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"Three Strikes" To Go Ahead In Britain

Posted by Soulskill on from the follow-the-money dept.

David Gerard writes "Lord Peter Mandelson has carefully ignored the Gowers Report and the Carter Report, instead taking the advice of his good friend David Geffen and announcing that 'three strikes and you're out' will become law in Britain. The Open Rights Group has, of course, hit the roof. Oh, and never mind MI5 and the police pointing out that widespread encryption will become normal, hampering their efforts to keep up with little things like impending terrorist atrocities. Still, worth it to stop a few Lily Allen tracks being shared, right?"

3 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. Widespread Encryption by DanMelks · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...And I say we need to be encrypting our traffic anyway. The average computer contains more than enough processing power, and the average 'pipe' width can easily handle the extra resources needed for widespread use of encryption in day-to-day use.

    In addition, the recent trend in government is towards snooping and perv-ish behavior: China with its "great" firewall, USA with its unwarranted spying and packet sniffing, and now the UK with its new "three-strikes" policies. I pay my ISP a significant sum of money to deliver me 1s and 0s as fast as they can, and there are very, very few exceptions in which they have a need to know what those 1s and 0s add up to.

    I call upon the open source community to lead the way -- while I would love to see the big leagues (Microsoft, Apple, etc) apply their tonnage behind such a problem, pigs are more likely to fly first. How hard would it be for a browser to automatically attempt to negotiate a secure connection for every visited web page and only use normal, unencrypted access when a secure connection fails or cannot be completed in a secure amount of time? People running web servers would not have to make major modifications, only implement a new protocol.

  2. Level of Responsibility by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If one person in a family is accused of pirating, the whole household gets cut off?

    If one person in a company is accused of pirating while at work, the whole company gets cut off?

    If one person in a ministry is accused of pirating while at work, the whole ministry gets cut off?

    Who is _allowed_ to accuse?

  3. Lily Allen - hypocrite? by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From the Lily Allen, Social Activism page and section:

    Lily Allen came out in strong support for disconnecting offenders. Creating a blog entitled "It's Not Alright" against file sharing, it subsequently came to light that she had copied text directly from the Techdirt website of an interview with 50 Cent. This led to an exchange on the internet, which culminated in accusations being made that Ms. Allen had infringed on other artists' copyrights by creating mix tapes early in her career, that she then made available via her website.

    Pot? Kettle is on the phone...

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .