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UK RIP Bill Reintroduced
AIM31 writes "The amendments to RIP bill in the UK, which gives the power to read email headers and history to such bodies as the Postal Service, is back. with amendments. Last time it was rejected after massive protest."
n/t
This bill is yet another in a long line of bills being introduced by David Blunkett
Compulsory ID cards being another.
The fact that a local council can get the information disturbs me, as I have worked for one, and know how sloppy they can be.
I only hope next election we vote them out, as all the promises they originally made (eg Freedom of Information) evaporated, and instead we get more draconian measures
Jamaica.. Dope smokin' people are friendly people.. and they're too lazy to invent laws that are supposed to fuck up your lifestyle... Make sure you don't travel in the touristic centres.. The countryside is much safer..
Canada. You can join the flood of "evil" potheads & free thinkers fleeing the police state that the US is becoming. And I know we aren't evil. But to George Bush and his cronies we sure are.
Point of fact: this is not a Bill, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act has already passed into law. What this is about is the statutory instrument needed to gave various parts of it effect in law.
The Isle of Man, where I live, is not part of the UK. We never implemented the RIP Act, and therefore this won't be implemented here either.
There is one trouble: the island is full (you'll have a hard time finding somewhere to live). We've got lots of spaces, but planning regulations makes it incredibly difficult to build new houses. Unfortunately, lots of UK citizens have holiday homes here which are left empty most of the year, crimping supply for the rest of us who aren't afraid of Manx winters...
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
RIPA is and has been law in the UK for several years now. The implementation of the latest revisions is designed to give legality to practices ALREADY underway with the UK government and local agencies.
Everything the ammendments legalise is already in progress - ILLEGALLY.
Oh how I wish I had a spare couple of million pounds... OH HOW I WISH!!!!
More expensive than the UK (bandwidth is generally more expensive due to the monopoly that Manx Telecom holds), but by the end of the year every exchange will be ADSL enabled, including the rural ones with only a couple of hundred subscribers. The South has good coverage, and as you'd expect, the capital, Douglas also has good coverage.
People whine about lag on Manx.net (Manx Telecom's ISP) connections, but I've not had a problem - it probably varies by location depending on who you share the contended backhaul with - I suspect people's connections in Douglas will be the worst off due to the population density - living in the south I probably don't have to contend with so many Kazaa leeches). Since I've moved from my Dad's place into my own, I changed my ISP to mcb.net where I have nice things like a static IP, and an ISP that's not RFC-ignorant. We have four ISPs. We now have "wires only" service (MT insisted on sending an engineer out in the past).
The bad points: the Island is very Windows-centric. No commercial IT organizations seem to be even vaguely aware of open source software, especially the Isle of Man Government, but I'm trying to correct that at my place of work. Pay in the IT sector is probably a little lower than the UK and the opportunities are somewhat limited and there's rather too much MCSE and Visual Basucks kind of jobs (after trying to use VB a little, I've decided if push came to shove and someone expected me to be a VB code monkey I'd get my HGV license and drive a lorry instead). (However, on the flip side, lower pay is more than compensated for by the lower income tax and NI - I spent most of my working life in the United States, and my taxation rate here is less than half of what it was in the USA)
We do have a Linux User Group, although our current activities seem to revolve more around beer drinking than anything else. Not surprising with three breweries and one distillery for a population of less than 80,000. We have very good beer. My local belongs to the owner of one of the breweries (http://www.bushys.com). The biggest brewery is Okells, but IMHO, Bushy's makes better beer. The other brewery is a microbrewery in Laxey.
You need to like motorcycles. Lots of road racing (TT circuit, 37.75 miles - the famous one, plus the Billown circuit in the south and the Jurby South road circuit in the northern plains)
We have weird cats with no tails.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Full list of MPs and email addresses
Seriously people, I've mailed my mp about a few things, and had an smail reply each time. Keep it polite and sane, because you know they'll ignore an uninformed rant, and you don't want to waste your time, right?
I suggest simply dropping them a few lines to explain that Blunkett's been pushing several highly unpopular ideas and blatantly ignoring public opinion, and if he continues, well, I for one will be voting for the opposition purely to get rid of him.
Warning: May contain nuts
Tories and Labour aren't the only parties though. By pretending they are when we vote we remove any strong incentive for either to behave as if they can be taken out of office and shouldn't do this sort of thing.
It _stinks_ that these proposals are appearing, but if we vote for Labour we implicitly support it and if we vote for the Tories, well, we saw what they came up with last time. Always makes me chuckle that the name is a corruption of an old Irish word meaning 'bandit'.
Personally, I'll be voting for the LibDems next time. Centre-left but they don't take money from the unions or business and don't have any great desire for authoritarian rubbish like this, or for daft military games in the sand and various silly measures to prop up the arms trade.
Maybe you'd rather be further left? OK, look at the SSP if you're north of the border, Plaid Cymru if you're west of a different border, SWP, Greens et al in other areas. Or further right? How about UKIP? No, with the exception of SSP and PC none are likely to win seats but who'd have said 5 years ago that SSP would have got anywhere? If you don't vote for these groups then they're never going to get anywhere. If they're not perceived as a threat on any level then the mainstream parties have no motivation whatsoever to examine their positions and take sections onboard. Voting for the present clowns only serves to legitimise their positions.
Or perhaps you won't vote at all, claiming they're all as bad as each other? Big mistake and demonstrably false. Look at what LibDems have achieved already in coalitions, look at what the SSP are doing in Holyrood so far. They're _not_ like the mainstream parties and pretending they are is just daft. By removing yourself from the process you ensure that your views have no input whatsoever. Hardly an effective way to ensure change!
If you want the major parties to take onboard your opinions and take them into government, you need to find candidates with similar opinions and vote for them or the democratic process simply doesn't take your views as input.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!