>does that mean gov & corp will have to pay royalty fees for all those hidden surveilance systems in use?
No. They don't have to pay a royalty. It's much funnier than that.
If you are recorded on any surveillance system you have a right to a copy of that recording under the Data Protection Act. But every other identifiable face must first be blacked out.
This was recently demonstrated by a UK Investigative Journalist/Comedian. Properly applied this might cause chaos amongst certain CCTV operators. One thing positive effect is it forces anyone (including the government) to say what they are doing with any information they collect from CCTV and they have to justify those uses and they are auditied on these points.
The UK Data protection Act applies to Government as well as to Companies. As out Police are currently discovering. An Audit has revealed that our centralised criminal records are stuffed full of errors - from memory over half the records contain a signficiant, serious error. This was something our senior Police have known about for some time - but didn't want to spend money putting right. They are now being forced to by the Data Protection Registrar. What some in the US need to understand is we now take Data protection very seriously - this is not "show" or "lip service".
>I don't know that I have misjudged how seriously
Europeans regard this issue
I can assure you that you have. It is a matter of some note in the EU. Not because it something done by the EU which enjoys widespread support - but because it is one of the very few things which enjoys widespread support.
>It is equally important to understand that many Americans regard the more free-wheeling, open market approach
Yes. We do understand that. But USA have got to understand that when they are trading in Europe they do it under our laws. And if they're not willing to do it that when then we will tell them to fuck right off. What would you say are the odds of persuading the US to allow EU countries to trade in the US under EU laws rather than EU laws ?
>Isn't the end result the same?
It doesn't seem to be. Because in the EU companies which collect data for one purpose are expreslly forbidden for using it for any other without asking permission first.
Which has several important results :
A) Inidividuals can ensure, without too much effort, that there is not loads of their personal information around the corporate world. Some people like this simply because it means less cold-calling, less junk mail - the little, practical things. Other people like this for reasons of principle. They simply like their privacy. Sometimes it is because they have some very tragic personal family memories about how such information can be misused
B) It prevents companies building up cross-linked databases about us. The details of your Gas supply aren't very interesting of themselves. But lotsof such snippets of information can be (and elsewhere are) linked together to build something which infringes privacy very much more.
>that over-regulation is a major contributor to the phenomenon so charmingly phrased as "Eurosclerosis".
Yes. And that is a valid point. However you need to realise that the UK was once of the first countries in the EU to do something firm about Data protection, this was done during the 1980s - an era when the UK government deregulated business in many many ways - cutting away a lot of the over regulation - something we are still having battles with the rest of the EU about - And yet at the same time as we doing that we were bothering to impose controls on the use of data. There is a message in there somewhere if you look hard enough
>a compromise will be reached
Yes. US companies trading in the EU will have to build a system of managing data from the EU which complies with our Data protection principles. The Details of how it is done will be open to negoiation - but the principles will not.
It seems some US companies are complainging because we are insisting on a system which can and will impose meaningful punishments, on those who break it - Punishments which will hurt enough to ensure that wilful disobedience is not a viable option. They have zero chance of getting a compromise on that - whatever system is agreed on WILL be one which is effective and which US companies will not be able to break, bypass or subvert.
>EU will compromise by finding some way to loosen
its requirements
Frankly. No. Not to any meaningful degree. if you believe that then you have misjudged the situation. The essential principle are sacrosant - and whatever is agreed will be in full accord with those principle. To put it another way - the effect of what is done is not up for neogiation, however HOW US companies achieve it is - but they must realise that whatever is agreed must be something which will actually work.
>With respect to contracts and what-have-you, again, you draw the line one place, we draw it another.
Yes. And when European companies trade in the US they obey US law. When Us companies trade in Europe either they obey EU law - or we WILL tell them to fuck off. Eu citizens are not actually cowed by the prospects of a trade war with the US. Many actively regard a trade war with the US as a good thing. So don't think that threats of a Trade war are going to force the EU to do things the American way. We regard that kind of view as arrogance and a majority of the EU would simply love to give the USA a bloody nose for that.
> potential or perceived abuses
They aren't "potential" or "perceived" abuses - they are real, solid "nasty experience" abuses. A lot of EU privacy regulation was created as a direct response big business - because Big Business did things which the population found completely unacceptable. So they were stopped.
I look at the USA and, as an observer, I am frankly amazed that you let Big Business get away with half the shit that you do.
I'm answering this seperately because the point is important.
> Why does this sound familiar? "From each according to his means, to each according to his needs." Is that where we're going?
Not even close.
Within our countries we have Individuals, Companies and Government. (Hopefully) the Government exists to run the country on behalf of the individuals. Its the people who count. They count the most. They should matter more than any corporation, any politician and Ideology.
Companies exist to make money for their shareholders. They do this by offering some product or service, getting paid for it and making a profit. However they must always operate within the rules provided by government.
The Law exists primarily to benefit individuals. To protect people from crime - of all types. That's crime as in Robbery, theft, mugging and murder - and that's crime as in being scammed by a con man out of their saving.
The Law also exists to provide a framework companies can work in - to make contracts enforceable, to resolve disputes efficiently and many other things.
In the UK and in the USA of course it limits the discretion of companies in certain way. Deliberately so. For example it would be illegal for a UK company to refuse to a service to someone because of their race, colour or sex. Companies are prevented from employing young children even if they and their parents agree to their employment. In the UK any company which extends credit to consumers has to obey strict rules intended to stops the kind of behaviour which some people would call nothing more than clever scams. This is not because the law makers are busy bodies - but because there was a real problem with some companies creating deals with terms which looked favourable - but which contained nasty, expensive "catches" which were so well hidden that even trained lawyers had trouble finding and decoding amongst the small print.
This is not done for any "communist" or "socialist" principle. It is based on simple pragmatism. Most people sign contracts in shops, in hurry, in poor lighting and without the benefit of a handy lawyer to check the small print for bombs. We and our government decided it shouldn't be legal for companies to spring legal traps on people in this way.
None of this has anything to do with redistribution of wealth. All that is happening is society is creating rules for the benefit of society and some of the rules impose limits on what companies can and cannot do.
Within the EU we've also gone a bit further - we now have "Unfair Contracts" contracts regulations. To slightly over simplify things - these have the effect of allowing a court to refuse to enforce contract terms it considers, in all the circumstances, to be unfair. Plenty of guidance is available for Companies as to what is "fair" and unfair - but, to give a simple example, a contract which allowed a company to vary the terms of the contract at will without agreement from the other aprty would also be rejected by the courts. As would a contract which attempt to take away certain legal rights.
No doubt you'll be suggesting that this type of rule was unfair too - that it is "communist" or something ?
BTW - US companies trading within the EU are forced to obey these rules too.
>And of course, since you "really need" that service, they are naturally required to provide it to you, no matter what the terms, good or bad, are for them, hmm
The Law in the UK (and everywhere in the world) already involves itself in contracts between corporations and consumers. Companies do not operate in a legal vacuum - they are constrained in what they can do and what contracts they can write. Unless I am much mistaken the situation in the USA is very similar. Contracts written in the USA must conform with the relevant US law and this means US companies are not free to write whatever contract they might like to. Are you suggesting they should be ? Or are you going to concede the principle that no company acts in a legal vacuum ?
Once you have conceeded the principle, all that is left is deciding where to draw the lines. You draw it in one place, we draw it in slightly different places.
> Mine just asked for a name, address, and Social Security number.
We don't have to give a social security number. There is no government issued number in the UK
which can be reliably used by companies to uniquely and reliably identify an individual.
Of course one effect of this (and of our privacy rules) is to make "Identity Theft" very much easier in the USA than it is in the UK.
So enough information is required to see how much credit can safely be given, or if a deposit will be required. All that is normally asked of here is the information required to tie you to the right credit records. Usually Name and address and a previous address if the current address is recent. Of course the situation for Car insurance or Health Insurance is very different.
>We could compare unemployment rates for the UK and US since 1985 to see if one economy tends to generate more jobs than the other, hence indicating the relative health of job-providers. Among other things.
So you think that preventing companies from ramming piles of useless junk mail down our throats and buiding up unregulated databases of personal information has measurably damaged our corporations and our economy?
>Fortunately for both of our economies, the leaders of both sides have a great deal of incentive to find the middle ground that you so cleverly excluded.
If you believe that then you have sorely misjudged this issue. There is no "middle ground".
It is very simple - If US companies want to trade within the EU then they will be forced to trade according to EU law. Period.
This is not a principle capable of compromise - either the rules are the same for everyone - or they are not.
Nor are we likely to create massive loopholes just because some large American companies can't get their corporate heads around ideas like "respecting customers", "privacy", "Enforceable rules" and "meaningful sanctions". And that will remain true even when those same corporations go whining to the Politicians they have bought - ooops. Sorry. Erm... "sponsored"?
It seems that some US companies have been surpised by just how seriously the EU regards this issue. So it seems it isn't just you who might have misjudged this.
It might be worth remembering that Privacy Policy is actually one of the few areas where the EU commission have managed to gain substantial and widely-based approval. The various espects of Privacy Policy are very popular in Europe - across country lines, political lines and with most ordinary people.
>since you don't like your current choices,
it is then the proper function of government to require some third party to cater to you in the fashion in which you think you deserve?
No. Not quite. What's happens is lots of people like me decide that there seems to be a problem. In this case the root cause of the problem is there is an imbalance of power and choice between the consumer and the corporation. They don't actually care whether or not they loose me as a customer - but I might really need the service they have on offer.
So that's the problem - and there is an obvious solution. One of the functions of government is to make things work properly - which includes evening up the odds when the big guy can use his size and strength to trample on the little guy - even if the concerns of the little guy are widely believed to be reasonable and genuine.
So our democratic government evens up the odds. It tells the big guy - in this case the corporation - that they HAVE to a real choice - they can collect data , but they MUST give real control over what can then be done with it.
It's exactly the same reasoning as requires corporations to use the courts (with the inherent checks and safeguards) when recovering debts - as opposed to allowing corporations to require me to hand over my first-born son as hostage when I'm more than two days late paying the phone bill. Or to give another example it's the same reasoning which requires UK employers to pay their wages in proper currency rather than tokens which can only be exchanged in the company shop. All examples where the power of the big guy can be (and has been) used to screw the little guy - and where laws are passed to even up the odds again.
>seeing that, won't my competitors have to somehow respond in kind? I merely wish to suggest that in the absence of government coercion, these problems occasionally do resolve themselves.
Sometimes they do. Rather too often they don't - at least that seems to be the experience with most "big guy v little guy" situations. So when it really matters - we pass laws and make sure it works properly.
None of the UK rules are stopping a company collecting data and using it for marketing. All they do is give me a real, practical, genuine choice to opt out. They stop the big guys using their power for purposes unrelated to what they are supposed to be supplying.
I happen to think that the little guys matter.
>all I want from you is a name and an address to send a bill to - shouldn't I receive a reward in the form of hordes of privacy concerned customers such as yourself descending on me to receive service?
What would actually happen is that you would find yourself with loads of customers who gave you tremendous problems with extracting payment. You'd probably go bust.
That's because a sensible Gas supplier does actually need more than just Name and Address when deciding what terms to offer to a potential customer. As does an insurance company (who would otherwise get lumbered with all the really bad risks).
So companies have a genuine need to personal information for basic busines purposes. Then the problem start - many people resent having Data (effectively forced out of them) given for one purpose passed on for use for purposes completely unrelated to the original reason.
> this discussion is perhaps symptomatic of a deep philosophical divide between the US and Europe.
Well - as an outside observer who has real, practical experience of both schemes. I reckon this is the key difference :
The EU/UK approach to giving consumers privacy seems to work - we get real, meaningful privacy and corporations get the information they need to run they core business.
Whereas the USA approach err... doesn't work. They don't get the choices on privacy that we get.
However what the USA allows or doesn't allow in the USA is not my business or problem. So I don't feel I want to get further involved in that discussion.
>we can also agree that these disagreements are best settled through diplomacy and negotiation
In this case. No. I don't agree. If a US company wants to trade in the UK or the EU then they should be limited to these two choices :
A) Do it according to the same laws and rules as apply to all other companies trading in the UK/EU
B) Fuck Right Off.
And that means they should not be allowed to move data around at will so they can create loopholes to avoid any rules they don't like.
It is worth repeating agin that nothing in any of the EU provisions says anything about what US companies does with data collected in the US. It is exclusively concerned with Data which was collected in the EU and is therefore subject to EU laws.
>merely the philosophical argument that people ought to be willing to take steps to protect their own information, if it is truly important to them. I'm big on personal responsibility. It's nice that the Irish government is concerned about your well-being.
Where I live I have the choice of :
* One supplier for water and Sewage
* Two suppliers for Telephone Service
* About a dozen electricity companies
* About a dozen gas companies
If the above companies didn't give me any "privacy" options - they just give me the choice of "give us the info to do whatever we like with if you want our service" - then can you please explain what practical steps I can take to protect my privacy ?
> But my point is this - no matter how thoughtful and wise your representatives are (and I'm sure they're all fine and decent people), none of them can possibly know what's good for you better than YOU can.
And in the UK we've looked at this and realised that leaving it to people's "personal responsibility" is simply a load of meaningless bullshit unless people are guaranteed a real, practical workable option to choose - which means something a bit better than "do without".
So this is one example where people acting together through their elected government can achieve a real, useful result.
It gives people real choices about what happens to their data without forcing to choose between whether they doing without gas and electricity or putting up with loads of crappy junk mail and cold-calling.
>I don't know - did they ASK me what I was going to do with it?
Under UK law they don't have to. The onus is deliberately and specifically placed on the organisation collecting the information to say exactly what they want to do with it. The details are obligatory. General terms will not do. That is how the law is written. Anyone trying your approach would find themslves fined into bankruptcy
>I challenge you to show me where, in my hypothetical situation, I attempted to gain information under false pretenses.
You miss the point. The assumption is that we are starting from an unequal position. People who want to live in "modern times" are effectively required to deal with businesses including big businesses. It is a matter of simple record that there have been examples where Big Business have abused their strong position, including examples where they have abused information they have collected. The aim of data protection law is to even things up - even tilt them towards the consumer a bit.
For this to work Data protection law has to be "solid" - it has to resist attempts to find loopholes - because big corporations have shown themselves experts at finding and abusing legal loopholes.
Therefore corporations are forced to be "whiter than white" when it comes to data protection. It isn't that you mustn't gain information under false pretences - it is that you must do everything in such a way as to prevent any possibility that you might be doing otherwise.
So the Law says it isn't enough to use vague terms which include your intended use. You must describe your intentions clearly and in terms which most people will not be confused by. Anything else is illegal.
>You may have decided that you need insurance, but I fail to see how, for example, life insurance is a basic human right which must be extended to all, regardless of what conditions they put on it.
If I want to live and work in the UK there's a fair chance I will require a car to do so. In the UK that means compulsary Car insurance. Apart from the insurance I also will want water, Gas and Electricity - all of which force me to deal with Corporations of some type.
Yes - I have an "option" - but if that option amounts to living rough in a tent somewhere in the Welsh moutains without a job, power, light or telephone, it is only a matter of common sense that most people will regard that as a non-option.
>Now this is just a cop-out - there is no "effectively forced". Either you are ACTUALLY forced to reveal personal things about yourself, or you are not.
Well the options are :
A) opt-out of modern life, school, the Rat-race etc etc
or
B) Put up with the non-choices offered by the corporate world.
You may regard that as a real choice - I don't.
You paint a world where only the extremes are possible. There are other methods - including the one democratically decided in the UK - which is we place legal restaints on what businesses can do with our personal data. That we can have modern life, businesses can collect whatever data they can show they need in order to provide their goods and services and I can relax a little knowing that there are sensible, enforced restraints placed on what can be done with the Data I disclose.
Ding! Everyone wins. Everyone except companies who want to force me to part with my personal information on their terms - so they can sell it or whatever. By I'm pleased when that kind of corporate behavious is punished - they deserve it.
We've now had data protection rules working in the UK for well over 15 years. Our companies and corporations are still functioning, the DPA has not forced them out of business. They just can't do some of the things which Corporate America seems to like doing.
How many junk telephone calls does the Average American get everyweek ?
I get less than one junk phone call a year on average. I get less than one junk fax a month. I get almost no junk mail addressed to me as a person (less than one item a week) When corporations do mail me marketing info it is because I have said I want to receive it (there are some kinds of marketing Material I don't mind).
If my friend needs to find my phone number they can get it - I'm not fully ex-directory - but the junk call people can't get it - and if they did ever phone me they would be comitting a criminal offence - because we have an opt-out system for cold calls which has real sanctions behind it.
And I enjoy all the above and I can still buy what I want from the corporations - These are a few of the benefits I get from the various EU privacy laws. And I want to keep them - no new loopholes.
> I repeat - just because you demand particular conditions attach to a transaction involving you does not mean that someone should be obligated to step up, do business with you, AND satisfy all your conditions.
No. When our democracy decides that certain conditions shall applied to such transactions - then we damn well can force companies to accept those conditions. By the way - these aren't my "personal" set of conditions - these are the rules defined by my country and its institutions.
> but rather than take responsibility for it yourself, you've chosen to push it off on someone else by coercing them.
No. I, along with a load of other people wanted a "real" choice. I want to know I can get insurance, buy a house, heat it, light it, buy a car, get a job, rent a phone line, etc WITHOUT having to reveal personal information on whatever terms some company cares to offer.
Practical reality seems to suggest that if we leave it to the corporate world I will not have that choice - my choice will be limited to either "have a phone" or "protect my data" - there will be no "both" option - even if many people or most people would prefer the "both" option.
>So, your "right" has now become someone else's >obligation.
That's right. We have democratically decided that the "both" option is important enough for it to be enforced by law. Do you have some problem with that ?
>But they _did_ have a say in what happens to it -
Yes. The important thing here would be whether they had an INFORMED say in what happens to it. Did you tell them what you were going to do with it ?
The basic principle behind EU law is "informed consent". You can collect data for (eg) marketing purposes but the people you collect it off must be aware that you are collecting it for that purpose and you must tell them everything you intend to do with that data. If you later decide you want to use the Data for another purpose then you cannot use the data you have collected unless you go back and ask permission.
>particularly as I carefully avoided discussing WHY I might want such information
Then that would make what you did unlawful - In the UK deliberately concealing the reason for collecting data is a criminal offence punishable by huge fines and/or time in Jail.
The thinking behind UK/EU law is that it is inevitable that Personal Data will have to be collected by companies. There is no realistic possibility of consumers having a real choice to withold it. So it attempts to strike a balance - to allow consumers to release vital information in the knowledge that :
1) They know and control who has the information
2) They know and can control what it is going to be used for
3) They can check information held on them.
4) They can have errors corrected
5) That they cannot be required to give more data than can be reasonably justified for the intended purpose.
6) That personal information will be held securely.
>shouldn't they have taken that into account when choosing to respond to my questions?
We have decided that attempting to trick people into revealing personal data is dishonest. The UK and the EU have decided that the law should prevent companies working in that devious way, prevent them from trying to trick people or catch them out. - And prevent them for using (eg) their size or market share from coercing people into releasing information with no safeguards.
This is nothing new in the UK - the laws were first created over ten years ago and passed through our legislatures with great ease and with the backing of almost all politicians of nearly every party.
>you are free to take your business elsewhere
Not if there is no "elsewhere" which doesn't also try the scam. A choice is only a real choice if people have a real alternative.
In reality people need things like insurance, so they have no real choice to withold information - the price would be too high for almost everyone.
If people are effectively forced to reveal personal information to companies it seems reasonable that companies are legally oblidged to treat people's information with respect.
A year or two ago I (and several other people) reported a company which had been directly flouting the UK data protection laws to the Data Protection registrar. They were abusing my Fax number. Recently I had the pleasure of being informed that the company I complained about had been Liquidated (bankrupted), closed down and the directors of the company were fined tens of thousands of pounds each.
The UK Data protection regime works. The rules are tough and enforced firmly. So companies working in the UK take them very, very seriously.
The UK/EU stance is about one thing only - preventing companies operating in the EU from exporting the data they collect in the EU to other countries in an attempt to force a loophole into our Data protection rules.
If you don't actually operate in the EU then the rules do not affect you.
If you only collect data outside the EU then the rules do not affect you.
The rules only affect data collected in the EU about EU citizens.
But if you collect Data under EU rules then the EU is making those rules watertight to prevent them being abused.
>blast the living crap out of things in her back yard with an AK-47,
I'm fairly sure it isn't legal to own an AK47 in the UK. Even if it were it wouldn't be legal for her to fire it in her backyard:-)
However she almost certainly does "blast the living crap" out of things in her backyard with something which looks a lot like an AK47. I've seen and played with some of her "toys".
Then again the town where she lives is a distinctly dodgy place - even if she lives in one of the nicer parts of it.
Yes she is. She's also a very interesting person with a highly developed, ironic, dry sense of humour. Which probably means her humour may not be appreciated by many people following this thread.
But heck - that doesn't matter. There's loads of books out there so if someone doesn't like one there's always another.
Anyway - I've exchanged emails with Mary about the existence of this thread and, if she can drag herself away from her kunes (a rare breed of pig she breeds) and find a computer with a working web-browser she might wander in here and explain some things for herself. Only maybe though because her piglets are very cute.
>the more your everyday person is going to start believing that their cosy little desktop system at home is not all it could be.
That's actually the key point. I speak as a European - and, strictly speaking I have no right to lecture anyone in the USA on their Law or tactics.
However seen from the outside by someone who has tried hard to see the big picture:
Microsoft software is developed in a way which encourages appearance over solid content. The problems I see with Microsoft software can be related to the way Microsoft as a company operates . Things like the way the company generates income, the way development is organised and what/who/how the development process is driven.
Microsoft's business practices follow on as a direct consequence of those same pressures and also as a consequence of the software they produce.
The problem is that most consumers(=voters) do not see much or any of this. They only see flashy looking software and an American company apparently making healthy profits. An American company equipped with a PR machine able and willing to paint any professional who dares criticise Microsoft's products as noting more than a pissed-off competitor.
Ultimately winning a battle at law (USA or EU) is not going to be enough. You need to persuade people/voters that there are problems with the Industry generally and especially Microsoft and these same, ordinary people are suffering as a consequence.
Part of the solution is going to involve explaining about good and bad software practices, How quality code can be built, the importance of well controlled and maintained open standards etc.
Once you have got the "movers and thinkers" in society to understand such issues - then it will become a lot easier to convince of them things like why it is wrong for a company to leverage its market to try and subvert an open standard API into a proprietry API.
>A detail you omit is that capturing the key schedules - the wheel order and the plug board settings for each day - was vital to the re-breaking of the Naval Enigma.
I'm not sure "captured" is the right word. The settings were (eventually) broken. Obtaining the wheel settings was the very essence of breaking the crypto.
>One branch of the German military (I forget which at the moment- Abwehr?) never had their traffic read, largely because they used the machine correctly.
I'm not sure what you are referring to here. The Abwehr communications were being broken routinely once they got the bombes going. "Fish" (the other German system) was also eventually read routinely - although it took longer than Enigma (around 5 or 6 days whereas Enigma was eventually being broken so quickly and routinely that the British were often reading the plaintext before the intended recipient). "Fish" was the system used by the highest levels of German command.
However it is true that early on in the war the "breaking" was done by hand and the methods used largely relied on the German Operators making mistakes. However once they got the Bombe working they could crack enigma even in the absence of such errors.
Naval Enigma was eventually cracked - largely because because of poor use of the machine. The procedures used were flawed and the execution of them was also flawed. There were also limitations in the way that the 4th wheel was added to the Navy machine. This drastically reduced the extra security.
> If we hadn't managed to capture the Enigma devices, we would have had a harder time decrypting messages as they changed keys.
I think there are a couple of clarifications needed there. The first Enigma wasn't "captured" by anyone - it was smuggled to London by concerned Poles.
Later in the war Germany changed the design of the Enigma machines used on their submarines - and one of these was captured by the Royal Navy when they disabled the sub.
Both the above were important and certainly helped make the decryption possible - but they were not the really "clever" bit. Merely having the machines didn't mean you could read the messages.
The "Clever" bit was the way the mathematicians at Bletchly Park discovered and exploited weaknesses in the cryptography and (more importantly?) noticed and exploited errors in the way the Germans were using Enigma.
Then later they developed machines to make the breaking almost routine.
Sorry to be pedantic - but I think these details are important. Not least because if we're all going to be using crypto then we need to take careful note of the German's errors. Simple errors in how you apply cryptography can dramatically reduce your security.
I was using their description. I agree that it's a rather dubious one. However their processor is hard to categorise - I don't think I've ever encountered anything quite like it before.
>It has a bunch of indirect addressing modes not found on most (or any) RISCs.
Of course the addressing modes are very valuable for the kind of work this chip is intended for. Maybe this is why it is hard to categorise - the design (including the instrcution set) is optimsed towards doing I/O and networking manipulation.
>It runs pretty quick (50Mhz? 100Mhz?),
100 mips IIRC
>as you say it has lots of good I/O features and >built-in networking.
Excellent for the kind of thing I need to do.
>But it ain't a RISC
Perhaps not - but it isn't really a classical CISC either. Perhaps someone needs to invent a new acronym ?
The Data sheet seems to push the "RISC" angle as an explanation for the low power consumption - and it certainly achieves pretty good results there.
The "bottom line" for me is that, on paper, it allows me to build a solution with a hardware cost around half that I can achieve any other way.
I think perhaps my application is unusual - I don't want any displays or user interface (the customer explicitly wants a "grey box screwed to the wall that they can just forget about") - so many single board computers on the market would just sit there with half the chips never doing anything - but I can't be the only person who needs to do this kind of thing ?
I design Telecomms stuff - much of it embedded. We've just been asked to design a box which takes serial data from PBXs, collates it, caches it and makes it them available over a network. JFFS is one very key part of that - and this announcement could not have come at a better time for me.
Axis have an excellent business model on all of this. They've designed their own custom RISC processor with built-in network support and quite a lot of very neat I/O ( A dream come true for telecomms embedded people). They're offering Linux as the OS and it seems they've taken a long, hard look at Linux and what it might lack for people using their chip. They spotted a gap - so they created the JFFS and released back to the developer community which gave them Linux in the first place.
It seems to me to be a perfect example of how Open source should work and how it can work for everyone's benefit - and how open source can be part of a very rational business stratgey.
So I hope to be an Axis customer very soon.
People who want to know more about the RISC chip should look at :
Had they contested the case and lost they would almost certainly have had to pay all the costs of both sides.
Had they contested the case and won then Godfrey would have had to pay all the costs. However it is likely that he didn't have that much money. Demon could have bankrupted him - but in the end they would not have got their money.
We will never know for sure - but it is quite likely that Demon made a tactical decision to make a small offer to settle the case (the offer made was modest compared with many UK libel settlements) - and Godfrey felt he had to accept the offer because in the event of him continuing and eventually receiving an award less than the offer - he would have been liable for all his costs and Demon's costs from the point of the offer onwards. He would have got nothing and would probably have been bankrupted.
Demon would have had a lot to gain by making such a tactical offer - if the thing had gone to full trial Demon would have almost certainly have lost more money than they have paid out in a settlement - regardless of whether they finally won or lost in court.
Essentially the fairly complex rules regarding who pays what costs and why effectively make much such litigation in the UK an advanced kind of high-stakes poker.
This is one good reasons why cases settled in this way do not set any kind of precedent.
Don't forget that the DPA was amended last year and signficiantly tightened. Even before then they had been very succesful in reforming the worst industry practices.
Going back to the Godfrey case I just they could get whoever drafted the DPA to come and rewrite English Libel law - especially as it applies to ISPs. It doesn't to anyone much good when what the law says and practical reality are so much at variance.
If you're talking about "privacy" - I would be careful.
In the UK we have a "Data Protection Act" and a "Data Protection Registrar" who do a heck of a lot to protect people's individual privacy. The system may not be perfect - but it has real teeth and it works. Doubleclick would simply not be allowed to do in the UK what they recently tried to do in the US.
In the USA I believe you have what is known as "Self regulation" when it comes to privacy. Viewed from here it would appear that it doesn't have any teeth and it doesn't work. Companies can do whatever they like to individuals data - until they do something so outrageous it has political consequences.
---
Oh! And anyone who hasn't tried decent "warm" beer should give it a go. The reason we don't drink our (decent) Beer cold is because it actually tastes of something nice, unlike Beer which has to be served ice-cold to hide the god-awful taste.:-)
But be warned. Many English pubs now serve Beer which isn't fit to drink warm OR cold. So if you want to try some decent stuff ask a local first!
> not only panders to net.kookery, but fails to recognize the decentralized nature of Usenet.
That may or may not be true.
The decentralized nature if Usenet causes obvious problems with certain legal jurisdictions. But the law always seems to be determined to "have a go" - even when it is pointless. It is not impossible to imagine how someone might try to take advantage of this.
>To order an ISP to remove a Usenet post is silly; yes, they can issue a cancel,
Demon refused to even try. When the dubious posts were reported they could have chosen to look remove them from their own servers and possibly issue cancels. Had they done so they would then have been able to make a strong case that they had done everything possible - and that would probably have got them off the hook, even if there attempts had only had very limited success.
There are a couple of important facts which I think people should be aware of - along with some important points about UK law and practice.
1) The case was settled before it went to court.
2) Up until that point Demon had a defence - the details of which made interesting reading and are relevant. Unfortunately the Demon press release on this seems to have been withdrawn. Hmmm. Anyway - working from memory, the defence was based on drawing attention to some of the other messages Godfrey has posted on Usenet, some of the other legal cases he had been involved with. I think they were suggesting that when looked at in context then people might be able to draw some very different conclusions about what was really going on.
3) Under English law there is a general prinicple that the loosing side of a legal action plays the costs of everyone involved. Normally these costs are "taxed". This is nothing to do with raising money for the government. "Taxing" is a way of the court ruling on what charges are fair. However Libel cases are different - the costs are not "taxed" and the lawyers on both sides can charge pretty much what they want and the losing side is stuck with paying the (huge) bill.
4) Legal costs in England are very high generally - and the most expensive area is libel law.
5) It is common practice for one side to make an offer prior to a hearing starting. If that offer is accepted then the party that made it pays whatever they offered - usually plus all the legal bills so far.
6) If the offer is refused and the court finally awards an amount which is equal too, or less than the amount offered, then the party which refused the offer is normally made to pay the costs from that point onwards.
7) In this case the settlement offered was fifteen thousand pounds + costs. This could be regarded as quite a low figure for libels in the UK. Costs are about two hundred thousand pounds.
8) Had the case gone to trial total costs could easily have reached a million pounds and beyond.
OK. Based on the above - here is one scenario which fits the known facts quite well :
Demon thought they had a good defence, but also knew it was a "high-risk" defence. One likely outcome of fielding that defence could have been that the court would still have found against Demon - but only made a very modest award of damages. Had that happened Demon would still have been lumbered with paying huge costs.
So Demon took a pragmatic view that they would make a modest offer to protect themselves from such an outcome.
When Godfrey saw the offer he was then faced with a decision. If he refused the offer there was a chance that the amount he finally won in court would have been less than Demon's offer - and he would been left to page the huge litigation costs. Given the risks involved he might have decided that his best interests lay in accepting the offer.
It was basically a gamble for both sides.
In making the offer Demon were paying out a quarter of a million pounds to reduce the odds of them being stung for well over a million.
In accepting the offer Godfrey was taking only fifteen thousand pounds and avoiding having an having to pay very substantial legal costs even if he only won modest damages.
1) The bloke with the Laptop was buying a ticket. This can frequently be a long, tedious complex process - especially at Paddington Station. One of Londons stations which serves some of the rather less -well organised rail companies. And you wouldn't believe how complicated buying a ticket can be in this country at the moment.
2) He put the Laptop down, between his legs.
3) Someone snatched it from behind and ran off. The guy realised at once and gave chase, helped by a couple of Transport Police. But the thief got away.
These pieces of software are sold to parents on the basis of several claims.
The main claim being that they allow parents to block sites.
The issues are:
1) Do they actually do what they claim - do they succesfully block the sites the parents want blocked ?
2) Do they do anything else - possibly as a side-effect of (1) ? (and possibly for other reasons).
3) Are parents told the honest truth about what the product does and how well it performs ?
It is IMPORTANT for responsible parents to know the limitations of the software they have chosen.
IMV Every sensible parent should be concerned as to what their children are doing on the internet. That concern will vary according to the age of the child.
What concerns many people is that all the various suppliers go out of their way to make verifying the performance of their products dificult - both through technological and legal means.
However if the claims of the people attacking the censorware products are correct then all the products are offering is a false sense of security. This should concern anyone.
Likewise it should concern any parent that the product they have bought to protect their child is allowing an external third party to manipulate the information presented to their children, possibly with dubious political or other motives - this manipulation being concealed from the parent.
When these same products are used in places like libraries ( and some people are trying to achieve exactly that) then the potential dangers should be apparent to everyone.
I believe that the companies marketing censorware claim they have to protect their blocked sites list etc because that is where most of their "creative" work is done. However this means that it is impossible for most people to check performance. When experts have analysed the software in depth, then in every case so far they have found that the performace is pretty poor and disturbing in many ways.
The awful truth may be that there is no simple, lazy method for parents to use software to control what their kids are doing on the internet.
If that is true (and I believe it is likely) then that means that responsible parents are going to have to look to other methods. Options like secure logging of where their kids have been surfing, supervision of children. Amongst other things this puts power back where it belongs - in the hands of parents so they can make their own decisions, rather than in the hands of some unknown company or pressure group who may well be simply lying because they believe that "they know better" and "the ends justify the means".
Likewise I can see there may be potential problems with internet access in libraries. However all such potential problems have solutions which are a lot more subtle, refined (and genuinely effective) than crude software which dare not even reveal its limitations to view.
I can see why busy parents look for shortcuts. However products which don't do what they claim and do do things which are kept concealed are not a solution. I'd rather parents faced up to the problem.
Yes - I think that sometimes collecting together information which is "freely" available can lead to an invasion of privacy. This is because it can become possible to link together facts which build up a picture which is very much bigger than the sum of its parts.
One of the things which I felt the argument didn't cover as well as it could is the very different attitude to collections of personal data in the EU as compared with the US. This is certainly relevant to the issue of copyright in databases. One may limit the other.
Just in case people aren't aware - there are some very specific and detailed requirements for holding personal information the UK (and the rest of Europe).
Personal information is basically anything about identifiable individuals.
The Law is too complex to fully describe here - but I will give the main points
Databases must be licenced (although the licences are relatively cheap)
Data can only be collected from people if the people are told that Data is being collected and why.
Only the data relevant to the purpose can be stored in the Database ( an example of this was that everyone in the country was required to fill in a form wrt to new local taxes. these forms apparently required people to give their phone number. This was ruled to be wrong - because people didn't have a choice and the local government do not need people's phone numbers to collect tax)
People have a right to see what records are held on them and they have the right (enforced in various ways) to have errors abuot them corrected.
The Data must be held securely
And finally - and importantly - companies are not allowed to transfer data to other countries unless the safeguards above are effectively enforced.
The Copyright issue is tightly bound to at least some of those principles. If people can copy personal information and use it for their won purposes without reference it directly breaks some of the principles explained above.
There is an officer of Government in the UK called "The Data Protection Registrar" (DPR for short). The regsitrar and his staff have real teeth, are not afraid to use them and, on the whole, they are very popular with people - most people in the UK think the DPR does an important job.
I might be wrong, but I believe the situation in the USA is very different with "self regulation" being the norm for Data protection. Until the situation in the two regimes can be reconciled there are going to be fundamental problems with copyright on databases between the two systems.
More information abut the DPR in the UK can be found at http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/
And the "principles" are described at http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/principl.htm
Slow down a bit there!. The exact terms have deliberately not been disclosed. It may be worth looking at the analysis done by The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/000111-000005.html
Microsoft have settled this now because of the consequences that losing in court would have on other current cases and possible future cases. By all accounts Microsoft can afford any damages likely to be awarded and sustained.
The real "cost" to Microsoft is the PR damage. Now it looks like they've found a way to square the circle and make it look like they've settted for peanuts.
What's less certain is why Caldera have chosen to settle now. However I can see reasons why they should.
A) The timing is certainly fortunate for Caldera,
B) There's little Caldera was likely to get out of the case beyond money and maybe some good PR. Any other remedies became impractical long ago.
C) Their case was good - but it wasn't perfect and any case involving a jury involves a significant uncertainty.
If we follow the hunch in "The Register" and The settlement was rather higher than we were all supposed to think - then Caldera are still going to get a large chunk of money - they can still "spin" it and get most of the PR benefits too. So it looks like a choice which is at least rational and defensible.
Other issues are more important for Caldera and all of us. We need Linux to suceed and grow on merit. Amongst many other things this means we need a good, genuine choice of distributions issued and supported by a range of healthy companies. If this result helps towards that then it is a good thing.
I agree with your sentiments but not your conclusions. Radio Spectrum is a scarce resource - at least it is at the end of the frequentcy range suitable for Broadcasting to consumers. This may not be a huge problem in countries like the the USA (although I suspect I'm wrong in some of your Urban Areas).
But here in the UK we're densely packed - and if we want to have usable broadcasting this means that use of frequencies simply must be coordinated somehow - or the result would be a truly appaling service for everyone.
Our broadcasting system is full of compromises as it is. A significant chunk cannot receieve the fifth of our national TV channels ( larhely on the South coast because signal here would interferece with the French. On the other hand Radio 4 ( The BBC's national speech program) uses up about six channels on vhf AND is also broadcast on Long Wave 198M ) because other wise a significant number of people can't get it on VHF.
(And every summer when England is being thrashed in some Cricket test match somewhere they grab R4 LW to broadcast a commentary for the duration of the match (3 or 4 days). And then all the people who wanted to hear Radio 4 not the test match moan on and one about it, write letters to the papers etc etc for weeks and weeks afterwards
Anyway - when Pirates broadcast it usually means they're stopping someone, somewhere from receiving a legitimate station.
After watching some some discussions elsewhere a couple of points become clear :
A) According to which country you are in the motive of the person doing the reverse-engineering may be very important. To me this seems utterly crazy - but lets just assume we have to live with it for a moment
B) The other key point (again only in some countries) is whether the person doing the work "agreed" to the licence terms on the Xing program as they did the work.
OK. So the above is daft. How can anyone actually prove in court the motives of the guy doing the hack? How can anyone prove they didn't read the licence agreement ( or that they did )?
------------
So why not :
1) Find ourselves a competent hacker(s) who, whilst they may be aware of the DeCSS, have never seen the source code or read the notes.
2) Get them to swear they've never seen it and that's they are doing it to enable an open-source DVD player to be written.
3) Lock them in a room with a computer and all the software/hardware tools they will need.
4) Take a disc image of the computer before they start work. Get this certified to the standards defined by a competent lawyer
5) Tell them what they've got to do. Give them as many clues as could be defended in court.
5) Tell them on no account are they to read or agree to the Xing software licence agreement.
6) Get some lawyers and witnesses to monitor the whole process. Maybe record the contents of the screen throughout.
7) Add loads of coke, pizza, chocolate etc.
8) Wait pateintly and eventually XING! we have a copy of the relevant trade secret that the DCD CCA are going to have one heck of a load of trouble with in court!
Apart from that just maybe this could make a good case watertight - it could also (handled well) be excellent publicity which would very effectively counter the hatchet PR-job done by the DVD CCA.
Yes. It would be a stunt! - But it would be a stunt which would make the whole legal thing look as foolish and warped as it obviously is. And that must be an excellent thing!
Slashdot Mirror
>does that mean gov & corp will have to pay royalty fees for all those hidden surveilance systems in use?
No. They don't have to pay a royalty. It's much funnier than that.
If you are recorded on any surveillance system you have a right to a copy of that recording under the Data Protection Act. But every other identifiable face must first be blacked out.
This was recently demonstrated by a UK Investigative Journalist/Comedian. Properly applied this might cause chaos amongst certain CCTV operators. One thing positive effect is it forces anyone (including the government) to say what they are doing with any information they collect from CCTV and they have to justify those uses and they are auditied on these points.
The UK Data protection Act applies to Government as well as to Companies. As out Police are currently discovering. An Audit has revealed that our centralised criminal records are stuffed full of errors - from memory over half the records contain a signficiant, serious error. This was something our senior Police have known about for some time - but didn't want to spend money putting right. They are now being forced to by the Data Protection Registrar. What some in the US need to understand is we now take Data protection very seriously - this is not "show" or "lip service".
>I don't know that I have misjudged how seriously
Europeans regard this issue
I can assure you that you have. It is a matter of some note in the EU. Not because it something done by the EU which enjoys widespread support - but because it is one of the very few things which enjoys widespread support.
>It is equally important to understand that many Americans regard the more free-wheeling, open market approach
Yes. We do understand that. But USA have got to understand that when they are trading in Europe they do it under our laws. And if they're not willing to do it that when then we will tell them to fuck right off. What would you say are the odds of persuading the US to allow EU countries to trade in the US under EU laws rather than EU laws ?
>Isn't the end result the same?
It doesn't seem to be. Because in the EU companies which collect data for one purpose are expreslly forbidden for using it for any other without asking permission first.
Which has several important results :
A) Inidividuals can ensure, without too much effort, that there is not loads of their personal information around the corporate world. Some people like this simply because it means less cold-calling, less junk mail - the little, practical things. Other people like this for reasons of principle. They simply like their privacy. Sometimes it is because they have some very tragic personal family memories about how such information can be misused
B) It prevents companies building up cross-linked databases about us. The details of your Gas supply aren't very interesting of themselves. But lotsof such snippets of information can be (and elsewhere are) linked together to build something which infringes privacy very much more.
>that over-regulation is a major contributor to the phenomenon so charmingly phrased as "Eurosclerosis".
Yes. And that is a valid point. However you need to realise that the UK was once of the first countries in the EU to do something firm about Data protection, this was done during the 1980s - an era when the UK government deregulated business in many many ways - cutting away a lot of the over regulation - something we are still having battles with the rest of the EU about - And yet at the same time as we doing that we were bothering to impose controls on the use of data. There is a message in there somewhere if you look hard enough
>a compromise will be reached
Yes. US companies trading in the EU will have to build a system of managing data from the EU which complies with our Data protection principles. The Details of how it is done will be open to negoiation - but the principles will not.
It seems some US companies are complainging because we are insisting on a system which can and will impose meaningful punishments, on those who break it - Punishments which will hurt enough to ensure that wilful disobedience is not a viable option. They have zero chance of getting a compromise on that - whatever system is agreed on WILL be one which is effective and which US companies will not be able to break, bypass or subvert.
>EU will compromise by finding some way to loosen
its requirements
Frankly. No. Not to any meaningful degree. if you believe that then you have misjudged the situation. The essential principle are sacrosant - and whatever is agreed will be in full accord with those principle. To put it another way - the effect of what is done is not up for neogiation, however HOW US companies achieve it is - but they must realise that whatever is agreed must be something which will actually work.
>With respect to contracts and what-have-you, again, you draw the line one place, we draw it another.
Yes. And when European companies trade in the US they obey US law. When Us companies trade in Europe either they obey EU law - or we WILL tell them to fuck off. Eu citizens are not actually cowed by the prospects of a trade war with the US. Many actively regard a trade war with the US as a good thing. So don't think that threats of a Trade war are going to force the EU to do things the American way. We regard that kind of view as arrogance and a majority of the EU would simply love to give the USA a bloody nose for that.
> potential or perceived abuses
They aren't "potential" or "perceived" abuses - they are real, solid "nasty experience" abuses. A lot of EU privacy regulation was created as a direct response big business - because Big Business did things which the population found completely unacceptable. So they were stopped.
I look at the USA and, as an observer, I am frankly amazed that you let Big Business get away with half the shit that you do.
I'm answering this seperately because the point is important.
> Why does this sound familiar? "From each according to his means, to each according to his needs." Is that where we're going?
Not even close.
Within our countries we have Individuals, Companies and Government. (Hopefully) the Government exists to run the country on behalf of the individuals. Its the people who count. They count the most. They should matter more than any corporation, any politician and Ideology.
Companies exist to make money for their shareholders. They do this by offering some product or service, getting paid for it and making a profit. However they must always operate within the rules provided by government.
The Law exists primarily to benefit individuals. To protect people from crime - of all types. That's crime as in Robbery, theft, mugging and murder - and that's crime as in being scammed by a con man out of their saving.
The Law also exists to provide a framework companies can work in - to make contracts enforceable, to resolve disputes efficiently and many other things.
In the UK and in the USA of course it limits the discretion of companies in certain way. Deliberately so. For example it would be illegal for a UK company to refuse to a service to someone because of their race, colour or sex. Companies are prevented from employing young children even if they and their parents agree to their employment. In the UK any company which extends credit to consumers has to obey strict rules intended to stops the kind of behaviour which some people would call nothing more than clever scams. This is not because the law makers are busy bodies - but because there was a real problem with some companies creating deals with terms which looked favourable - but which contained nasty, expensive "catches" which were so well hidden that even trained lawyers had trouble finding and decoding amongst the small print.
This is not done for any "communist" or "socialist" principle. It is based on simple pragmatism. Most people sign contracts in shops, in hurry, in poor lighting and without the benefit of a handy lawyer to check the small print for bombs. We and our government decided it shouldn't be legal for companies to spring legal traps on people in this way.
None of this has anything to do with redistribution of wealth. All that is happening is society is creating rules for the benefit of society and some of the rules impose limits on what companies can and cannot do.
Within the EU we've also gone a bit further - we now have "Unfair Contracts" contracts regulations. To slightly over simplify things - these have the effect of allowing a court to refuse to enforce contract terms it considers, in all the circumstances, to be unfair. Plenty of guidance is available for Companies as to what is "fair" and unfair - but, to give a simple example, a contract which allowed a company to vary the terms of the contract at will without agreement from the other aprty would also be rejected by the courts. As would a contract which attempt to take away certain legal rights.
No doubt you'll be suggesting that this type of rule was unfair too - that it is "communist" or something ?
BTW - US companies trading within the EU are forced to obey these rules too.
>And of course, since you "really need" that service, they are naturally required to provide it to you, no matter what the terms, good or bad, are for them, hmm
The Law in the UK (and everywhere in the world) already involves itself in contracts between corporations and consumers. Companies do not operate in a legal vacuum - they are constrained in what they can do and what contracts they can write. Unless I am much mistaken the situation in the USA is very similar. Contracts written in the USA must conform with the relevant US law and this means US companies are not free to write whatever contract they might like to. Are you suggesting they should be ? Or are you going to concede the principle that no company acts in a legal vacuum ?
Once you have conceeded the principle, all that is left is deciding where to draw the lines. You draw it in one place, we draw it in slightly different places.
> Mine just asked for a name, address, and Social Security number.
We don't have to give a social security number. There is no government issued number in the UK
which can be reliably used by companies to uniquely and reliably identify an individual.
Of course one effect of this (and of our privacy rules) is to make "Identity Theft" very much easier in the USA than it is in the UK.
So enough information is required to see how much credit can safely be given, or if a deposit will be required. All that is normally asked of here is the information required to tie you to the right credit records. Usually Name and address and a previous address if the current address is recent. Of course the situation for Car insurance or Health Insurance is very different.
>We could compare unemployment rates for the UK and US since 1985 to see if one economy tends to generate more jobs than the other, hence indicating the relative health of job-providers. Among other things.
So you think that preventing companies from ramming piles of useless junk mail down our throats and buiding up unregulated databases of personal information has measurably damaged our corporations and our economy?
>Fortunately for both of our economies, the leaders of both sides have a great deal of incentive to find the middle ground that you so cleverly excluded.
If you believe that then you have sorely misjudged this issue. There is no "middle ground".
It is very simple - If US companies want to trade within the EU then they will be forced to trade according to EU law. Period.
This is not a principle capable of compromise - either the rules are the same for everyone - or they are not.
Nor are we likely to create massive loopholes just because some large American companies can't get their corporate heads around ideas like "respecting customers", "privacy", "Enforceable rules" and "meaningful sanctions". And that will remain true even when those same corporations go whining to the Politicians they have bought - ooops. Sorry. Erm... "sponsored"?
It seems that some US companies have been surpised by just how seriously the EU regards this issue. So it seems it isn't just you who might have misjudged this.
It might be worth remembering that Privacy Policy is actually one of the few areas where the EU commission have managed to gain substantial and widely-based approval. The various espects of Privacy Policy are very popular in Europe - across country lines, political lines and with most ordinary people.
>since you don't like your current choices,
it is then the proper function of government to require some third party to cater to you in the fashion in which you think you deserve?
No. Not quite. What's happens is lots of people like me decide that there seems to be a problem. In this case the root cause of the problem is there is an imbalance of power and choice between the consumer and the corporation. They don't actually care whether or not they loose me as a customer - but I might really need the service they have on offer.
So that's the problem - and there is an obvious solution. One of the functions of government is to make things work properly - which includes evening up the odds when the big guy can use his size and strength to trample on the little guy - even if the concerns of the little guy are widely believed to be reasonable and genuine.
So our democratic government evens up the odds. It tells the big guy - in this case the corporation - that they HAVE to a real choice - they can collect data , but they MUST give real control over what can then be done with it.
It's exactly the same reasoning as requires corporations to use the courts (with the inherent checks and safeguards) when recovering debts - as opposed to allowing corporations to require me to hand over my first-born son as hostage when I'm more than two days late paying the phone bill. Or to give another example it's the same reasoning which requires UK employers to pay their wages in proper currency rather than tokens which can only be exchanged in the company shop. All examples where the power of the big guy can be (and has been) used to screw the little guy - and where laws are passed to even up the odds again.
>seeing that, won't my competitors have to somehow respond in kind? I merely wish to suggest that in the absence of government coercion, these problems occasionally do resolve themselves.
Sometimes they do. Rather too often they don't - at least that seems to be the experience with most "big guy v little guy" situations. So when it really matters - we pass laws and make sure it works properly.
None of the UK rules are stopping a company collecting data and using it for marketing. All they do is give me a real, practical, genuine choice to opt out. They stop the big guys using their power for purposes unrelated to what they are supposed to be supplying.
I happen to think that the little guys matter.
>all I want from you is a name and an address to send a bill to - shouldn't I receive a reward in the form of hordes of privacy concerned customers such as yourself descending on me to receive service?
What would actually happen is that you would find yourself with loads of customers who gave you tremendous problems with extracting payment. You'd probably go bust.
That's because a sensible Gas supplier does actually need more than just Name and Address when deciding what terms to offer to a potential customer. As does an insurance company (who would otherwise get lumbered with all the really bad risks).
So companies have a genuine need to personal information for basic busines purposes. Then the problem start - many people resent having Data (effectively forced out of them) given for one purpose passed on for use for purposes completely unrelated to the original reason.
> this discussion is perhaps symptomatic of a deep philosophical divide between the US and Europe.
Well - as an outside observer who has real, practical experience of both schemes. I reckon this is the key difference :
The EU/UK approach to giving consumers privacy seems to work - we get real, meaningful privacy and corporations get the information they need to run they core business.
Whereas the USA approach err... doesn't work. They don't get the choices on privacy that we get.
However what the USA allows or doesn't allow in the USA is not my business or problem. So I don't feel I want to get further involved in that discussion.
>we can also agree that these disagreements are best settled through diplomacy and negotiation
In this case. No. I don't agree. If a US company wants to trade in the UK or the EU then they should be limited to these two choices :
A) Do it according to the same laws and rules as apply to all other companies trading in the UK/EU
B) Fuck Right Off.
And that means they should not be allowed to move data around at will so they can create loopholes to avoid any rules they don't like.
It is worth repeating agin that nothing in any of the EU provisions says anything about what US companies does with data collected in the US. It is exclusively concerned with Data which was collected in the EU and is therefore subject to EU laws.
>merely the philosophical argument that people ought to be willing to take steps to protect their own information, if it is truly important to them. I'm big on personal responsibility. It's nice that the Irish government is concerned about your well-being.
Where I live I have the choice of :
* One supplier for water and Sewage
* Two suppliers for Telephone Service
* About a dozen electricity companies
* About a dozen gas companies
If the above companies didn't give me any "privacy" options - they just give me the choice of "give us the info to do whatever we like with if you want our service" - then can you please explain what practical steps I can take to protect my privacy ?
> But my point is this - no matter how thoughtful and wise your representatives are (and I'm sure they're all fine and decent people), none of them can possibly know what's good for you better than YOU can.
And in the UK we've looked at this and realised that leaving it to people's "personal responsibility" is simply a load of meaningless bullshit unless people are guaranteed a real, practical workable option to choose - which means something a bit better than "do without".
So this is one example where people acting together through their elected government can achieve a real, useful result.
It gives people real choices about what happens to their data without forcing to choose between whether they doing without gas and electricity or putting up with loads of crappy junk mail and cold-calling.
>I don't know - did they ASK me what I was going to do with it?
Under UK law they don't have to. The onus is deliberately and specifically placed on the organisation collecting the information to say exactly what they want to do with it. The details are obligatory. General terms will not do. That is how the law is written. Anyone trying your approach would find themslves fined into bankruptcy
>I challenge you to show me where, in my hypothetical situation, I attempted to gain information under false pretenses.
You miss the point. The assumption is that we are starting from an unequal position. People who want to live in "modern times" are effectively required to deal with businesses including big businesses. It is a matter of simple record that there have been examples where Big Business have abused their strong position, including examples where they have abused information they have collected. The aim of data protection law is to even things up - even tilt them towards the consumer a bit.
For this to work Data protection law has to be "solid" - it has to resist attempts to find loopholes - because big corporations have shown themselves experts at finding and abusing legal loopholes.
Therefore corporations are forced to be "whiter than white" when it comes to data protection. It isn't that you mustn't gain information under false pretences - it is that you must do everything in such a way as to prevent any possibility that you might be doing otherwise.
So the Law says it isn't enough to use vague terms which include your intended use. You must describe your intentions clearly and in terms which most people will not be confused by. Anything else is illegal.
>You may have decided that you need insurance, but I fail to see how, for example, life insurance is a basic human right which must be extended to all, regardless of what conditions they put on it.
If I want to live and work in the UK there's a fair chance I will require a car to do so. In the UK that means compulsary Car insurance. Apart from the insurance I also will want water, Gas and Electricity - all of which force me to deal with Corporations of some type.
Yes - I have an "option" - but if that option amounts to living rough in a tent somewhere in the Welsh moutains without a job, power, light or telephone, it is only a matter of common sense that most people will regard that as a non-option.
>Now this is just a cop-out - there is no "effectively forced". Either you are ACTUALLY forced to reveal personal things about yourself, or you are not.
Well the options are :
A) opt-out of modern life, school, the Rat-race etc etc
or
B) Put up with the non-choices offered by the corporate world.
You may regard that as a real choice - I don't.
You paint a world where only the extremes are possible. There are other methods - including the one democratically decided in the UK - which is we place legal restaints on what businesses can do with our personal data. That we can have modern life, businesses can collect whatever data they can show they need in order to provide their goods and services and I can relax a little knowing that there are sensible, enforced restraints placed on what can be done with the Data I disclose.
Ding! Everyone wins. Everyone except companies who want to force me to part with my personal information on their terms - so they can sell it or whatever. By I'm pleased when that kind of corporate behavious is punished - they deserve it.
We've now had data protection rules working in the UK for well over 15 years. Our companies and corporations are still functioning, the DPA has not forced them out of business. They just can't do some of the things which Corporate America seems to like doing.
How many junk telephone calls does the Average American get everyweek ?
I get less than one junk phone call a year on average. I get less than one junk fax a month. I get almost no junk mail addressed to me as a person (less than one item a week) When corporations do mail me marketing info it is because I have said I want to receive it (there are some kinds of marketing Material I don't mind).
If my friend needs to find my phone number they can get it - I'm not fully ex-directory - but the junk call people can't get it - and if they did ever phone me they would be comitting a criminal offence - because we have an opt-out system for cold calls which has real sanctions behind it.
And I enjoy all the above and I can still buy what I want from the corporations - These are a few of the benefits I get from the various EU privacy laws. And I want to keep them - no new loopholes.
> I repeat - just because you demand particular conditions attach to a transaction involving you does not mean that someone should be obligated to step up, do business with you, AND satisfy all your conditions.
No. When our democracy decides that certain conditions shall applied to such transactions - then we damn well can force companies to accept those conditions. By the way - these aren't my "personal" set of conditions - these are the rules defined by my country and its institutions.
> but rather than take responsibility for it yourself, you've chosen to push it off on someone else by coercing them.
No. I, along with a load of other people wanted a "real" choice. I want to know I can get insurance, buy a house, heat it, light it, buy a car, get a job, rent a phone line, etc WITHOUT having to reveal personal information on whatever terms some company cares to offer.
Practical reality seems to suggest that if we leave it to the corporate world I will not have that choice - my choice will be limited to either "have a phone" or "protect my data" - there will be no "both" option - even if many people or most people would prefer the "both" option.
>So, your "right" has now become someone else's >obligation.
That's right. We have democratically decided that the "both" option is important enough for it to be enforced by law. Do you have some problem with that ?
>But they _did_ have a say in what happens to it -
Yes. The important thing here would be whether they had an INFORMED say in what happens to it. Did you tell them what you were going to do with it ?
The basic principle behind EU law is "informed consent". You can collect data for (eg) marketing purposes but the people you collect it off must be aware that you are collecting it for that purpose and you must tell them everything you intend to do with that data. If you later decide you want to use the Data for another purpose then you cannot use the data you have collected unless you go back and ask permission.
>particularly as I carefully avoided discussing WHY I might want such information
Then that would make what you did unlawful - In the UK deliberately concealing the reason for collecting data is a criminal offence punishable by huge fines and/or time in Jail.
The thinking behind UK/EU law is that it is inevitable that Personal Data will have to be collected by companies. There is no realistic possibility of consumers having a real choice to withold it. So it attempts to strike a balance - to allow consumers to release vital information in the knowledge that :
1) They know and control who has the information
2) They know and can control what it is going to be used for
3) They can check information held on them.
4) They can have errors corrected
5) That they cannot be required to give more data than can be reasonably justified for the intended purpose.
6) That personal information will be held securely.
>shouldn't they have taken that into account when choosing to respond to my questions?
We have decided that attempting to trick people into revealing personal data is dishonest. The UK and the EU have decided that the law should prevent companies working in that devious way, prevent them from trying to trick people or catch them out. - And prevent them for using (eg) their size or market share from coercing people into releasing information with no safeguards.
This is nothing new in the UK - the laws were first created over ten years ago and passed through our legislatures with great ease and with the backing of almost all politicians of nearly every party.
>you are free to take your business elsewhere
Not if there is no "elsewhere" which doesn't also try the scam. A choice is only a real choice if people have a real alternative.
In reality people need things like insurance, so they have no real choice to withold information - the price would be too high for almost everyone.
If people are effectively forced to reveal personal information to companies it seems reasonable that companies are legally oblidged to treat people's information with respect.
A year or two ago I (and several other people) reported a company which had been directly flouting the UK data protection laws to the Data Protection registrar. They were abusing my Fax number. Recently I had the pleasure of being informed that the company I complained about had been Liquidated (bankrupted), closed down and the directors of the company were fined tens of thousands of pounds each.
The UK Data protection regime works. The rules are tough and enforced firmly. So companies working in the UK take them very, very seriously.
The UK/EU stance is about one thing only - preventing companies operating in the EU from exporting the data they collect in the EU to other countries in an attempt to force a loophole into our Data protection rules.
If you don't actually operate in the EU then the rules do not affect you.
If you only collect data outside the EU then the rules do not affect you.
The rules only affect data collected in the EU about EU citizens.
But if you collect Data under EU rules then the EU is making those rules watertight to prevent them being abused.
>blast the living crap out of things in her back yard with an AK-47,
:-)
I'm fairly sure it isn't legal to own an AK47 in the UK. Even if it were it wouldn't be legal for her to fire it in her backyard
However she almost certainly does "blast the living crap" out of things in her backyard with something which looks a lot like an AK47. I've seen and played with some of her "toys".
Then again the town where she lives is a distinctly dodgy place - even if she lives in one of the nicer parts of it.
>Is Mary Gentle a nice person?
Yes she is. She's also a very interesting person with a highly developed, ironic, dry sense of humour. Which probably means her humour may not be appreciated by many people following this thread.
But heck - that doesn't matter. There's loads of books out there so if someone doesn't like one there's always another.
Anyway - I've exchanged emails with Mary about the existence of this thread and, if she can drag herself away from her kunes (a rare breed of pig she breeds) and find a computer with a working web-browser she might wander in here and explain some things for herself. Only maybe though because her piglets are very cute.
>the more your everyday person is going to start believing that their cosy little desktop system at home is not all it could be.
That's actually the key point. I speak as a European - and, strictly speaking I have no right to lecture anyone in the USA on their Law or tactics.
However seen from the outside by someone who has tried hard to see the big picture:
Microsoft software is developed in a way which encourages appearance over solid content. The problems I see with Microsoft software can be related to the way Microsoft as a company operates . Things like the way the company generates income, the way development is organised and what/who/how the development process is driven.
Microsoft's business practices follow on as a direct consequence of those same pressures and also as a consequence of the software they produce.
The problem is that most consumers(=voters) do not see much or any of this. They only see flashy looking software and an American company apparently making healthy profits. An American company equipped with a PR machine able and willing to paint any professional who dares criticise Microsoft's products as noting more than a pissed-off competitor.
Ultimately winning a battle at law (USA or EU) is not going to be enough. You need to persuade people/voters that there are problems with the Industry generally and especially Microsoft and these same, ordinary people are suffering as a consequence.
Part of the solution is going to involve explaining about good and bad software practices, How quality code can be built, the importance of well controlled and maintained open standards etc.
Once you have got the "movers and thinkers" in society to understand such issues - then it will become a lot easier to convince of them things like why it is wrong for a company to leverage its market to try and subvert an open standard API into a proprietry API.
>A detail you omit is that capturing the key schedules - the wheel order and the plug board settings for each day - was vital to the re-breaking of the Naval Enigma.
y pt.info/ultra.txt
h tm
I'm not sure "captured" is the right word. The settings were (eventually) broken. Obtaining the wheel settings was the very essence of breaking the crypto.
>One branch of the German military (I forget which at the moment- Abwehr?) never had their traffic read, largely because they used the machine correctly.
I'm not sure what you are referring to here. The Abwehr communications were being broken routinely once they got the bombes going. "Fish" (the other German system) was also eventually read routinely - although it took longer than Enigma (around 5 or 6 days whereas Enigma was eventually being broken so quickly and routinely that the British were often reading the plaintext before the intended recipient). "Fish" was the system used by the highest levels of German command.
See
http://www.und.edu/org/crypto/crypto/general.cr
However it is true that early on in the war the "breaking" was done by hand and the methods used largely relied on the German Operators making mistakes. However once they got the Bombe working they could crack enigma even in the absence of such errors.
Naval Enigma was eventually cracked - largely because because of poor use of the machine. The procedures used were flawed and the execution of them was also flawed. There were also limitations in the way that the 4th wheel was added to the Navy machine. This drastically reduced the extra security.
There's a lot of detail about all this at :
http://www.uboat.net/technical/enigma_breaking.
> If we hadn't managed to capture the Enigma devices, we would have had a harder time decrypting messages as they changed keys.
I think there are a couple of clarifications needed there. The first Enigma wasn't "captured" by anyone - it was smuggled to London by concerned Poles.
Later in the war Germany changed the design of the Enigma machines used on their submarines - and one of these was captured by the Royal Navy when they disabled the sub.
Both the above were important and certainly helped make the decryption possible - but they were not the really "clever" bit. Merely having the machines didn't mean you could read the messages.
The "Clever" bit was the way the mathematicians at Bletchly Park discovered and exploited weaknesses in the cryptography and (more importantly?) noticed and exploited errors in the way the Germans were using Enigma.
Then later they developed machines to make the breaking almost routine.
Sorry to be pedantic - but I think these details are important. Not least because if we're all going to be using crypto then we need to take careful note of the German's errors. Simple errors in how you apply cryptography can dramatically reduce your security.
>It's not very RISC
I was using their description. I agree that it's a rather dubious one. However their processor is hard to categorise - I don't think I've ever encountered anything quite like it before.
>It has a bunch of indirect addressing modes not found on most (or any) RISCs.
Of course the addressing modes are very valuable for the kind of work this chip is intended for.
Maybe this is why it is hard to categorise - the design (including the instrcution set) is optimsed towards doing I/O and networking manipulation.
>It runs pretty quick (50Mhz? 100Mhz?),
100 mips IIRC
>as you say it has lots of good I/O features and >built-in networking.
Excellent for the kind of thing I need to do.
>But it ain't a RISC
Perhaps not - but it isn't really a classical CISC either. Perhaps someone needs to invent a new acronym ?
The Data sheet seems to push the "RISC" angle as an explanation for the low power consumption - and it certainly achieves pretty good results there.
The "bottom line" for me is that, on paper, it allows me to build a solution with a hardware cost around half that I can achieve any other way.
I think perhaps my application is unusual - I don't want any displays or user interface (the customer explicitly wants a "grey box screwed to the wall that they can just forget about") - so many single board computers on the market would just sit there with half the chips never doing anything - but I can't be the only person who needs to do this kind of thing ?
I design Telecomms stuff - much of it embedded. We've just been asked to design a box which takes serial data from PBXs, collates it, caches it and makes it them available over a network. JFFS is one very key part of that - and this announcement could not have come at a better time for me.
Axis have an excellent business model on all of this. They've designed their own custom RISC processor with built-in network support and quite a lot of very neat I/O ( A dream come true for telecomms embedded people). They're offering Linux as the OS and it seems they've taken a long, hard look at Linux and what it might lack for people using their chip. They spotted a gap - so they created the JFFS and released back to the developer community which gave them Linux in the first place.
It seems to me to be a perfect example of how Open source should work and how it can work for everyone's benefit - and how open source can be part of a very rational business stratgey.
So I hope to be an Axis customer very soon.
People who want to know more about the RISC chip should look at :
http://developer.axis.com/about/
Not Quite.
Had they contested the case and lost they would almost certainly have had to pay all the costs of both sides.
Had they contested the case and won then Godfrey would have had to pay all the costs. However it is likely that he didn't have that much money. Demon could have bankrupted him - but in the end they would not have got their money.
We will never know for sure - but it is quite likely that Demon made a tactical decision to make a small offer to settle the case (the offer made was modest compared with many UK libel settlements) - and Godfrey felt he had to accept the offer because in the event of him continuing and eventually receiving an award less than the offer - he would have been liable for all his costs and Demon's costs from the point of the offer onwards. He would have got nothing and would probably have been bankrupted.
Demon would have had a lot to gain by making such a tactical offer - if the thing had gone to full trial Demon would have almost certainly have lost more money than they have paid out in a settlement - regardless of whether they finally won or lost in court.
Essentially the fairly complex rules regarding who pays what costs and why effectively make much such litigation in the UK an advanced kind of high-stakes poker.
This is one good reasons why cases settled in this way do not set any kind of precedent.
Don't forget that the DPA was amended last year and signficiantly tightened. Even before then they had been very succesful in reforming the worst industry practices.
Going back to the Godfrey case I just they could get whoever drafted the DPA to come and rewrite English Libel law - especially as it applies to ISPs. It doesn't to anyone much good when what the law says and practical reality are so much at variance.
If you're talking about "privacy" - I would be careful.
:-)
In the UK we have a "Data Protection Act" and a "Data Protection Registrar" who do a heck of a lot to protect people's individual privacy. The system may not be perfect - but it has real teeth and it works. Doubleclick would simply not be allowed to do in the UK what they recently tried to do in the US.
In the USA I believe you have what is known as "Self regulation" when it comes to privacy. Viewed from here it would appear that it doesn't have any teeth and it doesn't work. Companies can do whatever they like to individuals data - until they do something so outrageous it has political consequences.
---
Oh! And anyone who hasn't tried decent "warm" beer should give it a go. The reason we don't drink our (decent) Beer cold is because it actually tastes of something nice, unlike Beer which has to be served ice-cold to hide the god-awful taste.
But be warned. Many English pubs now serve Beer which isn't fit to drink warm OR cold. So if you want to try some decent stuff ask a local first!
> not only panders to net.kookery, but fails to recognize the decentralized nature of Usenet.
That may or may not be true.
The decentralized nature if Usenet causes obvious problems with certain legal jurisdictions. But the law always seems to be determined to "have a go" - even when it is pointless. It is not impossible to imagine how someone might try to take advantage of this.
>To order an ISP to remove a Usenet post is silly; yes, they can issue a cancel,
Demon refused to even try. When the dubious posts were reported they could have chosen to look remove them from their own servers and possibly issue cancels. Had they done so they would then have been able to make a strong case that they had done everything possible - and that would probably have got them off the hook, even if there attempts had only had very limited success.
There are a couple of important facts which I think people should be aware of - along with some important points about UK law and practice.
1) The case was settled before it went to court.
2) Up until that point Demon had a defence - the details of which made interesting reading and are relevant. Unfortunately the Demon press release on this seems to have been withdrawn. Hmmm. Anyway - working from memory, the defence was based on drawing attention to some of the other messages Godfrey has posted on Usenet, some of the other legal cases he had been involved with. I think they were suggesting that when looked at in context then people might be able to draw some very different conclusions about what was really going on.
3) Under English law there is a general prinicple that the loosing side of a legal action plays the costs of everyone involved. Normally these costs are "taxed". This is nothing to do with raising money for the government. "Taxing" is a way of the court ruling on what charges are fair. However Libel cases are different - the costs are not "taxed" and the lawyers on both sides can charge pretty much what they want and the losing side is stuck with paying the (huge) bill.
4) Legal costs in England are very high generally - and the most expensive area is libel law.
5) It is common practice for one side to make an offer prior to a hearing starting. If that offer is accepted then the party that made it pays whatever they offered - usually plus all the legal bills so far.
6) If the offer is refused and the court finally awards an amount which is equal too, or less than the amount offered, then the party which refused the offer is normally made to pay the costs from that point onwards.
7) In this case the settlement offered was fifteen thousand pounds + costs. This could be regarded as quite a low figure for libels in the UK. Costs are about two hundred thousand pounds.
8) Had the case gone to trial total costs could easily have reached a million pounds and beyond.
OK. Based on the above - here is one scenario which fits the known facts quite well :
Demon thought they had a good defence, but also knew it was a "high-risk" defence. One likely outcome of fielding that defence could have been that the court would still have found against Demon - but only made a very modest award of damages. Had that happened Demon would still have been lumbered with paying huge costs.
So Demon took a pragmatic view that they would make a modest offer to protect themselves from such an outcome.
When Godfrey saw the offer he was then faced with a decision. If he refused the offer there was a chance that the amount he finally won in court would have been less than Demon's offer - and he would been left to page the huge litigation costs.
Given the risks involved he might have decided that his best interests lay in accepting the offer.
It was basically a gamble for both sides.
In making the offer Demon were paying out a quarter of a million pounds to reduce the odds of them being stung for well over a million.
In accepting the offer Godfrey was taking only fifteen thousand pounds and avoiding having an having to pay very substantial legal costs even if he only won modest damages.
According to the reports over here...
1) The bloke with the Laptop was buying a ticket. This can frequently be a long, tedious complex process - especially at Paddington Station. One of Londons stations which serves some of the rather less -well organised rail companies. And you wouldn't believe how complicated buying a ticket can be in this country at the moment.
2) He put the Laptop down, between his legs.
3) Someone snatched it from behind and ran off. The guy realised at once and gave chase, helped by a couple of Transport Police. But the thief got away.
That isn't the important point though.
These pieces of software are sold to parents on the basis of several claims.
The main claim being that they allow parents to block sites.
The issues are:
1) Do they actually do what they claim - do they succesfully block the sites the parents want blocked ?
2) Do they do anything else - possibly as a side-effect of (1) ? (and possibly for other reasons).
3) Are parents told the honest truth about what the product does and how well it performs ?
It is IMPORTANT for responsible parents to know the limitations of the software they have chosen.
IMV Every sensible parent should be concerned as to what their children are doing on the internet. That concern will vary according to the age of the child.
What concerns many people is that all the various suppliers go out of their way to make verifying the performance of their products dificult - both through technological and legal means.
However if the claims of the people attacking the censorware products are correct then all the products are offering is a false sense of security. This should concern anyone.
Likewise it should concern any parent that the product they have bought to protect their child is allowing an external third party to manipulate the information presented to their children, possibly with dubious political or other motives - this manipulation being concealed from the parent.
When these same products are used in places like libraries ( and some people are trying to achieve exactly that) then the potential dangers should be apparent to everyone.
I believe that the companies marketing censorware claim they have to protect their blocked sites list etc because that is where most of their "creative" work is done. However this means that it is impossible for most people to check performance. When experts have analysed the software in depth, then in every case so far they have found that the performace is pretty poor and disturbing in many ways.
The awful truth may be that there is no simple, lazy method for parents to use software to control what their kids are doing on the internet.
If that is true (and I believe it is likely) then that means that responsible parents are going to have to look to other methods. Options like secure logging of where their kids have been surfing, supervision of children. Amongst other things this puts power back where it belongs - in the hands of parents so they can make their own decisions, rather than in the hands of some unknown company or pressure group who may well be simply lying because they believe that "they know better" and "the ends justify the means".
Likewise I can see there may be potential problems with internet access in libraries. However all such potential problems have solutions which are a lot more subtle, refined (and genuinely effective) than crude software which dare not even reveal its limitations to view.
I can see why busy parents look for shortcuts. However products which don't do what they claim and do do things which are kept concealed are not a solution. I'd rather parents faced up to the problem.
Yes - I think that sometimes collecting together information which is "freely" available can lead to an invasion of privacy. This is because it can become possible to link together facts which build up a picture which is very much bigger than the sum of its parts.
One of the things which I felt the argument didn't cover as well as it could is the very different attitude to collections of personal data in the EU as compared with the US. This is certainly relevant to the issue of copyright in databases. One may limit the other.
Just in case people aren't aware - there are some very specific and detailed requirements for holding personal information the UK (and the rest of Europe).
Personal information is basically anything about identifiable individuals.
The Law is too complex to fully describe here - but I will give the main points
Databases must be licenced (although the licences are relatively cheap)
Data can only be collected from people if the people are told that Data is being collected and why.
Only the data relevant to the purpose can be stored in the Database ( an example of this was that everyone in the country was required to fill in a form wrt to new local taxes. these forms apparently required people to give their phone number. This was ruled to be wrong - because people didn't have a choice and the local government do not need people's phone numbers to collect tax)
People have a right to see what records are held on them and they have the right (enforced in various ways) to have errors abuot them corrected.
The Data must be held securely
And finally - and importantly - companies are not allowed to transfer data to other countries unless the safeguards above are effectively enforced.
The Copyright issue is tightly bound to at least some of those principles. If people can copy personal information and use it for their won purposes without reference it directly breaks some of the principles explained above.
There is an officer of Government in the UK called "The Data Protection Registrar" (DPR for short). The regsitrar and his staff have real teeth, are not afraid to use them and, on the whole, they are very popular with people - most people in the UK think the DPR does an important job.
I might be wrong, but I believe the situation in the USA is very different with "self regulation" being the norm for Data protection. Until the situation in the two regimes can be reconciled there are going to be fundamental problems with copyright on databases between the two systems.
More information abut the DPR in the UK can be found at http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/
And the "principles" are described at
http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/principl.htm
Slow down a bit there!. The exact terms have deliberately not been disclosed. It may be worth looking at the analysis done by The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/000111-000005.html
Microsoft have settled this now because of the consequences that losing in court would have on other current cases and possible future cases. By all accounts Microsoft can afford any damages likely to be awarded and sustained.
The real "cost" to Microsoft is the PR damage. Now it looks like they've found a way to square the circle and make it look like they've settted for peanuts.
What's less certain is why Caldera have chosen to settle now. However I can see reasons why they should.
A) The timing is certainly fortunate for Caldera,
B) There's little Caldera was likely to get out of the case beyond money and maybe some good PR. Any other remedies became impractical long ago.
C) Their case was good - but it wasn't perfect and any case involving a jury involves a significant uncertainty.
If we follow the hunch in "The Register" and The settlement was rather higher than we were all supposed to think - then Caldera are still going to get a large chunk of money - they can still "spin" it and get most of the PR benefits too. So it looks like a choice which is at least rational and defensible.
Other issues are more important for Caldera and all of us. We need Linux to suceed and grow on merit. Amongst many other things this means we need a good, genuine choice of distributions issued and supported by a range of healthy companies. If this result helps towards that then it is a good thing.
I agree with your sentiments but not your conclusions. Radio Spectrum is a scarce resource - at least it is at the end of the frequentcy range suitable for Broadcasting to consumers. This may not be a huge problem in countries like the the USA (although I suspect I'm wrong in some of your Urban Areas).
But here in the UK we're densely packed - and if we want to have usable broadcasting this means that use of frequencies simply must be coordinated somehow - or the result would be a truly appaling service for everyone.
Our broadcasting system is full of compromises as it is. A significant chunk cannot receieve the fifth of our national TV channels ( larhely on the South coast because signal here would interferece with the French. On the other hand Radio 4 ( The BBC's national speech program) uses up about six channels on vhf AND is also broadcast on Long Wave 198M ) because other wise a significant number of people can't get it on VHF.
(And every summer when England is being thrashed in some Cricket test match somewhere they grab R4 LW to broadcast a commentary for the duration of the match (3 or 4 days). And then all the people who wanted to hear Radio 4 not the test match moan on and one about it, write letters to the papers etc etc for weeks and weeks afterwards
Anyway - when Pirates broadcast it usually means they're stopping someone, somewhere from receiving a legitimate station.
After watching some some discussions elsewhere a couple of points become clear :
A) According to which country you are in the motive of the person doing the reverse-engineering may be very important. To me this seems utterly crazy - but lets just assume we have to live with it for a moment
B) The other key point (again only in some countries) is whether the person doing the work "agreed" to the licence terms on the Xing program as they did the work.
OK. So the above is daft. How can anyone actually prove in court the motives of the guy doing the hack? How can anyone prove they didn't read the licence agreement ( or that they did )?
------------
So why not :
1) Find ourselves a competent hacker(s) who, whilst they may be aware of the DeCSS, have never seen the source code or read the notes.
2) Get them to swear they've never seen it and that's they are doing it to enable an open-source DVD player to be written.
3) Lock them in a room with a computer and all the software/hardware tools they will need.
4) Take a disc image of the computer before they start work. Get this certified to the standards defined by a competent lawyer
5) Tell them what they've got to do. Give them as many clues as could be defended in court.
5) Tell them on no account are they to read or agree to the Xing software licence agreement.
6) Get some lawyers and witnesses to monitor the whole process. Maybe record the contents of the screen throughout.
7) Add loads of coke, pizza, chocolate etc.
8) Wait pateintly and eventually XING! we have a copy of the relevant trade secret that the DCD CCA are going to have one heck of a load of trouble with in court!
Apart from that just maybe this could make a good case watertight - it could also (handled well) be excellent publicity which would very effectively counter the hatchet PR-job done by the DVD CCA.
Yes. It would be a stunt! - But it would be a stunt which would make the whole legal thing look as foolish and warped as it obviously is. And that must be an excellent thing!