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."

Comments

Hi.

[rkz]

I live in the UK but the number of stupid laws is approaching american levels. Can somone recomend a country I could move to which protects the civil liberties of its citizens; prefrebaly English speaking? Thanks in advance.

encryption

[Neophytus]

As protest last time a group sent the then home secretary a bunch of encrypted emails. It would have actually been illegal for him to recieve them because of the poor wording in the bill - you had to be able to decode anything that you recieve.

What's going on here?

[joshsnow]

What is Blairs government up to? Compulsory ID cards - which I read that Blunkett is still trying to get introduced, monitoring car speeds via satellite transmission/receivers, mobile police radar "saftey" (speed) cameras used by illegally parked police who refuse to divulge the amount of revenue they raise from issuing tickets etc.

I'm beginning to think that Blair is big brother. Next time, I won't be voting for his lot or any of the others. They're all as bad as each other.

Re:What's going on here?

[mickwd]

"Next time, I won't be voting for his lot or any of the others. They're all as bad as each other."

Why ? Just because the Conservatives and "New" Labour are as bad as each other ?

What about the Liberal Democrats ? Or the Greens ? Or one of the regional parties (if such a thing exists where you live) ? What about an independent candidate ?

Sometimes I get the feeling that there are millions of people in the UK all thinking "I can't vote for the Lib Dems because they have no chance of winning". If half of them bloody voted for them, then they might have a chance. On the other hand, not voting for them because you don't agree with their policies is something I can easily accept.

(For non-UK readers, the Lib Dems are the third-largest national party here, and seem to get roughly about 20% of the vote in recent times - nowhere near enough to challenge the two main parties in terms of the number of seats they win at parliament).

If all a government has to face as a result of introducing unpopular policies is someone saying "They're all as bad as each other. I won't vote for any of them next time" then that is no disincentive to them whatsoever.

Amount Of Data

[nightgeometry]

Is it possible (well, I know it is, I guess I mean how difficult is it -IANAC-), to build a reasonably simple programme that would just sit in the background requesting web pages.

Gazillions of them.

Constantly...

Surely the weight of data would flood ISP's.

Okay, problems with this:
Bandwidth - I am on DSL, so not such a problem, but do we need to retrieve all the data? No, just pull the text. And have the thing running in the background. If you have a permanent connection (a la DSL), then run it constantly, whilst you aren't surfing / downloading et cetera. The bandwidth cost to ISP's would rocket, and thus cause fiscal issues for them.
Other problems: None that I can think of - enlighten me.

As for e-mail: Get a pgp key, and send random emails. If you had a key that was specifically used for this then somehow the receiving party could know to just delete all mails sent with that key. Rotate the key every couple of weeks, and voila (oops - wrote viola, thank heavens for preview), the mail can't even be filtered by key.

Seems viable. The big issue is bandwidth usage, both locally and as an issue to the community as a whole. But it puts such a strain on the system (i.e. the monitoring) that monitoring becomes non viable.

Comments?

Re:Whatever...

[netsharc]

They should start using Rubberhose. Basically, you have a partition that looks like it's filled with random data, but give a password, and you see some files, give another password, and there are other files, and so on, but the KGB agents won't know if there's still another cache of data hidden in there or if that really was all of it, and the rest is really just garbage.

Just aimed at the home user ?

[Space cowboy]

As part of my work, I have a rack at a co-lo. There are no services other than bandwidth provided by the co-lo (Level 3). I run DNS, mail, web, ftp, etc. etc. on machines at the co-lo for all the domains I use.

How likely is it that Level-3 are actually storing anything - they'd have to put a transparent proxy in front of my systems, and it would have to be fast enough and good enough to handle the 500 or so racks in the room the my rack is in. Each rack is served with 100mbit (which I use) and 1Gbit endpoints.. .The potential bandwidth this room can saturate is pretty F'ing big - /. effect, eat your heart out! My personal best peak so far has been 76 mbit/second throughput ...

They could always have one proxy per customer, I suppose, but that's a lot of rack space going to "waste". I suppose if you use blade servers, you could fit ~120 or so in a rack, otherwise at 1U proxy-machine per customer, you're looking at 13 racks for my room. Did I mention there are several other rooms just as large or larger ?

So, how's it going to work for businesses ?

Simon.

Re:try iceland

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, most Icelanders speak English but their language is very much Icelandic. Secondary, it is very hard to move to live there. While they do accept many tempory immigrants, they are infamous for how they politically treat them. Lastly, while the government may try to protect its citizens, I've found the Icelanders to be much the same with respects to Europe as what Southern Rednecks are in the USA. "Are these guys for real!?" is something you'll be saying alot if you spend time around them.

Oh and they like to eat whales while saying it is for 'research'.