UK Government Wins Villain of the Year

Anonymous Cowpat writes "The BBC is reporting that the UK Government, or rather their six month presidency of the EU, has been awarded the Internet Villain of the Year award by the Internet Service Providers Association for being the driving force behind the new EU data retention laws. These require that ISPs and other telecomms providers keep records of the time\date & recipient of every communication made by their subscribers."

Comments

Tor?

[ZiakII]

Wouldn't using something like Tor make all logs worthless?

Re:Tor?

[ZiakII]

However, there are other protocols out there. I don't want my ISP keeping logs of all the porn i download from Usenet, for instance.

There are ways to get other protocols running though Tor I have done it I have gotten FTP, SOCKS, Telnet, HTTPS, HTTP, and .bitorrent to all work though it.

Re:Tor?

[Splab]

My bachelor project (masters?) was about makeing TOR run on a router using Dante, all TCP traffic gets multiplexed over TOR.

Only downside on the implementation is its only running through socks4 - so DNS gets routed through the normal path rendering it a bit useless.

Also, TOR is by no means strong anonymity, if you want that go have a look at Herbivore.

Re:Tor?

[tinkertim]

Actually you sparked an idea, well sort of an observation and sort of speculation.

You don't *have* to use your ISP's nameservers. Try 4.2.2.2 or other public ones relatively easy to find on the internet. You could also just toss the domain -> ip of activity you'd rather not have logged in /etc/hosts.

If you are still that paranoid why not just spend the 50 - 60 bucks it costs to bring up a co-located Celeron , toss VNC on it and surf from there if you have any concerns. A quick search on google for "dedicated server" brings up cheap listings including Win2k3 termservs.

While I agree its a crappy law it shouldn't deter even your halfway knowledgeable power user from doing whatever it is they do in complete privacy.

Personally I use These guys. I'd rather deal with their AUP than ever changing polictical influences over the internet.

So I surf on my desktop somewhere in texas. It rocks on my crappy cable at 1024x768 / 15 bit graphics. And it keeps my e-mail centralized, and I can "work" anywhere with a connection.

If my ISP wants to go through the trouble of breaking RDP5 or VNC (could even just use ssh forwarding) .. they're *more* than welcome to see what I'm surfing as I feel at that point they've earned it.

Most of us have a nix box somewhere (or even a celeron running windows) that could easily be setup for such purposes.

If *any* isp started blocking RDP or VNC well (duh) we'd change ports, and if they persisted we'd take our business to one who did not.

It's not like the heavy iron hand just came bounding down. Law makers have at least 10 more years of random stupidity and ego strifes before they could actually become (really) annoying when it comes to netlaws.

Off my soapbox

Privacy and the Internet

[keilinw]

I've been following consumer and privacy rights issues for quite some time now. The issue that ISP's are REQUIRED to log personal information is an interesting one.

First and foremost, I consider the Internet to be a type of "public" space. I am reasonably certain that anything I do on the Internet can and probably will end up in someones log file. Whether or not such information can be used against me is what really concerns me.

Second. It is reasonable to expect that ISPs do in fact keep logs of information. What they log and how they do it is generally up to them. Requiring the ISP to log information does not make sense as they probably already do it. Again, what should be of concern is whether or not the ISPs are required to share that information. Interestingly, the whole issue may actually involve the ISP's right to claim they don't have any logged information -- which is probably a lie -- or that they could delete it and thus not be legally responsible for it.

Third. Spoofing is most certainly a "real" concept and these laws may, in fact, incriminate innocent people. Certain "dangerous" individuals may actually be able to LEARN how and what required logging is and use this to their advantage; effectively covering their tracks.

In conclusion, I find it interesting that there is such a hoopla over laws that threaten privacy in general when they can't be that effective to begin with. Perhaps there should be a commission that limits the forming of useless laws. If things continue the way they have been it may soon be illegal to even touch a computer.

I wish I had more time to distill and clarify my thoughts, but this will have to suffice. I hope that the readers will look past the disorganized nature of this argument and consider some of the actual points.

Matthew Wong

http://www.themindofmatthew.com/

Re:Big Brother means cheaper big hard drives...

[__aaclcg7560]

Who in their right mind compares hd prices with the price of freedom and privacy.

Considering that America is giving up freedom and privacy for security who to say that Corporate America won't come up with a better deal?

Re:When will the English take back their country?

[Sanity]

First they took your guns

You just lost the interest of 99.9% of the British population. You should be aware that outside the US, and perhaps Switzerland and one or two other countries, the notion that people have some kind of natural right to own guns is taken about as seriously as the assertion that people have a natural right to own nuclear weapons.

Re:When will the English take back their country?

[dfgchgfxrjtdhgh.jjhv]

england never had a wild west & we dont want one either.

guns (on their own) dont bring down governments either, especially not small guns.

every iraqi houshold had a gun under saddam, it did nothing to stop that oppressive government.