Are We Free or Not?

There's a truly disturbing article in Wired right now about the battle to remove the restrictions on encryption technology. The worry is that such laws make individuals powerless to prevent media companies from using the DMCA to restrict their rights. But how far do you go?

' "When you empower people to do things, we empower them to do bad things," said Mike Godwin, staff council at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "It's a hard problem: What do you allow people to do in a free society? This is the hard part of democracy. You have to end up trusting people." '

What do you allow people to do in a free society? The answer to this one is deceptively simple, folks. Anything they want. If you don't, you're just kidding yourself about having a free society in the first place.

Will some people do bad things? Sure. Actions have consequences, and those that hurt others will be caught and punished. But you can't call yourselves "the land of the free" by depriving everyone of their rights in the name of some nebulous security.

Yes, Too Good To Be True

Lies! Lies! All Lies!

So I figured that by going to an actually stand alone T-Mobile location I would find accurate answers to all my questions. Nope! The salesman outright lied! I asked him 3 times if he was sure that the "Sidekick Plan" was available for any phone, and 3 times the answer was, "Yes." Liar! After 2 hours with T-Mobile's extremely helpful customer service and "data specialists" we learn that indeed it is only available with the Sidekick device.

Deciding to keep my phone and the supreme customer service of T-Mobile, I switched to a normal voice plan and will simply connect via GSM to my normal ISP at the agonizing speed of 9600 baud. Archaic, slow, and using my ample minutes, but at least I am now "wireless" with this handy 4 ounces of fun.

I pray that no one ran out to purchase the Sidekick plan in the past few hours based upon my earlier misguided post. I'll crawl back into my hole now...

Too Good To Be True?

I have finally entered the modern age. Friday night my wife and I broke down and bought a Sony Ericsson T68m phone with T-Mobile as the service provider. Do I need a cell phone? Probably not, but the tech-geek in me was charmed by the new revelation... The service plan for T-Mobile's "Sidekick" in not restricted solely to that device, it is available with any Net ready phone! $39 per month gets me an mediocre 200 week "anytime" minutes and 1000 weekend "anytime" minutes with overages being a mere $0.35 per minutes.

So what's so great about it? Hmm, how about unlimited data over their GSM/GPRS network! Woohoo! Now I'll never get any writing done! Reading the fine print lets you know that the "Unlimited Data" is only for the first year, after that it is 15MB per month with overage being $3.50/MB. Even with that it is still more reasonable than all of their other Data plans.

But, the big "butt" in the equation is... The data is currently not turned on for my phone. Either that or the phone was not set up properly at purchase. So this morning must be spent with T-Mobile's support staff on the phone. Fortunately my call yesterday was handled extremely well so I am hopeful.

This is how I must spend my rare Sunday off from work... Like everyone else I'm chasing the wireless dream, and Freddy Krueger is chasing me in a rocket powered monkey car...