,000 and signs a non-disclosure agreement. And they’ll only tell him how the decoder works — there’s no price you can pay to find out how VEIL encoding works.

Sounds like Diebold. You know, the voting machines used across the country that have screwed up the last 2 presidential elections.