I bought my dad a Cybook Opus for Christmas - sturdy, simple, wasn't too expensive, just epub support, no ties to a publisher/DRM. Not used it myself but Dad seems pretty happy.
Yes, any game where the ability to tell red from green is crucial has always landed it in the bin for me. The worst example was the 11th Hour, where the very first puzzle involved sorting red and green books on a shelf. I spent about 45 minutes with the bloody things dancing in front of me, thinking I'd succeeded when if I looked away, and back again, the colours swapped back. A total failure, though maybe I saved myself from a bad game anyway. I think Popcap were the first I remember adding a "colourblind mode" where they change the *shapes* of objects that you need to tell apart, as well as moving away from the hazy red/green/yellow distinction.
Never had a problem with L4D though - if it shambles, shoot it:)
Surely there is a strong possibility of a failure where both VMs run at once- the original image thinking it has lost touch with a dead backup, and the backup thinking the master is dead, and so starting to execute independently? If they're connected to the same storage / network segment, it could cause data loss, bring down the network service and so on. I've not investigated these types of lockstep VMs, but it seems you have to make some pretty strong assumptions about failure modes, which always break eventually commodity hardware (I've seen bad backplanes, network chips, CPU caches, RAM of course, switches...). How can you possibly handle these cases to avoid having to mop up after your VM is accidentally cloned?
It's a fair comment - the packaging touts a gigabit network interface, but you'll be lucky to get 10Mbs out of the thing, probably 5% of what the drive is capable of. However this is common with most similar cheap NAS devices - they are only just fast enough to stream hi-def video. I don't really have any trouble with noise; it sits outside my bedroom and my wife doesn't complain which is good enough:)
I will one day replace it with one of these Atom boards kicking around the office, and I'm sure will be much happier but I still find mine very useful as-is.
I bought a Western Digital MyBook network drive which is basically a little ARM board with 32MB memory. It is intended just to serve up some windows shares over a network. But you can run a simple program to enable ssh access, install a package manager and start installing other software on it - mine runs a few cron jobs to download files, as well as being a print server through its spare USB port. I'm not sure how far it could be pushed given how little memory it has, but I'm sure a bit of email & NFS wouldn't be beyond it if you're not fussy about speed.
Power and cost were only a bit more than the drive itself.
I would have thought a bunch of the older titles off gog.com will work well under wine - e.g. I bought Painkiller Black Edition and it runs very nicely on the basic 3D accelerator in my laptop, but there are plenty of 2D games, older Fallout etc. and no DRM to have to break. Also see World Of Goo, as some others have pointed out - a perfect port, and a really creative & fun title.
Why would you think a corporation with a £3 bn government mandated income cares about controlling a minority technology market while they've no intentions to broadcast their programmes encrypted (they ditched encryption through Sky in 2003).
I don't care why they do, I just think they shouldn't. Why should we have to explain intentions before doing something against someone misbehaving?
Because it saves you from jumping to insane conclusions? The BBC have been around since 1922, generally leading the way in pioneering broadcast TV. You should look them up some time.
They are not trying to supplement their £3.2bn income (well, 2007 figure) with a paltry few thousand pounds that they would get from branding a handful of satellite boxes. 350000 units *is* peanuts if that's accurate, but I'm sure Humax, Philips, Grundig etc. are very grateful to have such an enormous partner helping them flog more PVRs and hi-def TVs. The BBC are pushing exciting, new and open technology into people's homes through iPlayer and Freesat, putting more entertainment into moore homes through this bizarre £12/month tax they can levy, and all the freetards see is fucking black helicopters at every turn!
If this tiny encryption scheme goes ahead, it will be a repeat of what they did to get iPlayer onto the iPhone, Wii & PS3 - an open standard with a tiny lock on for anyone to break. The writers guilds demand this idiocy to protect their fees for broadcast repeats, but I think the BBC are way ahead of them.
But of course I would say that, I'm just a shill for the black helicopters, so don't listen to my facts or reasoned deductions, I just want you to live in a world where you can't point your dish at Hotbird for dubbed Saudi soap operas, and with a month's toner budget paid for by their Freesat licensing cartel, the BBC will control your MIND... look away! Look away now!
Freesat is simply a set of standards badge that ensure makes satellite boxes simpler to install and use in a particular market.
BBC propaganda bullshit. Freesat is essentially an EPG platform which lists only channels which pay the licenses. Receivers have to meet certain criteria. These agreements are of course not openly published, but it would appear that they prohibit functionality such as DiSEqC switches, which is very basic functionality for a DVB-S receiver. The choice of licensed receivers is also extremely limited.
You don't need DiSEqC for a Freesat setup because it's all coming from one satellite! I don't see why such functionality would be prohibited for Freesat boxes that wanted to offer other channels, but you're right there aren't many Freesat receivers (yet) because it's a tiny market. Why would you think a corporation with a £3 bn government mandated income cares about controlling a minority technology market while they've no intentions to broadcast their programmes encrypted (they ditched encryption through Sky in 2003). Freesat is a tiny platform which the BBC are investing in to get more bandwidth to viewers who are willing to go the extra mile to put a satellite dish up. I don't see what nefarious motivation you're ascribing to their actions here. The restriction they're talking about is *trivial* for any "non-compliant" manufacturer to work around, hardly the actions of the Beeb's black helicopter division.
I don't know what axe you have to grind but you're misinformed.
The BBC doesn't have a monopoly on EPG transmissions or information - there are several EPGs on Freeview multiplexes that are used by different STB manufacturers to offer more than just now/next information. They arrange this themselves, nothing to do with the BBC.
I don't know what you're talking about with the DVB-S receiver market - Freesat is simply a set of standards badge that ensure makes satellite boxes simpler to install and use in a particular market. If anything the market for DVB-S devices has increased through the initiative, as they are friendly enough to be sold through high street chains. I watch TV through a generic satellite box (pre-Freesat), bought from a specialist supplier, and it was hard work to set up.
Just from the summary, this sounds like the BBC are proposing a tiny, insignicant technical change to their metadata broadcast and presenting to rightsholders as a complicated and cast-iron DRM solution. Of course it's nothing of the sort, will probably never get implemented, and if it were, sounds like it would be trivial to work around (if only by getting your listings data from an external source, of which there are several!) So I think this is just singing a song the rightsholders want to hear; I'm pretty certain nobody technical at the BBC gives a hoot about implementing DRM, and would see it as an unwelcome obstacle to doing their job.
I already had to do this when I recently bought Assassins Creed off Steam (nearly a year after its release!). The game communicated with Ubisoft servers for *every* significant event in the game (picking up a flag, killing an enemeny etc., every couple of minutes basically) and whenever that happened the game froze for 30s to make some transaction with an overloaded server. The fix? Edit my Windows/etc/hosts file - sigh. I'm not sure whether it was anti-piracy, or just stats tracking or what. How do they have the same people create such a technically brilliant game and then put such boneheaded code in there, I don't know.
if there aren't alternative components that can be swapped out with a GPL'd one, that's linking
That is a nonsensical definition - if a component has a well-defined API and is loaded dynamically, then clearly it is substitutable, even if no substitution exists at any given moment in practice. After all, the end user can always write one.
At the other extreme, in these days of monkey-patching, binary-patching, part-compiled intermediate code, any component of any software is practically swappable at any time. What matters surely is *shipping* a particular software component with your product, and that component being essential and practically irreplaceable to the whole. The shades of gray as to what's "irreplaceable" can only form legal arguments; but a purely technical definition of linking no longer suits the GPLv2.
Not sure about now, but a few years back, MySQL made this pretty explicit - they considered any kind of bundling of MySQL to be "linking". i.e. if your application could only work with MySQL, and you shipped it with your app, that was linking, even though they might have only communicated through a socket. The whole concept of program linking has come on quite a bit since 1990, so I agree with the parent, if there aren't alternative components that can be swapped out with a GPL'd one, that's linking.
So what price would be reasonable for every (say) SNES ROM in existence, a reasonable price that you would pay? That's 800-odd games, many expensive-to-develop blockbusters, many of which are being still being sold individually for $10-odd full price on the Wii's virtual console service? Would you pay $8000? Is that a fair price? If not, why not? What about $4000? Or are you saying that copyright it broken because all those ROMs should be out of copyright by now, and you should be able to have them for free? And do you think that the copyright system is somehow not motivating Nintendo to produce new games? There is an enormous number of them being released, and profits must be decent from their monopoly on their own creativity.
If you want to own every ROM in existence, or play a single old classic, there is nothing practically stopping you. You could write to Nintendo and say, hey, I've got a copy of Mother 2 here, I'm really enjoying it, sue me or bill me, whatever, I want this to be a legitimate transaction! And they'd ignore you, you crank! They know their old titles are there for the taking, just download and enjoy them. But it's copyright that allows Nintendo that monopoly on *selling* old titles as new, and produce new games to boot.
This whine might have had an air of legitimacy in 2000 when Nintendo were squashing ROM sites as NES/SNES titles became scarcer, but now the vintage game market is in full swing via downloads; it shows that it just took companies a bit of time to adapt to selling their old titles again, so I don't think a copyright on old games of tens of years is unreasonable.
Rubbish - Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are making plenty of money selling their old games as console downloads - that might not be how you want to play them, or they might be selling them for more than you want to pay, but it's no longer true that 8-bit and 16-bit era titles are being "neglected". Just because you can't (legally) sell a device with hundreds of ROMs on for pennies doesn't mean the copyright system is broken.
* Asbo of the Colossus * Big Brain City Academy * Turning Point: Fall of (civil) Liberties * Nintendogs (poodle edition) * Mario & Sonic in "Olympic overspend" * House Of The Red (-handed)
Didn't apple do this with OSX? You can run OS9 apps, but it is in a VM.
I'll see your "circa 2000" and raise you a 1987: Acorn, in the UK, switched from the 6502-based BBC Micro to the ARM-based Archimedes - they produced a "BBC Micro" emulator to run old software (usually much faster).
Pfft, as someone who wanted their damned games to run, the Acorn-supplied BBC emulator was not nearly good enough. At least Classic runs Crystal Quest:-)
You're comparing apples and oranges - internet transit bandwidth is cheap because for a particular piece of switch or fibre infrastructure in a data centre (where your hosting is), there are multiple commercial uses and plenty of opportunity to sell your bandwidth so it's used maximally. This results in a multi-tier system where you pay for a commodity according to volume, and a handful of centralised engineers can maintain it. Your sites are reaping the benefits of that economy.
The infrastructure for providing data bandwidth to residential areas has usually been put down by one or (if the area is lucky) two companies, involving very expensive digging up of public land. The return on investment for a particular piece of cable can only be provided by the homeowners, who are very price-sensitive compared to businesses. This infrastructure is mostly single-homed, needs roving national teams of engineers to maintain, and for a return that is often heavily regulated.
That's why (as a relatively small player in broadband, but a larger one in hosting) we pay £300-odd per Mb for connectivity to *any home in the UK*, but only £5-15 for "internet transit", where we're not the ones paying for that expensive last mile of connectivity.
Bernstein doesn't need to convince people with his diplomacy, just his software and its minimalist documentation. qmail and djbdns achieved widespread deployment *despite* their unhelpful licenses and lack of official maintenance. If he can put out a new tinydns release to prove DNSCurve, rather than just a vague specification, he stands a high chance of spreading the idea from the ground up.
Facebook have an office in London employing British workers, they have lots of British users, and I'd guess they have servers here too. I think that means they have to obey at least some of our laws, but I'm no expert:)
One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are createdâ"one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work.
Except that Facebook is completely unlike email, because everything in under the control of a single company, in a single application. If I share something with a friend (and by "share" that means "make a status update" or "post a new public photo", not necessarily privately a one-to-one private exchange), Facebook does not make a separate copy of that information in their database for every single person that might read it, that is under that person's exclusive control. The data and sharing terms remain under Facebook's control at all times.
So in the UK they should be terrified of the first person to issue a Data Protection Act request to stop processing personal information which, if a request were justified (e.g. "someone is stalking me, I need to be anonymous for a while"), could force Facebook to delete every piece of information linked to your account. For instance they would have to turn your name and every reference to your account into Account_Redacted1234, leaving status updates and historical information deleted or looking broken. They would probably also have to remove / blur any tagged photos to comply fully.
If there is ever a channel for this kind of information editing to start happening, Facebook could be in trouble as soon as somebody starts a "this site sucks, and I'm going to get my information deleted!" movement. As a defence they are trying to retroactively write themselves blank cheques with people's personal data in ways that seem rushed and legally questionable in some parts of the world.
If anyone has even the slightest bit of success with this kind of hacking, count on Apple's next firmware update "upgrading" the device. Then only wi-fi carriers or phone applications that they approve will work, and third parties that don't pay them for the privilege will be out in the cold again.
Any ISP that is interfering with traffic is going to exclude the IPs for bandwidth testing sites from its traffic management policies? At least they will in a market where customers care about this kind of thing, and have a choice of ISP.
Of all the potential legislation that the government have been talking about over the last few months, this music industry stuff reeks of lobbyists doing whatever they can to gain influence in Westminster. And what has been in the headlines in the UK the last few days? Ah yes, allegations that unelected members of the House of Lords are being paid by lobbyists to table amendments to UK law. Maybe there's a hurried shakedown going of this kind of overly "lobbied" legislation - before a pesky journalist joins the dots while the legislation is still on the table.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought my dad a Cybook Opus for Christmas - sturdy, simple, wasn't too expensive, just epub support, no ties to a publisher/DRM. Not used it myself but Dad seems pretty happy.
Those are still a pretty neat idea.
Yes, any game where the ability to tell red from green is crucial has always landed it in the bin for me. The worst example was the 11th Hour, where the very first puzzle involved sorting red and green books on a shelf. I spent about 45 minutes with the bloody things dancing in front of me, thinking I'd succeeded when if I looked away, and back again, the colours swapped back. A total failure, though maybe I saved myself from a bad game anyway. I think Popcap were the first I remember adding a "colourblind mode" where they change the *shapes* of objects that you need to tell apart, as well as moving away from the hazy red/green/yellow distinction.
Never had a problem with L4D though - if it shambles, shoot it :)
Surely there is a strong possibility of a failure where both VMs run at once- the original image thinking it has lost touch with a dead backup, and the backup thinking the master is dead, and so starting to execute independently? If they're connected to the same storage / network segment, it could cause data loss, bring down the network service and so on. I've not investigated these types of lockstep VMs, but it seems you have to make some pretty strong assumptions about failure modes, which always break eventually commodity hardware (I've seen bad backplanes, network chips, CPU caches, RAM of course, switches...). How can you possibly handle these cases to avoid having to mop up after your VM is accidentally cloned?
It's a fair comment - the packaging touts a gigabit network interface, but you'll be lucky to get 10Mbs out of the thing, probably 5% of what the drive is capable of. However this is common with most similar cheap NAS devices - they are only just fast enough to stream hi-def video. I don't really have any trouble with noise; it sits outside my bedroom and my wife doesn't complain which is good enough :)
I will one day replace it with one of these Atom boards kicking around the office, and I'm sure will be much happier but I still find mine very useful as-is.
I bought a Western Digital MyBook network drive which is basically a little ARM board with 32MB memory. It is intended just to serve up some windows shares over a network. But you can run a simple program to enable ssh access, install a package manager and start installing other software on it - mine runs a few cron jobs to download files, as well as being a print server through its spare USB port. I'm not sure how far it could be pushed given how little memory it has, but I'm sure a bit of email & NFS wouldn't be beyond it if you're not fussy about speed.
Power and cost were only a bit more than the drive itself.
I would have thought a bunch of the older titles off gog.com will work well under wine - e.g. I bought Painkiller Black Edition and it runs very nicely on the basic 3D accelerator in my laptop, but there are plenty of 2D games, older Fallout etc. and no DRM to have to break. Also see World Of Goo, as some others have pointed out - a perfect port, and a really creative & fun title.
Why would you think a corporation with a £3 bn government mandated income cares about controlling a minority technology market while they've no intentions to broadcast their programmes encrypted (they ditched encryption through Sky in 2003).
I don't care why they do, I just think they shouldn't. Why should we have to explain intentions before doing something against someone misbehaving?
Because it saves you from jumping to insane conclusions? The BBC have been around since 1922, generally leading the way in pioneering broadcast TV. You should look them up some time.
They are not trying to supplement their £3.2bn income (well, 2007 figure) with a paltry few thousand pounds that they would get from branding a handful of satellite boxes. 350000 units *is* peanuts if that's accurate, but I'm sure Humax, Philips, Grundig etc. are very grateful to have such an enormous partner helping them flog more PVRs and hi-def TVs. The BBC are pushing exciting, new and open technology into people's homes through iPlayer and Freesat, putting more entertainment into moore homes through this bizarre £12/month tax they can levy, and all the freetards see is fucking black helicopters at every turn!
If this tiny encryption scheme goes ahead, it will be a repeat of what they did to get iPlayer onto the iPhone, Wii & PS3 - an open standard with a tiny lock on for anyone to break. The writers guilds demand this idiocy to protect their fees for broadcast repeats, but I think the BBC are way ahead of them.
But of course I would say that, I'm just a shill for the black helicopters, so don't listen to my facts or reasoned deductions, I just want you to live in a world where you can't point your dish at Hotbird for dubbed Saudi soap operas, and with a month's toner budget paid for by their Freesat licensing cartel, the BBC will control your MIND... look away! Look away now!
Freesat is simply a set of standards badge that ensure makes satellite boxes simpler to install and use in a particular market.
BBC propaganda bullshit. Freesat is essentially an EPG platform which lists only channels which pay the licenses. Receivers have to meet certain criteria.
These agreements are of course not openly published, but it would appear that they prohibit functionality such as DiSEqC switches, which is very basic functionality for a DVB-S receiver.
The choice of licensed receivers is also extremely limited.
You don't need DiSEqC for a Freesat setup because it's all coming from one satellite! I don't see why such functionality would be prohibited for Freesat boxes that wanted to offer other channels, but you're right there aren't many Freesat receivers (yet) because it's a tiny market. Why would you think a corporation with a £3 bn government mandated income cares about controlling a minority technology market while they've no intentions to broadcast their programmes encrypted (they ditched encryption through Sky in 2003). Freesat is a tiny platform which the BBC are investing in to get more bandwidth to viewers who are willing to go the extra mile to put a satellite dish up. I don't see what nefarious motivation you're ascribing to their actions here. The restriction they're talking about is *trivial* for any "non-compliant" manufacturer to work around, hardly the actions of the Beeb's black helicopter division.
I don't know what axe you have to grind but you're misinformed.
The BBC doesn't have a monopoly on EPG transmissions or information - there are several EPGs on Freeview multiplexes that are used by different STB manufacturers to offer more than just now/next information. They arrange this themselves, nothing to do with the BBC.
I don't know what you're talking about with the DVB-S receiver market - Freesat is simply a set of standards badge that ensure makes satellite boxes simpler to install and use in a particular market. If anything the market for DVB-S devices has increased through the initiative, as they are friendly enough to be sold through high street chains. I watch TV through a generic satellite box (pre-Freesat), bought from a specialist supplier, and it was hard work to set up.
Just from the summary, this sounds like the BBC are proposing a tiny, insignicant technical change to their metadata broadcast and presenting to rightsholders as a complicated and cast-iron DRM solution. Of course it's nothing of the sort, will probably never get implemented, and if it were, sounds like it would be trivial to work around (if only by getting your listings data from an external source, of which there are several!) So I think this is just singing a song the rightsholders want to hear; I'm pretty certain nobody technical at the BBC gives a hoot about implementing DRM, and would see it as an unwelcome obstacle to doing their job.
I already had to do this when I recently bought Assassins Creed off Steam (nearly a year after its release!). The game communicated with Ubisoft servers for *every* significant event in the game (picking up a flag, killing an enemeny etc., every couple of minutes basically) and whenever that happened the game froze for 30s to make some transaction with an overloaded server. The fix? Edit my Windows /etc/hosts file - sigh. I'm not sure whether it was anti-piracy, or just stats tracking or what. How do they have the same people create such a technically brilliant game and then put such boneheaded code in there, I don't know.
if there aren't alternative components that can be swapped out with a GPL'd one, that's linking
That is a nonsensical definition - if a component has a well-defined API and is loaded dynamically, then clearly it is substitutable, even if no substitution exists at any given moment in practice. After all, the end user can always write one.
At the other extreme, in these days of monkey-patching, binary-patching, part-compiled intermediate code, any component of any software is practically swappable at any time. What matters surely is *shipping* a particular software component with your product, and that component being essential and practically irreplaceable to the whole. The shades of gray as to what's "irreplaceable" can only form legal arguments; but a purely technical definition of linking no longer suits the GPLv2.
Also, that was an interesting discussion you brought up
Not sure about now, but a few years back, MySQL made this pretty explicit - they considered any kind of bundling of MySQL to be "linking". i.e. if your application could only work with MySQL, and you shipped it with your app, that was linking, even though they might have only communicated through a socket. The whole concept of program linking has come on quite a bit since 1990, so I agree with the parent, if there aren't alternative components that can be swapped out with a GPL'd one, that's linking.
So what price would be reasonable for every (say) SNES ROM in existence, a reasonable price that you would pay? That's 800-odd games, many expensive-to-develop blockbusters, many of which are being still being sold individually for $10-odd full price on the Wii's virtual console service? Would you pay $8000? Is that a fair price? If not, why not? What about $4000? Or are you saying that copyright it broken because all those ROMs should be out of copyright by now, and you should be able to have them for free? And do you think that the copyright system is somehow not motivating Nintendo to produce new games? There is an enormous number of them being released, and profits must be decent from their monopoly on their own creativity.
If you want to own every ROM in existence, or play a single old classic, there is nothing practically stopping you. You could write to Nintendo and say, hey, I've got a copy of Mother 2 here, I'm really enjoying it, sue me or bill me, whatever, I want this to be a legitimate transaction! And they'd ignore you, you crank! They know their old titles are there for the taking, just download and enjoy them. But it's copyright that allows Nintendo that monopoly on *selling* old titles as new, and produce new games to boot.
This whine might have had an air of legitimacy in 2000 when Nintendo were squashing ROM sites as NES/SNES titles became scarcer, but now the vintage game market is in full swing via downloads; it shows that it just took companies a bit of time to adapt to selling their old titles again, so I don't think a copyright on old games of tens of years is unreasonable.
Rubbish - Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are making plenty of money selling their old games as console downloads - that might not be how you want to play them, or they might be selling them for more than you want to pay, but it's no longer true that 8-bit and 16-bit era titles are being "neglected". Just because you can't (legally) sell a device with hundreds of ROMs on for pennies doesn't mean the copyright system is broken.
Coming this year:
* Asbo of the Colossus
* Big Brain City Academy
* Turning Point: Fall of (civil) Liberties
* Nintendogs (poodle edition)
* Mario & Sonic in "Olympic overspend"
* House Of The Red (-handed)
(that's enough British games- ed)
Didn't apple do this with OSX? You can run OS9 apps, but it is in a VM.
I'll see your "circa 2000" and raise you a 1987: Acorn, in the UK, switched from the 6502-based BBC Micro to the ARM-based Archimedes - they produced a "BBC Micro" emulator to run old software (usually much faster).
Pfft, as someone who wanted their damned games to run, the Acorn-supplied BBC emulator was not nearly good enough. At least Classic runs Crystal Quest :-)
You're comparing apples and oranges - internet transit bandwidth is cheap because for a particular piece of switch or fibre infrastructure in a data centre (where your hosting is), there are multiple commercial uses and plenty of opportunity to sell your bandwidth so it's used maximally. This results in a multi-tier system where you pay for a commodity according to volume, and a handful of centralised engineers can maintain it. Your sites are reaping the benefits of that economy.
The infrastructure for providing data bandwidth to residential areas has usually been put down by one or (if the area is lucky) two companies, involving very expensive digging up of public land. The return on investment for a particular piece of cable can only be provided by the homeowners, who are very price-sensitive compared to businesses. This infrastructure is mostly single-homed, needs roving national teams of engineers to maintain, and for a return that is often heavily regulated.
That's why (as a relatively small player in broadband, but a larger one in hosting) we pay £300-odd per Mb for connectivity to *any home in the UK*, but only £5-15 for "internet transit", where we're not the ones paying for that expensive last mile of connectivity.
Bernstein doesn't need to convince people with his diplomacy, just his software and its minimalist documentation. qmail and djbdns achieved widespread deployment *despite* their unhelpful licenses and lack of official maintenance. If he can put out a new tinydns release to prove DNSCurve, rather than just a vague specification, he stands a high chance of spreading the idea from the ground up.
Facebook have an office in London employing British workers, they have lots of British users, and I'd guess they have servers here too. I think that means they have to obey at least some of our laws, but I'm no expert :)
One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are createdâ"one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work.
Except that Facebook is completely unlike email, because everything in under the control of a single company, in a single application. If I share something with a friend (and by "share" that means "make a status update" or "post a new public photo", not necessarily privately a one-to-one private exchange), Facebook does not make a separate copy of that information in their database for every single person that might read it, that is under that person's exclusive control. The data and sharing terms remain under Facebook's control at all times.
So in the UK they should be terrified of the first person to issue a Data Protection Act request to stop processing personal information which, if a request were justified (e.g. "someone is stalking me, I need to be anonymous for a while"), could force Facebook to delete every piece of information linked to your account. For instance they would have to turn your name and every reference to your account into Account_Redacted1234, leaving status updates and historical information deleted or looking broken. They would probably also have to remove / blur any tagged photos to comply fully.
If there is ever a channel for this kind of information editing to start happening, Facebook could be in trouble as soon as somebody starts a "this site sucks, and I'm going to get my information deleted!" movement. As a defence they are trying to retroactively write themselves blank cheques with people's personal data in ways that seem rushed and legally questionable in some parts of the world.
If anyone has even the slightest bit of success with this kind of hacking, count on Apple's next firmware update "upgrading" the device. Then only wi-fi carriers or phone applications that they approve will work, and third parties that don't pay them for the privilege will be out in the cold again.
Any ISP that is interfering with traffic is going to exclude the IPs for bandwidth testing sites from its traffic management policies? At least they will in a market where customers care about this kind of thing, and have a choice of ISP.
Of all the potential legislation that the government have been talking about over the last few months, this music industry stuff reeks of lobbyists doing whatever they can to gain influence in Westminster. And what has been in the headlines in the UK the last few days? Ah yes, allegations that unelected members of the House of Lords are being paid by lobbyists to table amendments to UK law. Maybe there's a hurried shakedown going of this kind of overly "lobbied" legislation - before a pesky journalist joins the dots while the legislation is still on the table.