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Anonymous Coward

Dual use or general purpose is almost the same...

One can make a port scanner out of netcat (aka. network copy) or even from cmd and telnet (both are installed on every windows machine by default). For a dos tool, you could flood a dns server with nslookup (also a default windows program) with locally disabled caching. Most hacker tools are just normal programs used in a clever way. It's one thing to outlaw viruses and hacking kits, but they didn't do that. What the legislation is saying is that it's illegal to own software that could be used as a hacking tool. One such software is internet explorer, which can be used to craft malicious http requests (by typing them into the address bar) that could crash or hack a webserver. There are better, so called ready made kits but instead of outlawing them they just outlawed everything that has to do something with networks and can be used as a general purpose tool. (btw, there is a clever way to use internet explorer with some tricky scripting for mapping a remote webserver for unpatched security holes, so if they ever want to put this law into use, i suggest they should make all browsers illegal to own and make sure everyone deletes every os that has a browser built-in)

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Time to take a sniff at the coffee, perhaps
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Will they have to drag him back like last time?
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