freedom
Hogan home
Well done to everyone invovled in getting him out, seems Nick hogan got released today
Excellent Stuff, special kudos to Anna Raccoon and Old Holborn for all their work.
This is getting silly
I’ve been meaning to write about the Digital economy bill for a while, but life has been getting in the way and it just keeps getting sillier. Plus of course loads of other people are providing excellent commentary faster than I was getting round to it, but I’ve never let being late to the party stop me before.
The things that are wrong with this bill are almost too numerous to mention, it’s obviously written with either no technical understanding at all, or with the deliberate intent to be wide open to abuse. The current government does such things so often I’ve given up trying to work out if they’re deviously evil or just incompetent or even some odd mix of the two. The latest silliness added to this bill oddly doesn’t come from the government benches but from Lib Dem peers who want to be able to force ISPs to block “access to specified online locations“. Now not only is this silly it’s pointless. (it may be worth noting that the Lib Dem peer concerned gets money from a law firm specialising in copyright protection.
It’s pointless because it’s very easily circumvented, the internet was designed to work around points of failure. So if they block a site people will still be able to get to it using proxies, VPNs, the TOR network or various other methods. A lot of work has been done in solving the problem of blocked sites to deal with far more oppressive and organised regimes than this. Plus of course such banned sites will get more publicity than before they were blocked, as any number of banned lists in the past will testify.
It’s silly because very many “online locations” share an IP address with other “online locations”, so the usual way to block access to a site is to block the IP address. This will have huge amounts of collateral damage as such a block will also block access to all the other sites at that address. Think of it as closing down an entire shopping centre just because there’s a single dodgy shop tucked away in the corner. I imagine that the innocent sites blocked in such a manner might be a bit miffed and contemplate taking some action against the ISP’s so blocking them. Depending on how the required court orders are worded it gets sillier still. If the order says block “copyrighttheft.anonymong.org” then the blocked site can get out of that by just changing the name to “copyrighttheft2.anonymong.org” and if they make it more general and block “anonymong.org” well a new domain costs two quid.
Of course there is a way they could block a site by name and not by IP address, all they’d need to do is look in depth at your traffic, rather than just where it’s going, to see what it’s actually doing. Then they could tell which actual site on a shared server you wanted and only stop requests going to the banned site. This is called deep packet inspection and BT are currently in court about it – but on the upside it would cause the ISPs to have records of everywhere you’ve visited, and with only a tiny bit of feature creep what you’ve done on all of those sites. Such transaction records of course being subject to other legislation which requires the ISP to keep them for seven years just in case the government needs them – to stop terrorists of to protect the children or something.
All of this will of course have a cost, particularly as the bill now says that “the Court shall order the service provider to pay the copyright owner’s costs of the application unless there were exceptional circumstances justifying the service provider’s failure to prevent access despite notification by the copyright owner.“. Whilst this cost will be passed onto the end user pushing up your internet bill, the ISPs are also going to minimise the cost by just blocking things on notification rather than waiting for a court order they have to pay for. Ever since Lawrence Godfrey* ISPs have pretty much had to remove/block content on notification this will just make that situation worse. Though I strongly suspect that where someone such as Guido to ask that the BBC be blocked for violating his copyright** he’d probably not get such a helpful response. Ultimately the aim of this clause is to allow large corporate copyright holders to trample all over the net at no cost to themselves and with little or no risk.
For a more legal focused review of this clause you could go worse than reading panGloss’s take on the matter.
I may attempt to tackle some of the other lunacy in this bill later.
Many thanks to Freya for passing on most of the links referenced above.
* Yeah, sorry about that.
** It’s worth remembering that by default you own the copyright to anything you create – without having to do anything. If some corporate site, or spotty oik in college nicks your graphic/music/content you could in theory get them blocked under this bill (good luck with that though if it’s not a spotty oik in college). This potentially makes this bill an incredible denial of service tool.
Just spreading the word
Via Captain Ranty comes this rather excellent post by Corrugated Soundbite
“Now I’m glad Brits don’t riot
No, really.
We live in a nation with a State that assumes every adult to be a paedophile unless proven otherwise. They can take your kids away by simply deeming you “not bright enough”, whilst knowingly leaving children in the hands of parents who abuse them until they die.
No riot. “
Go read the whole thing, it rather echo’s and sums up a lot of stuff that’s been said by Leg Iron in the past, and they’ve got a damn good point.
Update: LegIron counsels patience even though there are even more reasons to be a tad miffed.
More things of interest
Much as I hate to have two posts in a row just pointing you at other articles, but I’m just going to have to live with that.
First off there is a rather ill thought out advert to persuade us all to get ID cards – apparently so that we can be executed, as spotted by The Register (do read the comments) and taken up by Big Brother Watch.
Which rather ties in with another excellent article from the keyboard of Leg Iron – a hypothetical future where people without ID chips get pulled from the street. Go read it and decide how unlikely it seems to you.
In the comments on LegIrons article was an anonymous link to a rather interesting if possibly a bit tinfoil hat video about the Codex Alimentarius – rather long but actually interesting enough to watch all the way through.
Photography in public places the battle continues
You can tell that the problem with the police harassing photographers for taking pictures in public places is getting serious when 365 establishment photographer write a letter to the Telegraph (hat tip Samizdata). If things get much worse they’ll write to the editor of the Times and use green ink. Now I’m not convinced this will do much good as the disconnect appears to be between the 646 that sit and make laws and those that implement them on the streets as they see fit.
The letter quite reasonably points out that if you were up to no good, you’d probably just use google street view, a camera phone or at most a small compact of some sort and not a hulking great SLR on a tripod. They even make the radical claim that the presensce of such a visible camera might make people thing twice about doing no good in case the very visible human operator took thier photo. Which if you think about it would explain why the police (and news agencies) appeal to the public for any photo’s after major incidents. Though as various commenatators have observed the letter does smell rather of special pleading – that the police shouldn’t pick on “proper” photographers with expensive equipment but feel free to infringe the rights and liberties of those scruffy plebs with the cheap nasty cameras.
Since the anti-terrorism laws have come into force making it allowable to stop and search people, and making it an offence to take photographs “liable to be of use to terrorists”. The police, PCSO and various security gaurds have been using it as an excuse to harrass or beat photographers that have been taking pictures in public of pretty much anything. Just taking photo’s of the outside of iconic landmarks can make you a terror suspect if the local security goons take against you. Of course this has been going on for a while now and has even been debated in parliament back in April 2009 by MP’s who’ve been stopped themselves. There have also been numerous blogs and articles written about it and public demonstrations organised. The home office issued a circular in August 2009 clarifying the situation and restating that it’s not illegal to take photogrpahs in public places, nor is taking photographs on it’s own grounds (if they really think you’re a terrorist they need to use section 43 not section 44). The Met office also updated their guidelines in September also stating that generally people shouldn’t be stopped from taking photographs. Yet despite this ongoing restating of the fact that normal people are in fact allowed to take photographs in public of retty much whatever they like, photographers are still getting routinely stopped. So really I’m expecting this letter to have about as much imapct as the facebook group.
What will probably also have no effect is another demo on 23rd Jan 2010 but still we must keep trying.
Of course on the flip side of this the police are using traffic cameras to harass and limit movement of peaceful protesters as well as building up a photographic data base of people at protests, but they really hate being filmed
Welcome to Lisbon
Yesterday very late in the day I posted a link to Captain Ranty’s summary of what we were about to lose under the Lisbon treaty. I like I suspect many other people have never read the 294 pages that make up the Lisbon treaty, and so (much to my shame) wasn’t aware of just what it meant. Now it’s in force so we’ll be fighting to regain what has been lost rather than to defend what we have, which is always a much trickier battle. Archbishop Cranmer as ever provides a nice historical perspective.
To understand just what this treaty means to us, and to the rest of Europe as it isn’t good for anyone except the unelected elite that now rule us, go and read the very succinct (just 6,000+ words) commentary on the Lisbon treaty over at Katabasis, then when you’ve done that and calmed down read it again. The implications of this “rationalising” treaty are really quite troubling (to put it mildly), but I do wonder as have many other people if the treaty is constitutional. I don’t think it makes much difference if it isn’t all the time we just choose between red or blue big statists, but as Leg Iron has often observed we do have alternatives. Perhaps the time has come to form some unholy alliances as Snowolf suggests. It would take a lot of nose holding, but short of who knows how many years of this new state followed by a more violent upheaval a single purpose alliance of many small parties may be our best hope. Elect anyone on a mandate of a chance to get out and the promise that as soon as we’re out another election would follow, it seems like a good option to me.
(I may update this further as I get my head round what’s actually just happened)
You’d have thought this would have made more of a stir
From Captain Ranty a list of rights that we’re about to lose.
Go and read it here and then ask yourself the same question I find I’m asking myself. Just how did we let this happen?
More demo’s on the 31st
As I mentioned a little while ago a rather dubious organization is planning a “procession” to call for the over throw of the government, monarchy and democracy in this country. The views of this group are rather unsurprisingly not widely supported being as they are just a few noisy extreme Muslims, however the march is significant so again unsurprisingly there is now a counter demonstration being organized by Muslims4UK, and British Muslims for Secular Democracy. Hopefully this will be a much larger demonstration, especially if those of us who are also rather against the ideas behind the initial “procession” turn up to be counted as well, as we have been invited to do.
Date: Saturday Oct 31 2009
Time: 13,00 to 16.00
Venue: Piccadilly Circus
(I sadly won’t be there due to being a few hundred miles away but I will be back for the 5th).
One thing though that may make this counter demonstration somewhat fraught or at least interesting is that the EDL seem to have changed their minds and despite initially saying that they were not counter demonstrating against Islam4UK they now are. Which may lead to some tension as the Muslims4UK group are against the EDL as much as they’re against the Islam4UK group saying:
“to the EDL: You do not represent English people. You are clearly looking to incite trouble.”
So with them both in the same place protesting against the same other group of protesters it may as I say become interesting. With luck it may become interesting in a positive way, with reconciliation of differences and increased understanding brought about by a shared opponent.
just to round things off the EDL have a promo video for their demo which as some very stirring music but really isn’t nearly as nice as the promo video made by
British Muslims for Secular Democracy under the moniker of SecularDemocracy.org
So if I could make it I’d be with the group with the amusing signs.
Update Facebook event here
News for photographers
This just in via FitWatch, the Met have updated their guidelines for stopping and searching terrorists photographers, to clarify that they can only see your photographs if they suspect you of being a terrorist and also that they have no right to delete digital photographs or destroy film. They actually state that twice, with regards to two different sections.
There is also a Home office circular giving clarification. The hesdline of which is:
Important: Section 43 does not prohibit the taking of photographs, film or digital images in a public place and members of the public and the press should not be prevented from doing so in exercise of the powers conferred by section 43.
A police officer can only stop and search a person they reasonably suspect to be a terrorist under this power.
Both the circular and the Met guidelines are quite short so do take the time to read them, then save a copy in case it changes/vanishes and then make sure to tell other people.
Update: The people over at “I’m a photographer not a terrorist” are putting together a rather dandy map of “authorised” areas.
Talking of anonymous police
Whilst the value of police bloggers is in mind I’d like to bring your attention to a “recent”* post of Inspector Gadgets. Who in a “fond” farewell to Hazel Blears time in the home office chair, links to a quite interesting report on the value of our plastic police, sod all it seems. It seems that the powers that be would rather that the finding the plastics have little use except for vehicle crime oh and they spend 71% of their time in the Station. Well worth reading all 9 pages.
Meanwhile it seems that other police are using false arrest to collect DNA samples (Hat tip Samiz Data & Old Holborn), you’ll note in this case that the mainstream media are quite happy to quote an anonymous member of the force. Perhaps it’s just the Times that doesn’t like such things, or perhaps it’s OK to be anonymous as long as you speak to the press.
UK terror threat status
- Severe 2010/01/25