It'd be monumentally unwise for the UK music industry to hire "lawyer" firms to trawl UK broadband providers. That'd breach the European Union data protection laws right away, using American legal firms to examine British data.
Yet again, Slashdot has confused "a proposal by a British government minister" with "a law which has been passed by both Houses of Parliament". The former has occured, the latter has not.
It won't happen for two reasons:
1. The upper house (House of Lords) is stuffed full of Conservatives who can't be removed (and won't support it.
2. The lower house (House of Commons) is up for election in less than two years. The Conservatives will win by a landslide and the intercept programme will be cancelled.
3. Nobody is stopping anyone from running their own mailserver with TLS. Whilst it is theoretically practicable to monitor email traffic from all UK ISPs, it is not theoretically practicable to monitor encrypted email servers in every household. Running your own mailserver is neither difficult nor expensive these days. Ditto using an offshore mailserver and connecting through encrypted POP/IMAP.
The real scandal here is that a government minister should suggest spending quite so much money on something that is so trivial to circumvent.
[Remember, in the UK, right-wing (Conservatives, capitalists, currently opposition but widely expected to win in 2010 by a landslide) = libertarian, left-wing (Labour, socialists, current government) = authoritatian. There are other significant parties such as the Liberal Democrats who do pretty much what it says on the tin.]
1. Find broadband (eg. your house, hotel with wifi, cybercafe, wifi at airport).
2. Put the data you want on a server somewhere. Protect it as required. I usually consider having it on a directory that can be only downloaded over SSH as sufficient.
3. Clean your laptop of anything dodgy. Leave shred running overnight.
4. Go through customs with clean laptop.
5. Find broadband (eg. your house, hotel with wifi, cybercafe, wifi at airport).
6. Download the files you wanted.
There's simply no need to take data on physical media through customs, provided both ends of your journey have broadband.
Erm, it's ten quid a month. Did the US dollar sink again whilst I was at lunch? I make that around US$240.
I don't know why they don't just incorporate it into general taxes, though. The only people who don't pay it are wierdos and those who lie (they just watch TV over t'interweb).
There are a small number of good reasons why the UK has government-backed funding and the US does not, notably programmes made specifically for the UK market, which is almost the whole of CBeebies output. For example we wouldn't want our children growing up with a foreign accent, or assuming that cars drive on the wrong side of the road, or thinking that school busses are yellow etc. Ditto programmes focussing on British culture such as history or classical composers.
None of those arguments are an argument against advertising, though, and I often wonder why we can't do both, where appropriate.
There are also places where the government funding is clearly unnecessary, such as the pop music based BBC Radio 1, AOR based Radio 2 and primetime TV comedy/drama channels BBC1 and BBC3.
And don't even get me started on the BBC website. Exactly what that provides above what is already provided by the Guardian newspaper is beyond my comprehension.
Dude, I've spent several weeks in a US hotel room with only free-to-air US TV. Frankly I'd pay $400 per week not to be subject to that experience again. Thank the Lord for WiFi and DivX.
That's only a partial solution; you need to ban merchandising too - ie. ban the sale of items featured on children's television programmes.
In the UK we have CBeebies, a free-to-air licence-fee funded preschool channel with no advertising.
My two-year old expresses a clear preference for toys and clothing branded with characters that are only shown on BBC channels in the UK, such as Bob the Builder and In The Night Garden, despite none of that merchandising appearing on-screen (indeed, the channel features slots demonstrating how children can construct their own toys, based on their TV characters, using household scraps such as cardboard tubes and fabric offcuts).
Personally I think a merchandising ban would be extremely difficult to enforce; it would only take one parent to import one doll from a foreign country where it isn't banned, and fairly quickly you'd have a playgroup full of kids who import merchandised toys- a craze which would spread fast.
Given that children, in western society, are going to be subject to advertising and merchandising as part of their life, a better solution would be to teach them to be approach consumerism with a critical eye. Early on, encourage the child to compare the merits and costs of advertised/merchandised toys. My two-year-old already recognises non-articulated models and branded magazines as essentially junk, and recognises that a pack of 60 unbranded colourful stickers is better value than a pack of 10 branded stickers.
There's nothing wrong with using advertising as a useful way to become informed about products. It only becomes a problem if this is your sole way of being informed, or if you assume that everything that is advertised is desirable.
use procmail and spamassassin to filter spam as effectively as Gmail does?
If you misconfigure Spamassassin, you can reduce its accuracy so that it filters spam only as effectively as Gmail, yes.
I've generally found a default up-to-date well-trained install of Spamassassin to be considerably more accurate than Gmail. Gmail FPs like a beeyatch- it dumps dozens of legit emails into the spam folder every week for me, and I typically have to spend 15 mins a week updating my whitelists to prevent this - only for it to FP on an entirely new lot of mails the next week.
But Gmail is very convenient when you're on the move. The iGoogle single-sign-on is ideal if you're hotdesking around friends' machines, and the Java/MIDP mobile phone client for basic cellphones (not even smartphones) is particularly good.
The books that turned me on to sci-fi, as a pre-teen, were the "Dragonfall 5" series by Brian Earnshaw.
There are five books in the series (all titled "Dragonfall 5 and the..."). They tell the tale of a family who live onboard a small spaceship (named Dragonfall 5), which visits various planets where the family has adventures. One of the most memorable stories concerned a civil war in an Orwellian society of intelligent rabbits.
They're definitely aimed at children and are available (mostly second-hand, sadly) from Amazon.
Proof that people who copy homework are stupid
on
The Privacy Paradox
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Quite.
The survey simply proves that, people who copy others' homework, find it difficult to follow a chain of logic. I'm fairly sure we all knew that before the survey.
Try +44 845 4647, which is the NHS Direct number for the UK. Staffed 24/7 by qualified nurses.
You may or may not need to fake your caller ID, you can do this using some VOIP services; a typical British mobile has a CID like the regexp:/07[1-9][0-9]{8}/
I have to suffer through 2 months (and counting) of 100+ degree days,
This is probably a really dumb question, but as I Brit I have never figured out why settlers chose to live in America. I mean, the climate seems to spend half the year trying to KILL you. I've been to Boston in January and got snowed in my hotel with 6-foot/2-metre snowdrifts that arrived in ONE NIGHT. I've been to Houston in May and been stuck in my hotel lest the 48c/115f heat burn me to a frazzle. I went to California in February and they had to close the coastal highway because the sea had smashed it up.
I don't doubt for a moment that the USA is a lovely place to live IF you have air conditioning and central heating, but when the first settlers turned up a few hundred years ago, long before climate control, exactly what made them think "This is place to live! This location is ideally suited! We shall search no further!"?
Now I realise that the Pilgrims were essentially an extreme religious cult who got booted out of the Netherlands for being too nutty (and believe you me, the Netherlands is a pretty liberal place, getting kicked out of there really does take some doing - they must have been like Waco-quality loons). I know they also faced persecution in England for much the same thing. I also know that the British/Netherland climate of, essentially, rain rain rain, cloud, rain, does get a bit depressing, but at least the weather here never tries to KILL you. Any day of the year, anywhere in the country, you can step outside for the whole day and you won't die.
Whereas the Pilgrims set up home in BOSTON for the WINTER?
Then there's the wildlife. We don't have any dangerous wildlife, we shot it all, whereas you lot appear to have a country full of poisonous plants and poisonous/pointy-toothed predators. If the American weather isn't trying to kill you, there's some ivy or crocodile waiting to give you grievous pain.
And then you sing songs about how great your country is. Sure, your people are virtually all fabulous (and anyone who says otherwise clearly hasn't met many of you personally), and ten out of ten for looking on the bright side of things, but your country is trying to kill you - how can that not introduce an element of self-doubt? How can you chaps be so religious when every time you step out of your house/car, some part of God's wonderful environment tries to nail you in the head?
When it comes down to energy conservation, do you never hover your finger over the thermostat, hesitate and think "Wouldn't it be a lot more energy efficient if I lived somewhere else entirely?".
(Iceland - it's the future of datacentres, believe you me.)
Er... surely the point is that it can be used by the passengers, or the driver only when stopped?
Here in the UK you're allowed to install whatever you like, but you can't have distracting stuff (TV/DVD screens, for example) in view of the driver whilst driving. The police will pull you over in a heartbeat if they see you moving with anything like that visible to the driver. Heck, you're not even allowed to use a mobile phone whilst driving unless you have a hands-free unit. There are also quite strict restrictions on what GPS displays can and can't do.
I really can't imagine any car company is going to fit anything more interactive than a GPS that is visible to the driver. Even if you had one country with stupidly lax laws, they wouldn't be able to sell it anywhere else.
The solution to your perceived problem (which I don't perceive as a problem) is for all WiFi routers to ship in a factory-set safe state.
This could be solved by either:
* Totally locked down by default (mean-spirited), or
* Open but bandwidth-throttled and firewalled by default (community-spirited but still cautious)
The argument between you and me boils down to which of these two we think should be the default. I'd agree that fully open by default is pretty naive.
What we need is some kind of WiFi "secure by default" badge that the industry can agree on and put on their boxes. Then all the customer needs to know is that any box they buy that carries that badge, is safe for them to use without significant further configuration.
someone could do something clearly illegal using my IP address... How do you deal with this risk
I don't see it as a risk so I don't deal with it.
I deliberately don't keep logs, other than those required to maintain DHCP leases until their expiry (I think I set it to 24 hours). However, the system is open so it is possible for someone else to sniff the traffic and keep logs.
If a poorly-informed policeman or prosecutor wants to waste everyone's time, I have more than enough funds and legal insurance to hire an expert witness. Note that I'm in England so all legal fees are almost always refunded unless you're found guilty. Also in England most buildings insurance comes with cheap legal insurance for all members of the family (cheap because, as I said, unless you're guilty, it gets refunded anyway).
This kind of thing has gone to court several times in England and the defence of "you cannot identify an individual person by IP address alone" has always won.
If the cops show up at my door one day
British coppers don't carry sidearms [1] so this is a distinctly less scary encounter for us. We consider the police to be mostly friendly, if a little overworked, under-educated and easily excitable. They're just people, if they make mistakes it's usually no big deal. It isn't like we have the death penalty or anything and with CCTV everywhere and mandatory recording of interviews they don't really have any opportunity to beat you up. If you're in the right then the system almost always does work, and almost always pretty swiftly.
[1] Some of them do keep SMGs or assault rifles in their cars, but they only get called in if you wave something that looks like a gun. I have several things that looks like guns (ie. guns; my three target pistols) but I'm not stupid enough to wave them in the direction of any human, ever, not even when I'm sure they're unloaded. Most rural schools teach gun safety as part of the general/social/citizenship curriculum, or at least offer it as an after-school option.
I believe it is a lesser crime to enter without breaking in.
Correct. Burglary is the act of breaking AND entering AND committing theft (logical AND; all three must happen). Theft is the intention to permanently deprive someone of physical property. Since accessing open WiFi does not involve depriving someone of physical property (neither permanent nor temporary), it is neither theft nor burglary.
Fraud covers many crimes such as obtaining goods or services through deception. Since there was no deception, there was no fraud.
A door does not reply with a message granting me access; the fact that it is open, closed, locked, unlocked, slightly ajar or otherwise is legally irrelevant - the important thing with burglary is that you had to break something to gain entry and then take something without permission, with no intention of giving it back.
An open WiFi router does specifically reply with a message granting me permission. The fact that it uses a particular protocol or particular encryption is legally irrelevent - the important thing is that it replied back with a message specifically granting me permission. Users are authorised.
(Declaration of interest: I run a deliberately open WiFi hotspot - albeit heavily firewalled and bandwidth-throttled. )
Slashdot Mirror
Words I hoped I'd never see in the same article:
"automate the 700-ton trucks" ...
"Autonomous vehicle technology is pretty much in its infancy"
I, for one, welcome our clumsy, myopic, bone-crushing, toddler-trantrum overlords.
Ah, what do I care, they probably wouldn't fit along British roads anyway. Except, oh noes, what does an American ton mean in real measurements?
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html#e-postage
UK in the past 10 years? How many people s died because they couldn't get health insurance?
In the UK? None.
Has there ever been a society in the history of the earth, where a once slave class later produced an elected leader?
I realise that you Yanks aren't really up on history, but did you not even watch the film Gladiator?
It'd be monumentally unwise for the UK music industry to hire "lawyer" firms to trawl UK broadband providers. That'd breach the European Union data protection laws right away, using American legal firms to examine British data.
Did you mean "solicitor" firms?
don't do anything really annoying like have a mandatory "music and movie tax" on all broadband connections.
You may be joking, but there are proposals to change the TV licence fee to do exactly that.
spending much of my - as a customer - money on lawyers
I can absolutely guarantee that they won't spend a penny on lawyers, mate. They'll spend it on solicitors and barristers.
Hey, Britain. What's going on over there?
Nothing.
Yet again, Slashdot has confused "a proposal by a British government minister" with "a law which has been passed by both Houses of Parliament". The former has occured, the latter has not.
It won't happen for two reasons:
1. The upper house (House of Lords) is stuffed full of Conservatives who can't be removed (and won't support it.
2. The lower house (House of Commons) is up for election in less than two years. The Conservatives will win by a landslide and the intercept programme will be cancelled.
3. Nobody is stopping anyone from running their own mailserver with TLS. Whilst it is theoretically practicable to monitor email traffic from all UK ISPs, it is not theoretically practicable to monitor encrypted email servers in every household. Running your own mailserver is neither difficult nor expensive these days. Ditto using an offshore mailserver and connecting through encrypted POP/IMAP.
The real scandal here is that a government minister should suggest spending quite so much money on something that is so trivial to circumvent.
[Remember, in the UK, right-wing (Conservatives, capitalists, currently opposition but widely expected to win in 2010 by a landslide) = libertarian, left-wing (Labour, socialists, current government) = authoritatian. There are other significant parties such as the Liberal Democrats who do pretty much what it says on the tin.]
My solution is:
1. Find broadband (eg. your house, hotel with wifi, cybercafe, wifi at airport).
2. Put the data you want on a server somewhere. Protect it as required. I usually consider having it on a directory that can be only downloaded over SSH as sufficient.
3. Clean your laptop of anything dodgy. Leave shred running overnight.
4. Go through customs with clean laptop.
5. Find broadband (eg. your house, hotel with wifi, cybercafe, wifi at airport).
6. Download the files you wanted.
There's simply no need to take data on physical media through customs, provided both ends of your journey have broadband.
Erm, it's ten quid a month. Did the US dollar sink again whilst I was at lunch? I make that around US$240.
I don't know why they don't just incorporate it into general taxes, though. The only people who don't pay it are wierdos and those who lie (they just watch TV over t'interweb).
There are a small number of good reasons why the UK has government-backed funding and the US does not, notably programmes made specifically for the UK market, which is almost the whole of CBeebies output. For example we wouldn't want our children growing up with a foreign accent, or assuming that cars drive on the wrong side of the road, or thinking that school busses are yellow etc. Ditto programmes focussing on British culture such as history or classical composers.
None of those arguments are an argument against advertising, though, and I often wonder why we can't do both, where appropriate.
There are also places where the government funding is clearly unnecessary, such as the pop music based BBC Radio 1, AOR based Radio 2 and primetime TV comedy/drama channels BBC1 and BBC3.
And don't even get me started on the BBC website. Exactly what that provides above what is already provided by the Guardian newspaper is beyond my comprehension.
Dude, I've spent several weeks in a US hotel room with only free-to-air US TV. Frankly I'd pay $400 per week not to be subject to that experience again. Thank the Lord for WiFi and DivX.
ban all advertisements targeted at kids
That's only a partial solution; you need to ban merchandising too - ie. ban the sale of items featured on children's television programmes.
In the UK we have CBeebies, a free-to-air licence-fee funded preschool channel with no advertising.
My two-year old expresses a clear preference for toys and clothing branded with characters that are only shown on BBC channels in the UK, such as Bob the Builder and In The Night Garden, despite none of that merchandising appearing on-screen (indeed, the channel features slots demonstrating how children can construct their own toys, based on their TV characters, using household scraps such as cardboard tubes and fabric offcuts).
Personally I think a merchandising ban would be extremely difficult to enforce; it would only take one parent to import one doll from a foreign country where it isn't banned, and fairly quickly you'd have a playgroup full of kids who import merchandised toys- a craze which would spread fast.
Given that children, in western society, are going to be subject to advertising and merchandising as part of their life, a better solution would be to teach them to be approach consumerism with a critical eye. Early on, encourage the child to compare the merits and costs of advertised/merchandised toys. My two-year-old already recognises non-articulated models and branded magazines as essentially junk, and recognises that a pack of 60 unbranded colourful stickers is better value than a pack of 10 branded stickers.
There's nothing wrong with using advertising as a useful way to become informed about products. It only becomes a problem if this is your sole way of being informed, or if you assume that everything that is advertised is desirable.
Apparently, all it has to do is "protect British troops". So all you NATO Johnny-foreigner chaps better watch out.
Presumably, the objective is to bring our friendly-fire statistics into line with our American allies.
use procmail and spamassassin to filter spam as effectively as Gmail does?
If you misconfigure Spamassassin, you can reduce its accuracy so that it filters spam only as effectively as Gmail, yes.
I've generally found a default up-to-date well-trained install of Spamassassin to be considerably more accurate than Gmail. Gmail FPs like a beeyatch- it dumps dozens of legit emails into the spam folder every week for me, and I typically have to spend 15 mins a week updating my whitelists to prevent this - only for it to FP on an entirely new lot of mails the next week.
But Gmail is very convenient when you're on the move. The iGoogle single-sign-on is ideal if you're hotdesking around friends' machines, and the Java/MIDP mobile phone client for basic cellphones (not even smartphones) is particularly good.
The books that turned me on to sci-fi, as a pre-teen, were the "Dragonfall 5" series by Brian Earnshaw.
There are five books in the series (all titled "Dragonfall 5 and the..."). They tell the tale of a family who live onboard a small spaceship (named Dragonfall 5), which visits various planets where the family has adventures. One of the most memorable stories concerned a civil war in an Orwellian society of intelligent rabbits.
They're definitely aimed at children and are available (mostly second-hand, sadly) from Amazon.
Quite.
The survey simply proves that, people who copy others' homework, find it difficult to follow a chain of logic. I'm fairly sure we all knew that before the survey.
To summarise: "Stupid is as stupid does"
Try +44 845 4647, which is the NHS Direct number for the UK. Staffed 24/7 by qualified nurses.
You may or may not need to fake your caller ID, you can do this using some VOIP services; a typical British mobile has a CID like the regexp: /07[1-9][0-9]{8}/
...welcome our alchemist / mineral-importing-alien overlords.
Everything grows like wildfire ... the environment is perfect for growing things, raising things, hunting things.
That's actually a really good answer - thanks.
I have to suffer through 2 months (and counting) of 100+ degree days,
This is probably a really dumb question, but as I Brit I have never figured out why settlers chose to live in America. I mean, the climate seems to spend half the year trying to KILL you. I've been to Boston in January and got snowed in my hotel with 6-foot/2-metre snowdrifts that arrived in ONE NIGHT. I've been to Houston in May and been stuck in my hotel lest the 48c/115f heat burn me to a frazzle. I went to California in February and they had to close the coastal highway because the sea had smashed it up.
I don't doubt for a moment that the USA is a lovely place to live IF you have air conditioning and central heating, but when the first settlers turned up a few hundred years ago, long before climate control, exactly what made them think "This is place to live! This location is ideally suited! We shall search no further!"?
Now I realise that the Pilgrims were essentially an extreme religious cult who got booted out of the Netherlands for being too nutty (and believe you me, the Netherlands is a pretty liberal place, getting kicked out of there really does take some doing - they must have been like Waco-quality loons). I know they also faced persecution in England for much the same thing. I also know that the British/Netherland climate of, essentially, rain rain rain, cloud, rain, does get a bit depressing, but at least the weather here never tries to KILL you. Any day of the year, anywhere in the country, you can step outside for the whole day and you won't die.
Whereas the Pilgrims set up home in BOSTON for the WINTER?
Then there's the wildlife. We don't have any dangerous wildlife, we shot it all, whereas you lot appear to have a country full of poisonous plants and poisonous/pointy-toothed predators. If the American weather isn't trying to kill you, there's some ivy or crocodile waiting to give you grievous pain.
And then you sing songs about how great your country is. Sure, your people are virtually all fabulous (and anyone who says otherwise clearly hasn't met many of you personally), and ten out of ten for looking on the bright side of things, but your country is trying to kill you - how can that not introduce an element of self-doubt? How can you chaps be so religious when every time you step out of your house/car, some part of God's wonderful environment tries to nail you in the head?
When it comes down to energy conservation, do you never hover your finger over the thermostat, hesitate and think "Wouldn't it be a lot more energy efficient if I lived somewhere else entirely?".
(Iceland - it's the future of datacentres, believe you me.)
Er... surely the point is that it can be used by the passengers, or the driver only when stopped?
Here in the UK you're allowed to install whatever you like, but you can't have distracting stuff (TV/DVD screens, for example) in view of the driver whilst driving. The police will pull you over in a heartbeat if they see you moving with anything like that visible to the driver. Heck, you're not even allowed to use a mobile phone whilst driving unless you have a hands-free unit. There are also quite strict restrictions on what GPS displays can and can't do.
I really can't imagine any car company is going to fit anything more interactive than a GPS that is visible to the driver. Even if you had one country with stupidly lax laws, they wouldn't be able to sell it anywhere else.
"Felony"? I don't understand your foreign language. Please speak English. I know what English is, because I am English.
it's the dumb person's fault if they can't be bothered to lock down their wifi
s/dumb person's fault/community-spirited person's generosity/
s/can't be bothered/don't choose/
The solution to your perceived problem (which I don't perceive as a problem) is for all WiFi routers to ship in a factory-set safe state.
This could be solved by either:
* Totally locked down by default (mean-spirited), or
* Open but bandwidth-throttled and firewalled by default (community-spirited but still cautious)
The argument between you and me boils down to which of these two we think should be the default. I'd agree that fully open by default is pretty naive.
What we need is some kind of WiFi "secure by default" badge that the industry can agree on and put on their boxes. Then all the customer needs to know is that any box they buy that carries that badge, is safe for them to use without significant further configuration.
I wouldn't mind sharing my bandwidth, being neighbourly and all.
I wrote an (admittedly slightly out-of-date) bandwith throttled and firewalled open WiFi howto.
someone could do something clearly illegal using my IP address ... How do you deal with this risk
I don't see it as a risk so I don't deal with it.
I deliberately don't keep logs, other than those required to maintain DHCP leases until their expiry (I think I set it to 24 hours). However, the system is open so it is possible for someone else to sniff the traffic and keep logs.
If a poorly-informed policeman or prosecutor wants to waste everyone's time, I have more than enough funds and legal insurance to hire an expert witness. Note that I'm in England so all legal fees are almost always refunded unless you're found guilty. Also in England most buildings insurance comes with cheap legal insurance for all members of the family (cheap because, as I said, unless you're guilty, it gets refunded anyway).
This kind of thing has gone to court several times in England and the defence of "you cannot identify an individual person by IP address alone" has always won.
If the cops show up at my door one day
British coppers don't carry sidearms [1] so this is a distinctly less scary encounter for us. We consider the police to be mostly friendly, if a little overworked, under-educated and easily excitable. They're just people, if they make mistakes it's usually no big deal. It isn't like we have the death penalty or anything and with CCTV everywhere and mandatory recording of interviews they don't really have any opportunity to beat you up. If you're in the right then the system almost always does work, and almost always pretty swiftly.
[1] Some of them do keep SMGs or assault rifles in their cars, but they only get called in if you wave something that looks like a gun. I have several things that looks like guns (ie. guns; my three target pistols) but I'm not stupid enough to wave them in the direction of any human, ever, not even when I'm sure they're unloaded. Most rural schools teach gun safety as part of the general/social/citizenship curriculum, or at least offer it as an after-school option.
I believe it is a lesser crime to enter without breaking in.
Correct. Burglary is the act of breaking AND entering AND committing theft (logical AND; all three must happen). Theft is the intention to permanently deprive someone of physical property. Since accessing open WiFi does not involve depriving someone of physical property (neither permanent nor temporary), it is neither theft nor burglary.
Fraud covers many crimes such as obtaining goods or services through deception. Since there was no deception, there was no fraud.
A door does not reply with a message granting me access; the fact that it is open, closed, locked, unlocked, slightly ajar or otherwise is legally irrelevant - the important thing with burglary is that you had to break something to gain entry and then take something without permission, with no intention of giving it back.
An open WiFi router does specifically reply with a message granting me permission. The fact that it uses a particular protocol or particular encryption is legally irrelevent - the important thing is that it replied back with a message specifically granting me permission. Users are authorised.
(Declaration of interest: I run a deliberately open WiFi hotspot - albeit heavily firewalled and bandwidth-throttled. )