At first glance, this just seems like another case of foolishly considered legislation holding back US progress in the computer field. We already saw it with encryption standards (the US has never caught up from the damage that treating encryption software as munitions did,) we are now seeing it with the DMCA and now this lemon-law (and the product liability issue that Elian speaks of) will most likely lead to a shift in certain types of software development out of the states to Europe and the East. (For instance it is arguable that developing a disassembler or debugger could be considered felony offences under DMCA.) Of course for me, living in Europe this probably would be a good thing...

A second thought is that product liability for security breaches would IMO probably be good for the open source community. Inividual developers and small software houses would find it impossible to check their security levels without peer review and as we all know peer review is all but impossible without open source.

Yves / DeMerphq
---
Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.