politicians
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.
Recycling old announcements
Reading the Metro today is seems that the Transport Minister Sadiq Khan has announced that the fines for over running roadworks will be increased from 2,500 pounds a day to 25,000 pounds a day, which notionally seems a good idea just as it did when he announced the same thing back in October.
One thing that the new announcement does tackle is the concern that “utility firms could use it as an excuse to put up domestic prices to compensate“, the cunning plan to stop this which can not possibly fail is …they won’t be allowed to do it. Because of course if the Government tells them not to pass on the costs they’ll just accept the lost profits and work harder to avoid the fines, there’s no chance they won’t just change prices for utterly unrelated reasons that happen to cover this increased overhead.
With a government so full of people skilled at fleecing the tax payer whilst working strictly within “the rules”, you’d have thought that they might at least suspect that merely forbidding something may not actually work. A more cynical person might in fact suspect that every time they forbid the passing on over regulatory costs they know damn well they’ll be covered in the next price hike. Though if one were that cynical one might also note that it’s a neat indirect route of pulling money out of our pockets without actually increasing taxes and with the added bonus of being able to blame those evil utility companies
Back to the blog with MPs being charged
I’ve been even quieter than usual as the last two weeks my free time was spent rapidly building props for a friend of mine called Preacher who for publicity and other reasons best known to himself was doing the Britains got Talent thing – oh and then there was sleeping. So I’m way behind on pretty much everything so may well go over stuff that’s already been covered by other people far better.
So as a fun place to start there’s the wonderful news that at least some of the corrupt or incompetent members of parliament are to actually face charges , something which will hopefully rumble on long enough to still be fresh in peoples minds when it comes to time to vote. Sadly of course it’s only four of them being charged so far even though < ahref="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/guidofawkes/~3/HJwEg3uxHfI/">52% were found to have over claimed.
The four that have been charged are claiming that parliamentary privilege means they shouldn’t go to court but that instead accoridng to the 1689 bill of rights it should just be a matter for parliamentary authorities – but they don’t think they’re above the law oh no, of course not. We should also pay no attention that the three of them are using the law firm that < ahref="http://www.annaraccoon.com/politics/a-devine-precedent/">usually represents Labour. There is of course the slight problem that if they can delay their day in court for long enough they may still get a rather handsome pay off, though of course if their colleagues so chose yet another bit of legislation could fix that.
The one thing that is making me suspect that they may actually all be incompetent rather than dishonest is the amazing video of Jim Devine explaining why he shouldn’t be charged. Also utterly failing to understand the difference between a budget and an allowance and the whole concept of false accounting. But then he does claim it was all OK because a whip told him so.
Meanwhile over at the Lords they can carry on troughing. As a final point the new body they’re bringing in to make sure we can’t complain in future when they feather their beds in this fashion is going to cost about six times the amount recovered from our MPs this time round – but just enforcing the rules as they existed and applying existing law would have been far too difficult and wouldn’t have allowed the government to be seen to be doing something.
Snippet of Blair
Having made the long and weary trek from the basement to the fifth floor in search of coffee and a fleeting glimpse of what the weather might be doing, I happened to catch a bit of our discredited glorious leader Mr T. Blair chatting to some inquiry that seems to be happening. The gist of what he seemed to be saying, and to be fair I wasn’t paying much attention as I was in need of coffee, was that a certain Mr Hussein had done lots of nasty things to people that weren’t us and Mr Blair thought that Mr Hussein probably had weapons which he could use to hurt other people who still weren’t us quite badly. Because of this Mr Blair espoused that it was not only reasonable but in fact quite sensible to go and do something really nasty to Mr Hussein before Mr Hussein did anything else nasty to people who probably still wouldn’t be us.
I’ll admit I may be over simplifying here, but that seemed to be the basic thrust of his defence of why beating up Mr Hussein was not only right but also legal. Now I’m not actually interested in if he was right or not, but I can’t help but think that sounds an awful lot like vigilantism, after all Mr Hussein already had an ASBO and had been told that if he was naughty again the UN would think about doing something else. But if this defence of Mr Blairs is accepted how does that mesh with people being told off for merely engaging in sabre rattling (well waving kitchen knives) at people that have also done nasty things to other people and will probably do so again and that are known for being nasty people. After all if our politicians are arguing that knowing someone is a wrong ‘un and will be naughty again is a perfectly fine reason for taking pre-emptive action against them before they’ve done a thing to you, surely the case for us taking action against wrong ‘uns closer to home must be much stronger?
(I know it’s one rule for them and another for us and that it doesn’t work that way – but the parallels are I feel rather interesting).
Just in – arrest Blair
Just been pointed at a shiny new website from Cyberium/George Monbiot (hat tip : Her Ladyship at Tora Towers).
The stated aim of the site is:
“This site offers a reward to people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, for crimes against peace. Anyone attempting an arrest which meets the rules laid down here will be entitled to one quarter of the money collected at the time of his or her application.
Money donated to this site will be used for no other purpose than to pay bounties for attempts to arrest Tony Blair. All administration and other costs, apart from any charges added to your donations by Paypal, will be paid by the site’s founder.”
A site well worth giivng a high profile to – though if Wikileaks is anything to judge by PayPal will no doubt pull the plug fairly quickly.
Withers LLP twinned with Carter Fuck
It would seem that the new fashion amongst lawyers is to try to silence Parliament, following on from Carter Fuck trying to stop Trafigura we now have Withers LLP trying their hand at preventing MPs talking about things in Parliament. This time though it’s not about dumping toxic waste in the third world but local planning issues, the full story is over at The Guardian. The key par of the e-mail sent by Withers LLP though is this gem:
“”In order to settle this matter we, therefore, require an apology in respect of both the serious allegations plus payment of our client’s costs, a substantial payment to a charity of his choice and an undertaking not to repeat the allegations or any similar allegations, particularly in parliament.
“Your threat to make a statement in the House of Commons referring to our client’s alleged ’spoiling tactics’ in this and other situations and that our client’s threatened proceedings amount to ‘bullying and an attempt to gag opponents’ is tantamount to blackmail.
“These allegations are untrue as our client is only trying to put right a serious wrong to his reputation. We note that you would only make these allegations under the cover of parliamentary privilege. My client objects very strongly to you doing this and would ensure, via other sources, that the House of Commons were fully appraised of the true situation and not misled.”
Which Withers LLP claim is not in any way an attempt to limit John Hemming MP’s parliamentary privilege. I guess he could say what he liked as long as he didn’t mention their client. On the bright side our glorious parliamentarians are actually at least thinking about doing something about it – if we’re really lucky they might accidentally become concerned about our freedoms whilst they’re at it. Maybe reform the odd bit of libel law (though at least the offence of criminal libel has gone.)
update Forgot to link to this first time round sorry.
MPs expenses 4 weeks to go
Just to remind people the consultation on MP’s expenses end on the 11th of February.
you can take part on line here:
http://mpexpensesconsultation.org.uk/
The Tax Payers Alliance have a fairly good run down of the questions on their Website (hat tip to Iain Dale again).
Speak up about MPs expenses
Via Iain Dale, the public consultation on MPs expenses is now open here:
http://mpexpensesconsultation.org.uk/
Such an important matter obviously needs to be very widely publicised. According to the web site:
We are consulting on the new system for managing MPs’ expenses
* The next parliament will start with a completely new system, independently designed and administered
* This is only the first step of a continuing consultation on the role of Members of Parliament and of Parliament itself
* We’d like to hear your views on our proposal for the new system.
So go along and let them know what you think.
Update: Talking of expenses if you want to know what your MP is claiming well “there’s an app for that
The spoilation of Parliament
Just when you think that the mendacious scoundrels that sit in the palace of Westminster might have learnt to shut up and keep their heads down, they find new and interesting ways to dig up past scandals and heap more disrepute upon their heads. In this case we have three labour MP’s claiming that parliamentary privilege protects them from being prosecuted for fraud over dodgy claims (hat tip: Dizzy). However there may be a silver lining in this dark and stinking cloud, in that as observed by Captain Ranty it may yet test and revalidate the 1689 Bill of rights which could have very interesting repercussions (see comment thread over on Captain Ranty for a discussion).
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)
UK terror threat status
- Severe 2010/01/25