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Well, as this is the UK, not the US, you would retain a solicitor, not a lawyer. Also, as there has currently been no loss associated with the email, doing so would be a... heroic... thing to do. In other words, you don't hire a solicitor unless you are going to recoup losses in excess of how much one will cost you in the first place. You could make a principled stand, in which case I hope you're rich.

This campaign is "sponsored" by the UK government as part of the IPO's "Creative Content UK" campaign, "rights holders" and the big ugly ISP monopolies: Sky (NowTV), BT, Virgin and TalkTalk (PlusNet is owned by BT), who in the race to the bottom make mistakes in the same way as water runs downhill.

If you're serious about it, and you don't mind paying extra, I suggest you switch your internet access to Andrews & Arnold. They most certainly do not put up with crap like that, and it's fun to watch them take providers like BT to pieces over the mistakes they make.

The UK is a pretty grim place in the western world for internet access, and it's only going to get far worse in terms of censorship and spying in the immediate future. I speak as someone who works for a UK company that used to be an ISP (we sold it off due to the margins being too thin to compete with the big four)

Shibboleet

https://xkcd.com/806/

Of course in the REAL WORLD you have to put up with the crap along with all the others :(

At least one ISP is explicitly XKCD/806-compliant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://aa.net.uk/broadband-why...

Easy. You call up the US vendor that sold China their Great Firewall and order another one. This one will be cheap, considering the UK's population is a fraction that of China.

Already done: TalkTalk (arguably the UK's worst ISP in general, as well as being the first to jump on the government's bandwagon) spent many millions of pounds (described in a related court case as "an eight figure sum") importing a horribly flawed censorship system from Huawei, which is one of the Chinese manufacturers of part of the Great Firewall.

A few principled UK ISPs are standing up to censorship, and still offering unfiltered services - though I do fear Cameron will attack them for it now: like most bullies, he can't handle criticism or opposition.

Although not directly related to net neutrality I feel that A&A http://www.aa.net.uk/ should be commended for their stance against the filtering and censoring of content http://www.aa.net.uk/kb-broadb... as requested by some.

Although not directly related to net neutrality I feel that A&A http://www.aa.net.uk/ should be commended for their stance against the filtering and censoring of content http://www.aa.net.uk/kb-broadb... as requested by some.

Try placing an order for broadband with this ISP:

https://order.aa.net.uk/h1orde...

and choose the "I want a censored connection" option.

Stop using a provider using filtering.

Catch 22 here unfortunately. The government basically said to the big ISPs "implement a filter voluntarily or we'll force you to do it via draconian legislation", and the ISPs reluctantly agreed. Small/niche ISPs weren't going to have it forced on them as it was seen as implementing a mandatory filter would have a disproportionately high capital outlay for the smaller firms, so almost all of them don't implement (and many, such as AAISP, wear this as a badge of pride) but of course many of them provide the option of safety filters/software as an optional service.

However, the threat is basically there that if there is a groundswell of people flocking to unfiltered ISPs, they'll no longer be considered a small ISP and the government will start breathing down their necks.

The writing's been on the wall for years now (what with the histrionics generated by the Daily Heil and Mumsnet [who have since recanted I believe] amongst others) so a great many geeks have been using VPNs and alternative DNS servers for quite some time. We'll have to see how far the thumbscrews get tightened in that regard.

Fuck knows what Cameron et al see in this other than a blatant power-grab via pandering populism, but sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity.

There can be only one ...
Andrews & Arnold is probably the best in terms of respecting the End User, but that quality does come at a price.

... with the possibility of increasing the cap if needed.

I am in the UK and wanted to move to an ISP which offered FTTC, IPv6, a static IP, would be happy for me to run servers and would not implement CG-NAT, and offered good technical support in the event I should need it. The ISP which was most highly recommended to me based on those criteria offered FTTC for a fixed monthly price, with a cap — if paying a proportionate more-than-average-in-the-consumer-market price gave me a proportionate more-than-average-in-the-consumer-market service, that sounded like a good trade-off to me, even with a cap.

Coming from an uncapped connection, I was nervous about buying something with a cap, but, having checked our usage for a three month period, I picked the option with a cap three times that (guessing that a faster connection would mean we use it for me) and, so far, that has worked out well for me. If I want another 100GB, I can pay for that, either as a one-off, on a particularly heavy usage month, or to upgrade the connection permanently.

(The ISP is Andrews and Arnold and, so far, I have been more than happy with them. I guess that they have to pay upstream for capacity, and an unlimited connection would entail a pretty significant premium to ensure that they were not left out of pocket.)

This kind of nonsense is exactly why I left Be when they were bought by Sky.

I'm now with Andrews & Arnold, who's registration process forces me to opt-out of any censorship http://aa.net.uk/kb-broadband-unfiltered.html

Andrews and Arnold (UK ISP) says the following:

We have no so called black boxes to covertly monitor traffic and/or pass traffic monitoring to the authorities or anyone else. Obviously the law is such that we may have to add such black boxes, but we would resist as far as possible. We may even find we are not allowed to change this web page if ever that happens. However, I, as director, am happy to answer direct questions on this matter on irc (user RevK) or on twitter (@TheRealRevK) and you can get paranoid if I refuse to . If black boxes become mandatory we aim to find ways and services to maintain the basic human right to privacy.

Equipment is probably the reason the carriers don't. My provider says:-

"Our call servers theoretically support IPv6, but we are having problems finding equipment to test against."

I used to think this, and it was very very true while home routers failed to support IPv6. (the manufacturers are idiots, imagine putting IPv6 on your routers and selling them as an added feature - most users won't know what it is, but they'll know its 'future proof' and shinier as it has a IPv6 sticker)

However, IPv6 home routers are starting to appear. In the UK the Andrews and Arnold ISP will give you IPv6 address, and they're evaluating routers.

They haven't decided which to use, but that's probably more down to cost considerations etc than technical as they have said the Technicolor TG582n is good to go.

As for performance, I imagine it'll be as good as the IPv4 as generally its just a bit of firmware change to get it running. Routing should be quicker, and if you're no longer going through NAT proxying, that should make it a tiny bit faster too.

I used to think this, and it was very very true while home routers failed to support IPv6. (the manufacturers are idiots, imagine putting IPv6 on your routers and selling them as an added feature - most users won't know what it is, but they'll know its 'future proof' and shinier as it has a IPv6 sticker)

However, IPv6 home routers are starting to appear. In the UK the Andrews and Arnold ISP will give you IPv6 address, and they're evaluating routers.

They haven't decided which to use, but that's probably more down to cost considerations etc than technical as they have said the Technicolor TG582n is good to go.

As for performance, I imagine it'll be as good as the IPv4 as generally its just a bit of firmware change to get it running. Routing should be quicker, and if you're no longer going through NAT proxying, that should make it a tiny bit faster too.

Yes, I am a UKian! In addition to AAISP, Goscomb and IDNet provide native IPv6 routing and /48 blocks to customers.

Zen keep promising it with no delivery date, and Merula might be v6-capable by now.

However of these only AAISP has been "vetted" by Google; they went through the process a couple of years ago when I was still a customer and it was both eye-opening and eye-watering in terms of the hoops that Google made them jump through. It was like watching an episode of Columbo; "...just one more thing...".

I'm now with Goscomb, who haven't yet tackled the Google v6 obstacle course.

Oh what a shame, my ISP gave me a /27 last week included as part of the service - and I thought it was worth $337.50 according to this article. I wonder what my /48 is worth at these prices! If we move to IPv6 everyone can be billionaires! </sarcasm>

Seriously though, I was very surprised they handed out a /27 so easily though after my /28 ran out. Then perhaps because they have been IPv6 ready for 8 years and well aware of IPv4 exhaustion that they have been planning well and are perhaps a little more confident than most.