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How ridiculous is this? I hope for my American technician friends that this doesn't become a country wide trend...
Texas PC Repair Now Requires PI License
Quote:
A recently passed law requires that Texas computer-repair technicians have a private-investigator license, according to a story posted by a Dallas-Fort Worth CW affiliate.
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In order to obtain said license, technicians must receive a criminal justice degree or participate in a three-year apprenticeship. Those shops that refuse to participate will be forced to shut down. Violators of the new law can be hit with a $4,000 dollar fine and up to a year in jail, penalties that apply to customers who seek out their services.
It's absolutely crazy!
the first counter-suit has already been filed
I agree. It is a bit ridiculous.?Quote:
Consumers are subject to the same harsh penalties as the repair shops they use: criminal penalties of up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine, and civil penalties of up to $10,000—just for having their computer repaired by an unlicensed technician.
Right when you thought you've seen it all....:eek:
Sounds to me like some politician got PO'ed at a repair shop...maybe he found a virus on his puter after it was repaired. Now he's pushed this utterly insane law.
That...or it is an influential PI moonlighting as a PC repairman who is trying to force out the competition.
That...or it extraterrestrial aliens taking over the Texas political system, but they haven't quite got this "common sense" thing down yet...
After having lived in Texas before, I'm leaning towards the latter....
:confused:Quote:
This Act takes effect September 1, 2007
Can someone explain to me the logic of this law? What on earth is the connection between PI and pc repair???
Ditto. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by bistro
H.B. No. 2833 - AN ACT, relating to the licensing and regulation of certain private security services.Quote:
Originally Posted by usil
http://www.legis.state.tx.us/tlodocs...l/HB02833F.htm
Quote:
... private security
... obtaining or furnishing information includes information obtained or furnished through the review and analysis of, and the investigation into the content of, computer-based data not available to the public.
Oh good grief.....http://bestsmileys.com/fainting/1.gif....Talk about paranoia!
The IT idiots where I work have reached this kind of ridiculous paranoia. When I called them to ask why the office Outlook was so incredibly slow, the dude told me that all incoming email had to go through an AV program...but it didn't stop there. They set it up so that internal email has to also go through AV....and all email that is deleted or moved to a different folder....ALL has to be scanned first before any action is done. Our Outlook is slower than roadkill because of this ridiculous redundancy (takes a full minute to open a file with a 1mb attachment). I told him, "Then YOU guys have become the virus!"....he just babbled incoherently for a few seconds....I just hung up on him. :D
Some butthead supervisor probably gave them the riot act about protecting the system and they have overreacted. Sounds like the same thing is going on down in Texas, only on a bigger scale (which is a Texan tendency).
Utterly ridiculous. I can't think of anything at the moment, but I am sure there are other professions that has access to private data.Quote:
Originally Posted by SpywareDr
This sort of thing is nothing new. In Idaho, they had another plan that would have required everyone who worked with network cabling to be a licensed electrician. To be a licensed electrician requires a three year apprenticeship. With the requirements proposed (backed by a few large wiring companies), it would have been illegal for business employees to plug in a patch cable between a computer and a switch. A licensed electrician would have been required for this operation. Never mind that most licensed electricians have no idea how to wire a network cable.
Jeez, if this sort of thing would have happened in Israel, the whole country would come to a halt.
This is beyond ridiculous, it's a misuse of a word. It's not "investigation", it's "recovery", plain and simple.
What do you mean Joe?Quote:
Originally Posted by JPnyc
Everything in this country is getting beyond bizarre :(
just what I said, it's a misuse of the word, to investigate is to uncover information for a purpose, to discover some fact or series of facts to point to a conclusion. To recover merely means to keep data from being lost forever. One has nothing to do with the other.Quote:
Originally Posted by usil
I agree.
investigate - To observe|study by close|systematic examination
recover - To save from loss and restore to usefulness. To gain by legal process.
exactly, and it really is just that simple. This by no means guarantees that everybody who does recovery will be scrupulous about it, but the law should embrace the ideal, and then punish the deviation. This law is wrong. Inarguably incorrect.