internet
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.
UK Threat level RSS
Given the recent change to our required fear level, I was some what surprised to discover that there’s no easy way to be notified as to when we should increase, or even decrease, our level of fear and underlying anxiety. It seems that by some terrible over sight our glorious Government and security forces haven’t made it easy to get notified of when the “current terrorism threat level” changes. As , and I was surprised at this, no one seems to have done so already I put together a little script that monitors the Home Office web site and publishes changes to the “current terrorism threat level” to an RSS feed. Which can then be pulled into all sorts of useful things, such as a blog side bar or anything else for that matter. The feed is deliberately very simple to make it more useful for feeding into other things.
I’ve just discovered the official historical record so I’ll back fill that data, and for future changes I’ll also grab the RSS feed from the BBC news site so we can know at least what was in the headlines at the time.
Anyway for more details either click on the link in the side bar or go here:
http://www.anonymong.org/alert/
or just subscribe to the feed here:
http://www.anonymong.org/alert/alert.rss
e-petitions what are they good for?
Yesterday I received notification that the Government had responded to an e-petition I’d signed. It happened to be the one regarding their limiting cost recovery if you’re found innocent (response here). Now other than suspecting they’ll not limit the costs they can award if you’re found guilty, and wondering why they now just send a link rather than e-mailing a response as they did back in 2007 (I suspect this is due to it being easier to change a website than an e-mail you’ve sent to people – but I’m cynical like that) – the main thing I found myself wondering is has any petition submitted via the Number 10 website ever caused any change in behaviour?
Every petition I’ve signed the response has basically boiled down to:
“Thanks for getting in touch, but you’re wrong”
now that could be due to the types of petition I sign so I checked some others and found two different types of response:
“Thanks for getting in touch, we’re already doing that”
and
“Thanks for getting in touch, that’s got nothing to do with us”
Has anyone seen a response which involves them making the slightest change in action or anything, even a bit of further thought of another fake consultation? Has any of the numerous petitions submitted resulted in even the tiniest change on the governments part?
I’m tempted to offer a prize for the first person to find a response where they actually say they’ll do something different.
Escaping from the Vatican
Having recently been reading all sorts of things on the freeman of the land and lawful rebellion front, it occurred to me that some people might also be interested in the obscure but much simpler method for formally leaving the Roman Catholic church. As they count you as a member unless you convert to another faith and even then sometimes. The whole idea of being “lapsed” is somewhat of a myth. So here for those that are interested are two rather useful links.
Firstly we have a Vatican document discussing just what the criteria are for someone to formally renounce their faith. The second a rather handy Irish website that has put the whole three step process On line.
Climate change hack
Loads of people have already dealt with this far better than I ever could, notably Bishop Hill and the Devils Kitchen. The response over at Real climate is also quite enlightening, especially as they feature in some of the hacked emails (Oh and claim to be independent of any environmental organizations) .
So go and read what these more informed people have to say, in the mean time I’m going to address just two points which come up in the defence of the scientists on Real climate. Firstly there is the claim that it’s all out of context and it’s vital that scientists e-mails are never seen for fear it will hamper their discussions. Apparently the fact that in business you have to assume that courts may see your mail is irrelevant, as in business I assume they believe that you don’t need a free and open exchange of ideas. This is really just so much nonsense, historically the amount of private correspondence between scientists that has been published as well as “private” notebooks is huge. Also obviously if they’re being funded by the tax payers then all of their work belongs to the tax payer, and how do you misinterpret people saying they’d rather delete a file that release it due to a FOI request? As we’re so often told if they’ve nothing to hide they’ve nothing to fear.
More worryingly from a scientific point of view is the huge and obvious reluctance to share their data and models with other people. Only allowing peer review by select and (presumably) friendly/sympathetic peers is not the way to do good science. The hypocrisy of claiming that they need to be able to speak freely to advance science whilst at the same time looking for ways to avoid sharing their work and data with other academics and talking about hiding behind IPR is somewhat shocking (well it would be if it was new).
The one thing, which I think the revealed data does show is that the science for significant man made climate change is nowhere near as solid as we’re led to believe. The robust debate for which hiding data is vital, isn’t allowed to reach us mere mortals despite the changes that are being insisted on to combat models which are still the matter of such robust debate and seemingly such suspect data. The way that bits of data sets are seemingly casually discarded when they no longer fit the favoured model is quite worrying, why should say tree data suddenly become unreliable? If there’s good evidence of some external change affecting that data fair enough, but if it’s suspect after point X with no such external change why isn’t it also suspect before then. It’s details such as this which I think go beyond “ambiguous at worst”
Letter to Baroness Buscombe
you may or may not have heard by Baroness Buscombe the new chair of the Press Complaints Commission is pondering if it might not be a frightfully jolly idea for the PCC to also regulate blogs. Regulating blogs seeming to be an idea that governments just can’t let go of, despite the vast numbers of technical difficulties that would prevent it working for anyone with even half a technical clue. So despite this being an even sillier idea than holding ISPs liable for usenet posts made by people that aren’t their customers, it’s probably best to try and kill it as soon as possible. After all they did end up making ISPs liable for usenet posts, and the evidence is they’ve only got dafter since then.
So go and sign this rather well written letter over at Liberal Conspiracy explaining to the powers that be, that it’s a very silly idea and that we’re doing quite well on our own thanks very much and that maybe the PCC should get the hang of effectively regulating the press first before they start worrying about anything else.
Post of the day
Been a while since I posted one of these but Pavlov’s cat has a rather excellent article about the newest anti-smoking adverts and our fear of death.
(Stumbled upon via an excellent article from Leg Iron)
NightJack exposed for the vanity of the Times
Until he stopped writing it I used to very much enjoy NightJacks view of the police, and his guide for decent people is invaluable. Now however thanks to The Times and that champion of free speech Justice Eady, the only way you’ll get to read his words is if you stumble across them in a cache somewhere. Despite having ceased blogging a while back, to go and write a novel, the Times felt that it would be a good thing to let everyone know who he was. This has already resulted in him getting written warning from his force and as his views were honest and not always full of praise for the higher echelons of the force, I suspect it won’t do his career and general work life much good.
Sadly I fear that Justice Eadys ruling was the correct one, though I’m not sure I agree with him that blogging is essentially a public business, and I definitely don’t agree that just because a blogger is a member of the police that automatically makes there real identity a matter of public interest. The story in the Times though seems to be without merit. I’ve no idea if this is part of a retaliation from the main stream media against those nasty upstart bloggers as some suggest. There’s nothing to be done to undo this situation, though if NightJack does ever publish a novel I’ll be buying it, in the meantime as Iain Dale asks will the Times cease to quote unnamed sources “close to…”, we can also as Hopi Sen suggests write to the Times to share our opinion of their actions. I am sadly sure, again as Iain Dale suggests, that this will have an impact on other bloggers and commentators involved in the justice systems and other organs of the state. I would though second the thought that it should also have an impact on who might want to talk to the Times, whilst I’m unlikely to ever have anything of interest to say I do know that in the unlikely event I do I won’t be saying it to the Times and who knows I may yet be at a demo and see something of note.
Oh and if anyone happens to know anything much at all about Patrick Foster of the Times Old Holborn feels it would be quite in the public interest for such things to be shared.
Update: The Independent knew but didn’t tell who NightJack is. (Tip of the tifter to Woman on Raft)
Plugging people I know
Gratuitous plug for a new blog by people I know (I won’t even mention the appalling use of a .co for something seemingly non-profit when the .org was available… well ok I will but not much), anyway go take a squint at:
Police State UK
The founding writers are intelligent and their writing doesn’t cause me to wish fiery death down on them, so got to be worth a quick look at least.
Enjoy.
UK terror threat status
- Severe 2010/01/25