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I think the whole sphere of politics and regulation needs more coverage. There are many opportunities to raise your voice in lobbying, consultations etc.

You cannot rescue the world alone but like an steering and hacking an Open Source Project you can adopt a special issue such as rfid, compile information ressources with a wiki, compile arguments and expertise. And then: Don't talk with your friends, talk to decision makers, politicians and the like.

By the way:
* RFID consultation

* Your Voice in Europe - EU consultations

* Edri.org - a civil rights organisation

You must be kidding right? Here's a nice overview, also EDRI has quite some information...

You must be kidding right? Here's a nice overview, also EDRI has quite some information...

I agree with the grandparent in one respect. Overall in Europe the power of the government in surveillance and control is much greater than that of the USA. But I've got one big reservation for this: this difference in power is on paper only! The EU does its control and power grab by law, and by the book. The US apparently does it sneaky and without any oversight. The net effect is similar, but at least we in the EU we can be proud that we've done it all legally. sigh.

Police agents can monitor music exchange Web sites and trace back the email address of beneficiaries by asking the Internet service provider for it through a court order.

Presumably they meant they can ask the ISP for the billing information of the customer who was using a particular IP address (not e-mail address), which the police agents obtained through monitoring P2P services (not Web sites).

Given the recent data retention directive passed by the European Commision and parlairment and required to be ratified in national laws by mid 2007, police will have access to far more data than just billing information.

Ummm...if you are "in public"...doesn't that over rule your "privacy" rights a little?

The fact that you walk around on some street is a public information. The data your phone company keeps about you is private, and can only be exchanged with others if you give permission or with a legal ground. Having said that, it is apparently not that hard to fabricate a legal ground, given the Netherlands government reputation for eavesdropping.

Does the phone company know if you depart to other countries automatically, or does this only occur when you actually make a call, SMS, or do internet activity from your phone?

Can they, with multiple phone towers, identify all phones in a given area?

Or do they have to know your phone number and know to look?

The wiretapping order they need for this type of thing is given for an individual phone. I don't know about the technical possibilities, and the available data from foreign operators probably depends on bilateral treaties. The government does require phone operators on the Dutch market to install equipment to facilitate investigation. The former state operator KPN even had a special department for eavesdropping before it was privatized. The phone operators supposedly proactively provide the government with information about public health risks.

Ummm...if you are "in public"...doesn't that over rule your "privacy" rights a little?

The fact that you walk around on some street is a public information. The data your phone company keeps about you is private, and can only be exchanged with others if you give permission or with a legal ground. Having said that, it is apparently not that hard to fabricate a legal ground, given the Netherlands government reputation for eavesdropping.

Does the phone company know if you depart to other countries automatically, or does this only occur when you actually make a call, SMS, or do internet activity from your phone?

Can they, with multiple phone towers, identify all phones in a given area?

Or do they have to know your phone number and know to look?

The wiretapping order they need for this type of thing is given for an individual phone. I don't know about the technical possibilities, and the available data from foreign operators probably depends on bilateral treaties. The government does require phone operators on the Dutch market to install equipment to facilitate investigation. The former state operator KPN even had a special department for eavesdropping before it was privatized. The phone operators supposedly proactively provide the government with information about public health risks.

Or, for example, see this article.

Nutzwerk - aren't they those litigous fuckpigs who censored the FFII website for telling the world that this company, despite being held up as the model company for software patents, was actually guilty of all sorts of ethically dubious internet practices?

I think the management there has control-freakery issues...

The same company that sued the FFII.

To me as a European, the fact that you have the DMCA in the USA seems absurd. The PATRIOT act seems absurd.

You mention not being able to say fire in a movie theater being absurd. How about not being allowed to say anything that might lead someone to do something violent, or writing anything construed as promoting violence or terrorism? This is law in the UK and Netherlands and is on its way to the EU.

How about having all of your telephone/cell traffic saved and archived for one year, and all of your internet traffic archived for 6 months? Sound crazy? Absurd? Luckly it is still a proposal, but that sure makes the USA PATRIOT Act library records section look good.

I am pro-freedom everywhere and not trying to defend America. Just be aware of contollers who want to rob you of your freedom in Europe as well.

To me as a European, the fact that you have the DMCA in the USA seems absurd. The PATRIOT act seems absurd.

You mention not being able to say fire in a movie theater being absurd. How about not being allowed to say anything that might lead someone to do something violent, or writing anything construed as promoting violence or terrorism? This is law in the UK and Netherlands and is on its way to the EU.

How about having all of your telephone/cell traffic saved and archived for one year, and all of your internet traffic archived for 6 months? Sound crazy? Absurd? Luckly it is still a proposal, but that sure makes the USA PATRIOT Act library records section look good.

I am pro-freedom everywhere and not trying to defend America. Just be aware of contollers who want to rob you of your freedom in Europe as well.

Of course there's the European Digital Rights-EDRI (http://www.edri.org/) which is the joint organisation for digital rights in Europe. In the UK the
* Campaign for Digital Rights-CDR (http://ukcdr.org/)
* the Foundation for Information Policy Research-FIPR (http://www.fipr.org/) and
* Greennet (http://www.gn.apc.org/)
are members. I would suggest consulting them first.

Not nessasary. Sweden just passed their version of the nazi like EU directive on enforcement of intellectual property. (the EU council or whatever passed it about a year or so ago and gave all member nations 2 years to pass thier own version) The version of this that was passed in UK had small things such as letting corporations (not law) freeze bank accounts and raid homes if they even THINK you copied a music cd. It also adds 2 year prison terms if you up or down any files they think you shouldn't A common excuse for this is, oh it only applies if you do it for commercial gain. Not so. "The Directive applies indiscriminately to all infringements of all intellectual property rights, including patents. A limitation to infringements committed for commercial purposes or causing significant harm, which was still present in the Commission's proposal, was deleted." "Other draconian measures such as search-and-seize raids carried out by rightholders like collecting societies, in civil law cases and before the merits of a case have even be evaluated by a judge, can still be applied to private small-scale infringers."" "After publication of the Directive in the Official Journal, the soon-to-be 25 EU member states will have 18 months to implement the Directive into their national laws." http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number2.5/IPRE "Prior to the law coming into force, Sweden was the only European nation that let people download copyrighted material for personal use." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4642373.stm

UK police and criminal intelligence people have wanted to ask for this for a very very long time. In fact this wish predates the madrid bombing and even 911!

Some time ago they wrote a position paper stating that it would be smart to force telecommunication providers (telephone & ISP`s) to store who telephones who, who e-mail`s who, who visites which sites and then some. They didn`t go into the details. The central point of these plans is that the internet is just like the phone system and therefore they should be able to request logs. The only dabate is for how long these log should be retained and how to keep within the european human right treaty which says every privacy invasion should be "proportional". But guess what, it wasn`t just the oppinion of some crazy bobbies (uk cops), it was a real plan

ignored are still

• The fact that telecommunications providers don`t have a clue who communicates with with who, they only know what phone or computer talks with which other phone or computer network and where the bill for all this goes. No biometric passport is required to make a phone call and the first thing many Europeans do when answering the phone is... say their name. Do you know who clicked the "send" button on that penis enhancement e-mail? Notice how your e-mail asks for " Radius or other IP address to user resolution logs" not for "ip addres to *acount* resolution logs"? How much do you wanna bet this person doesn`t know the slight difference? How much do you bet that a defense lawyer does know the difference once your logs end up in court as evidence? A terrorist might walk (can`t prove he was the one behind the computer) and you just invested a million in terabytes of storage space and sniffing/logging equipment....
• The fact that the cases where the billing details arent the personal details of whoever is communicating may quite heapon to be the very cases they claim to want to investigate, namely terrorism and serious crime. (Although "serious" has been stripped from recent proposals). Who is the last guy you saw use a public pay-phone on TV? I will give you a hint he was called Anthony and the show is called the Sopranos....
• the fact that on the Internet everyone is free to encode their application traffic anyway they want. Want to build an e-mail system that uses hyrogliphics for e-mail adresses? go ahead. Want to run you web traffic on port 666? Why not, dont forget to give your tcp packet a protocol type of 66 to ;-)

Telephone companies can expect normal and "lawfull interception" equipment ready to handle any new standardized signaling system for sending phone numbers around. Isp`s will have to hack their collection systems with every new way of evading capture and every new new Internet application protocol. Also isp`s will be collecting many gigabytes every minute, (and many times that on peek hours), which is tough. But what is really tough is that Internet traffic grows so much faster than telephone traffic. Isp`s will en up having to buy extra storrage every month. And what should a application level traffic data collection system do when it reaches storage or processing capacity limits? Signal core routers to throttle Internet traffic routing?

But wait, won`t the UK politicians dislike this plan even more than the ID card plan? Yes they very well might! If only there was some sort of commision of european justice a interior affairs ministers that could make laws without input from any pairlements.... Thank god we don`t yet have one of those, but there is the justice and home office comity of the European council. They answer only to the national pairlements but as the software patents showed, what national pairlement actually cares about what goes on ins Brussels? I mean, what hea

Did you notice that Mono supports numerious languages?

Did you notice that Mono is primarily an implementation of .NET, and thus subject to patent claims by Microsoft? Microsoft has stated that these patents will be avilable on a "royalty free and otherwise reasonable and non-discriminatory basis", but short of an irrevocable legally-binding release worded in such a way that it's unambiguously clear these patents can not be used against open-source software, I am unwilling to trust to their good will.

Statements like "Furthermore, our release of the Rotor source code base with a specific license on its use gives wide use to our patents for a particular (non-commercial) purpose, and as we explicitly state we are open to additional licenses for other purposes." -- Microsoft applies for .NET patent are less than encouraging.

In Europe, Microsoft are already showing their true colors: "If developers want to build the protocols into their products, they must agree not to distribute that product in source-code form, or to subject it to licenses that require source-code disclosure, a formula that excludes many open source licenses."

And they have other tricks up their sleeve, "At every release the focus of Microsoft's tools that provide a compelling Linux development environment could break or prevent mono-compatibility the same way Microsoft's J++ broke Java compatibility by replacing JavaBeans, RMI,and JNI with COM, DCOM, Direct/J. At that point, you would face the choice of either forking the API's or forking over some royalty payments." --Mono developer meeting

With Mono you can hitch your wagon to Microsoft's oxen, never knowing just where they're going to go.

This proposal is already on the table in the EU. You can find more information about it at European Digital Rights.

In the EU the proposal is to retain telephony data for a period of 6 to 48 months. Discussion is still on whether this includes unsuccesful calls and location data during the call.

Furthermore there is discussion on which data to retain with regards to Internet. There are some wishlists around, which generally seem to entail email traffic logs, radius logs, and quite often wo sent whom or received from whom anything at an IP-level and to which TCP port. The most outrageous proposal is from Lithuania, which also wants all the geographical locations of all intermediate routers. For all recent documents on this go to this European Union site The lithuanian proposal is there as well http://register.consilium.eu.int/pdf/en/05/st08/st 08004.en05.pdf
Interesting is that there is no data in the EU on whether or not this data is useful to law enforcement. For instance, what is the value of knowing all IP-level connections and their port numbers in a world of DNS, spyware, peer2peer technology and dynamic port numbers. Word is that in The Netherlands research is being done on this and that it will be sent to their parliament in the coming months.
The European Parliament has been very critical, but is of no influence, since it is not a party in this. The member states can decide amongst themselves. Funny is that France and Denmark already have data retention laws, but cannot put them into effect, since they have no clue on what to retain for the internet.

Can't we have a groklaw like site on these kinds of proposals? Collaborative burning of these kinds of proposals?

According to the MacNN coverage of the keynote a Pentium 4 development machine will be available in two weeks. Also announced are Pentium III (or "m" in marketing English) based notebooks. These need a differend chipsets. Also OS X has been running on x86 forever, even before apple had much reason to look into x86. (We knew, Darwin, but still)

To me this doesn`t sound like apple has its own special chipset. It doesn`t even sound like they have much in the way of apple specific non "IBM compatible" firmware. It wouldn`t matter that much as Darwin boots fine from a plain old PC bios. As Darwin is open source it could be made to boot pretty much anyware (Ice cream for the first person to port it to the x-box 360 ;-)).

Without a chipset to set the x86 Mac apart from its "IBM compatible" cousin and only minor differences in the firmware (it still has to initialize the same (Intel?) chipset) what is the difference? Especially if you build a PC with the same processor, chipset, disk controller, graphics and sound?

So if, and this is the big if, (pre-???)installing OS X comes in the reach of the corner computer shop then we have a platform with:

• Cheap x86 machines
• "Walk into store, have fixed, walk out" support
• Every major productivity application in use today (ms office,adobe)
• Better security than on windows running ie/outbreak, or at least that perception.
• A user interface that is at least equal to the other desktop competitors.
• documentation, and word of mouth/relative/coworker support that beats Unix-alikes.
• Support for most things you find on a network.(kerberos,ldap,cifs,NFS,imap,most websites)
• The support of geeks everywhere happy with new chances to replace stuff with tiny shell scripts
• a possibility for wine on os x, meaning buy one os, get the second one for free. This may be enough for a couple of those business specific windows only apps
• big players more and more free to ship the OS they like without getting on bill`s shitlist.
• microsoft opening up the office file formats potentially giving away their other cash cow.

Apple could

• Sue? Doesn`t seem likely if you stay within the apple public licence when messing with Darwin and buy the rest.
• Ignore, seams likely
• Embrace, more likely then you might think! Where did all those crazy BeOS people go? They already tried the head on attack on windows and their motto was that getting a new OS is a smart thing to do once every decade... Also NeXT really was intended as "the next standard desktop os" and many people working on os x might still think of their baby that way. They might for example help out people working on drivers. Afterall more drivers means more hardware options for Apple to consider for their next Mac.

Ofcourse without pure windows dominance microsoft loses a lot. Even if they keep office microsoft would be left with

• the x-box 360 (seems IBM will have less supply problems and with ppc microsoft may have found a way to keep the machines cost down)
• file and user authentication servers everywhere (keep them, os x doesn`t care and samba 4.0 is moving in)
• exchange (which the people I know would rather get rid of)
• sql server (get your linux or os x copy at sybase.com, that is if you dont like opstgresql or mysql)
• windows CE (which the mobile phone people wont do because they have plenty of problems without inviting microsoft into their market)
• Lots of worthless patents (Remember the "no patent experiance required" jobs? Anyway there will be a european showdown soon)

This has to be the worst dupe ever. How often has slashdot covered this?

The *entire European union* will require biometrics stored in contactless chips (RFID) in a passport. The EU didn`t think of this all by itself, the US forced it. If the EU doesn`t go along fast with this billion dollar hype it`s citizens will have to get a visa to visit the US. (How are US plans for this coming along?)

The biometrics are two fingerprints and a digital portrait. The last one will be to low resolution for camera surveilance but ofcourse this wont stop people from trying. Face it(no phun), the words "false positive" sound complicated and no politician is going to bother to look like caring about these words. Ofcourse you can translate them to "huge lines at the airport", "tens of innocent people questioned on ever major airport every day" (So mister Bin Laden, how did you turn into an asian twelve year old?).

Want to hear some of the argumentation behind this? Yes you do! Implementing passports with biometric identifiers will be a great business opertunity, especially for the business that get to build the hardware for this stuff... Boy do I wish I was making this up.

Of course the people who sell biometrics are alway happy to tell how many people on this planet have the same fingerprint and face. wanna guess? Its always a very low number, like zero. In fact they keep saying this over and over. They never have any time left to mention that:
a. biometric comparisons always allows for lots of differences because no one want`s to hold up a line at the airport because of a mismatch due to some sweat.... every time someone sweats one these occasions.
b. cheap fingerprint scanners are fooled by gummy bear taste gelatine prints, pressing bags of water on the scanner.... or just blowing on it. Can you blame these vendors for not mentioning this? Maybe not, they are afterall, very busy in this "post 911 world". Or so they keep saying.

Ofcourse it doesn`t stop here. Other bright ideas going on the the EU:

• Giving US three leter ancronym agencies read access to all airline booking systems. If airlines refused they couldn`t land in the US, now they comply they might be send back midair from time to time. But hey, what are the chances of someone matching a name on a list of 70,000 names? (If you think this list sounds to short, don`t worry adding names is easy, no evidence of anything is required)
• Storing traffic data for every telephone or Internet connection in the EU... Depending on the phase of the moon this data consists of telephone call data, GSM location data and ofcourse URL`s of every site visited and headers for send and/or received mail. Yes I mean storing everything about the communication of everyone....

Meanwhile Italy, Germany and Sweden are investigating what heaponed to a some of their citizens. They where kidnapped by the CIA and sent to places that make abu graib look like the holiday in... Ofcourse these investigations arent about getting justice for these people, they are just about making things difficult for the national goverment for allowing these kidnap operations.

Anyway, it seamed like the right time for an European update on these things.

Canada I can buy. But freedom in Europe? Try wearing a Muslim headscarf to school in France. Go to Germany and try accessing content the Bundestag declares "indecent". Stop being so shrill and "wake up" to the fact that whatever it is you hold dear isn't so goddamn holy after all.

• ZDnet: Patent opponents claim success
• Infoworld: Polish rejection may derail EU patent directive
• The Inquirer: Poland scuppers EU software patents directive
• EDRI: Poland blocks EU Software Patent directive
• NoSoftwarePatents.com: Polish Cabinet Against Software Patents

See also FFII's Breaking News wiki

The Council of Ministers' first reading text had been scheduled for fast-track approval before the end of the year, probably by Agriculture and Fisheries ministers.

at the moment the European Union is just as bad, if not worse.

For those who doubt imogthe's words, read this document (Acroread only, sorry) It's a draft decision by the EU council of ministers to require all telecommunications logged, and data stored for a year. Wish I was kidding...

I would recommend "IRIS" instead. There are many EFF`alikes world-wide, the european ones tend to be in contact with European digital rights

Personally I would guess (ianal) any decent laywer should get you out of trouble without turning the court into a full disclosure gosphel church and the judge into an eff cheerleader. These things can backfire you know, even in the pre-DMCA-US not everyone agreed on full disclosure beeing the best first step to handle finding holes. Personally I think you put yourself at greater risk if you do not at least discus holes with the manufacturer privately. What if systems get cracked by a hole you knew about but claim never to have discussed with anyone ....surely script kiddies didn`t find it on there own, what is the chance of that?

Unless there is evidence of code that isn`t yours in your exploits a counterfeiting case should not come far I guess considering copyright/counterfeiting law tends to be the same world wide thanks to wipo. An expensive lawyer should also be able to take care of you being called a terrorist in a civil lawsuit, but wheither you would even be able to get your money back out of such a thing is anyones guess.

- and in Europe it's called EDRi

I think a lot of slashdotters are supporting one of these orgs, at least casually, or through some EDRi member.

Silly me, and I thought innovation came through patent laws ;-)

There's European Digital Rights (EDRI) that is supposed to help the national European digital rights organizations to work together. Unfortunately most of the activity is still in national level while most of the new directives threatening freedom are planned in the European Union bodies.