Competition does not necessarily cause the saintliness you hope for...
...There are plenty of examples throughout the world where there is good competition at the ISP level, with consumers benefiting from better infrastructure, services, and prices. And the great majority of it is from introducing competition, not allowing monopolies to get larger and larger. Net Neutrality probably wouldn't even be on the radar if infrastructure and services were not tied together in government granted monopolies.
In the UK there is plenty of competition, but the ISPs understandably want to increase profitability. Thus they cloud the market with "unlimited [with "fair" usage limits]" deals and offers of "up to" XYZ - note that free market theology assumes a perfectly informed customer base, and its benefits don't necessarily follow where that doesn't happen.
More seriously, they want to move away from being "dumb pipes" to entities that can "monetize" (read "charge for") everything. Just the same as the USA's local monopolies do.
So competition will not necessarily guarantee good behaviour - especially where customers don't understand the market, and where providers collude in a race to the bottom.
It's all very well to point out that some people abuse the system. But the solution to that is not to abolish a system that is there for a very real reason - the solution is to tackle the abuse.
As with Social Security and benefits, so with regulation of communications. Some regulation is needed to stop abuses like... well I'm sure you can think of some... but bad regulations (like the bizzaro US local telecomms monopolies) are an argument for BETTER regulations, not for none at all.
Let's be honest here. The Pirate Party believes non-commercial filesharing for a song that came out 5 minutes ago should be 100% legal. This "from the 1940s" stuff is just an attempt to make themselves sound more reasonable.
I think the factor you're neglecting is that filesharing is also a civil matter between the infringer and the copyright owner. The owner can sue for damages - as they always could. Nothing I see in the Pirate Party platform suggests they want to abolish that right.
On the other hand, copyright owners tended not to sue the students who indiscriminately taped copies of their music and distributed them to their friends. The studios produced advertising campaigns claiming that "home taping is killing music", but still the music did not die.
I don't think that filesharing is quite the death sentence to the "creative industries" that you seem to fear. There is some evidence that filesharing has an promotional effect on the shared music and artists. There is also clear evidence that the number of lost sales is significantly lower than the number of shared copies - not all copiers would have purchased an copy (any more than they would have done in the days of taping music from radio, CDs or LPs). There is also clear evidence that there are people who will pay for a legal copy, even where "free" unauthorised copies are available, and "value adds" can assist this - things like like album art, the higher quality of CDs over MP3s, and availability of the full catalogue without depending on vagaries of fileshare networks.
So, while there is some damaging effect from non-commercial filesharing, it's not as big as the studios pretend, it's NOT going to kill music, and it's not an area that the criminal law (funded by the taxpayer) needs to get involved in. The last people who need state/corporate welfare are the music and movie industry!
You're wrong! It's pretty safe to join, without making civilisation collapse.
The Pirate Party isn't fighting for responsible copyright laws, they want to gut the whole thing.
From the Aussie Pirate Party FAQ:
What are your main policy areas?
We aim to protect civil liberties and promote culture and innovation, primarily through... [various free speech, privacy and anti-censorship issues... ], and
* Reforming the life + 70 years copyright length
* Decriminalisation of non-commercial copyright infringement
Do you support abolishing intellectual property entirely?
No. We believe that the original goals of intellectual property protections, which are to promote creativity and invention, are reasonable. We don't believe that prosecuting non-commercial file sharers for copying a song from the 1940s is reasonable, however.
Do you think that commercial copyright infringement or patent infringement is ok?
No. Our position is that companies should pay for the use of copyrighted works and patented designs.
It's something called public service broadcasting. I know for some slashdotters that's a bit like socialism, and therefore evil... but there is broad support for it in the UK. Not least because the Public Service output of the BBC seems... better than Fox. People like the system because (on the whole) it works.
Maybe it's because the BBC doesn't have that strange Fox TV rule that if a series is any good it must be cancelled:-)
If they would just start selling full episodes of Top Gear (amongst others) over here in the states... -- In 2009 we confirmed yet again that indeed you can buy everything in New York City.
last year James Murdoch criticized the BBC for providing 'free news' on the internet, making it 'incredibly hard for private news organizations to ask people to pay for their news.'
So where does Murdoch's mythical right to extract money from the public come from? Or, more to the point, Murdoch's right to prevent anyone from competing with services he might prefer we pay for?
Especially when the public have already paid for the news to be gathered, and the BBC are only making available (at modest extra cost to the BBC) the information they have already been paid to gather - to the people who paid for it (even if it is also available to non-licence payers).
Isn't it the BBC's mission to inform and entertain? And why not do that via the internet as well as the airwaves?
And if we're being even pickier, we should probably mention the law and practice of the Police Service of Northern Ireland in retaining DNA (I don't know what it is, but suspect it matches the situation in England, policing and justice not being devolved yet).
That's without considering what the law and police practice might be in other related "British" jurisdictions like the Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Gibralter, and various overseas territories.
But (given the speed technology moves at, and the slowness of laws "catching up"), it makes more sense to legislate what people can and cannot do, rather than the technology they use.
So if the problem is tracking users without warning them, ban that - and make the ban apply whether they use cookies, flash cookies, or magic spy-rays from their monitors. Just like the law forbids murder, without a special law for murder with guns, murder with hammers, murder with rolling pins.
...if Autodesk or any other developer of specialized software were not able to dictate the terms of their licensing, including licensing the individual rather than having the license apply to the copy of the media itself, then many specialized markets would fail. Why? Because there are limited sales opportunities to support the employee base required to develop and maintain the product... Second-hand software sales in specialized markets would kill those markets...
If you are not getting enough money, raise the price.
If you need a continued revenue stream from old sales, move to a rental model.
If software was sold, rather than rented or leased, then it should stay sold. Devious tricks like Autodesk is trying should be banned.
We don't have to. The thing that everyone seems to forget is that corporations as such don't do anything. People who work for corporations, and people who run corporations do.
Jail the person responsible - be it a director, or some other manager or drone - and the risk-free abuse will suddenly seem much less risk-free!
Yes, I'm talking about removing all legal accountability for slanderous statements. Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.
So if a business rival makes allegations that you are a convicted thief or rapist or something, or your products kill babies and destroy the planet, and your customers desert you as a result, you think it would be wrong for the law to provide any recourse?
That is the sort of thing the law of defamation is designed to protect against. Some words can do real harm!
If Slander were legalized, then people would be more critical of possibly defamatory statements...
I'm not sure why you think "legalising" spoken (or otherwise published) defamatory statements would change human nature in this way.
I'm not even sure what you mean by "legalising" in this context. Are you talking about removing any form of legal accountability for what people say or write about other people? Preventing people from obtaining compensation if they are seriously harmed by somebody's lies about them?
That law gives legal effect to any treaty designated as a "Community Treaty".
European Council Directives are a different matter, and need to be specifically implemented by each member state. There is a treaty obligation to do this, but it is not automatic. Different states often implement rules with very significant differences.
Hence the earlier discussion as to how exactly parliament had enacted the requirement to notify "standards" to the EU, and whether there was any statutory basis for regarding the Video Recordings Act 1984 as invalid without such notification.
I imagine it could, at the cost of essentially withdrawing from the EU.
Which is why I described such an (unlikely) step as causing a constitutional crisis.
Which seems a rather drastic solution for the right to not tell anybody how you label your DVDs.
This is not considered a constitutional crisis, just an administrative oversight. The law was passed in 1984, and the EEC directive in 1983. They probably just hadn't gotten the hang of it yet.
Quite. That would be a drastic step... and not a solution to any "problem" discussed in TFA.
But my main point remains that nothing in the article or summary or the parent posting states WHETHER OR NOT, when implementing the directive, PARLIAMENT DID introduce a requirement to notify the EU of "standards". Nor have we heard whether any such a requirement included the feature that a failure to comply would render invalid any or all of the relevant legislation.
It is the UK Law that counts, not the directive. If parliament did not explicitly lay down that laws would be invalid, then there is no reason to believe the law is not valid.
All treaty negotiations are secret, but the treaty itself has to be voted on by Congress and is thus public. Anyone making statements along the lines of "This treaty may do x" is spreading FUD.
Based on the leaks we've seen so far, fears and doubt may well be indicated -- and public uncertainty is the whole point of having secret negotiations.
And what are the chances of an open and honest debate about the impact the treaty will have on ordinary consumers, and then a congressional vote depending on the results of that debate? If we're not getting honesty in the healthcare debate, why would you expect it for ACTA, where big business has just as much to gain or lose?
ACTA (and any other controversial debate you care to imagine) will show up the same weaknesses in American society, media, and democracy that the healthcare debate now exposes.
Some of the "problems with the Internet" are not technical problems so much as social, legal, and financial ones.
SPAM would be an example - except that today's legal approach has failed catastrophically to address the issue. The US has a weak "you can spam" act, and the UK is worse (Spam can only be stopped, one spammer to spammee "information" flow at a time, starting from the second message any given spammer sends to any given recipient). But the problem is not IP. Nor is the problem, fundamentally, that anonymous virtually-free email is possible (it is a system that has many important benefits - from global accessibility, to anonymity). The problem is unscrupulous users who exploit the internet by sending spam.
The Network Neutrality debate is driven by under-investing ISPs who want to run an under-resourced cheap network, and split it into many segmented markets, where they can charge each separate segment as much as it will bear without going into bankruptcy. This will fossilise current usage models of the network, and be a huge barrier to innovation.
Many of today's security "problems of the Internet" are no more Internet problems than mugging or burglary are a problem with streets. The real problem is undetected criminals, and insecure computers and protocols.
Most of these issues either are being addressed - or can be addressed without "fixing" the Internet.
TFA says that the internet was just an experimental demo that worked too well and ended up getting adopted. Wrong. It started as an experimental but real network that was to be used for real work. The basic principles were deliberately, and well, chosen.
The environment has changed, but the basic principle of a simple network with intelligence at the "edges" - in the devices that connect to the basic bit-shuffling network - is sound. That above all is what has allowed so many innovative services to be rapidly and successfully deployed.
This allows some less desirable features, but that's the price of flexibility. Same with roads: they are a flexible network, which means the bad guys can use them for trafficking or drive stolen cars. If you build too many controls into a system, you make it less versatile.
The problem with "sweeping technical improvements" is that improvements are often tradeoffs, and (as someone else pointed out) any changes will have the grubby claws of "stakeholders" all over them. They are most likely to serve powerful interests rather than users and they are much less likely to foster the innovation that has made the internet such an explosive success, and such a multiplier of potential.
The article also has a slightly US-centric view of the IP6 issue. In other parts of the world there is not the same relative abundance of IP addresses, and IP6 deployment seems to be a bit further ahead. The Beijing Olympics used IPv6, and ISPs in India and Australia for example run commercial IP6 services.
The UK joined the EEC in 1973. Council Directive 83/189/EEC was passed in March 1983. It says that if a country passes "standards" it has to notify other countries.
But the directive would only have effect in UK law under the enabling legislation subsequently introduced in the UK (or resulting from ECJ judgements based on the doctrine that the UK had failed to properly implement the directive). The UK implementing legislation could have stated that standards must be notified to the EU, but whether or not it did, and whether it specified that standards-related legislation would not come into effect without such notification are two further and distinct questions.
Even if both were true, parliament cannot bind its successors (at least according to diehard "parliamentary sovereignty" constitutional theorists), so that if it wanted, it could ignore any such rule. If it did not explicitly disclaim such a restriction (assuming there is one) courts might well hold that the restriction had implicit effect due to the earlier legislation implementing the directive.
As a side issue, if any law explicitly disclaimed such a requirement, you could have a constitutional ambiguity (crisis?) on which the UK courts (and possibly eventually the ECJ) would have to rule. If the UK wanted to push things, and the courts were minded to agree, UK courts could refuse to implement or observe the ECJ rulings where specifically overridden by the UK, and there would be a full blown EU constitutional crisis. It's unlikely to happen though, but that would probably be the shape of the underlying doctrine.
So it's not been shown that there is any legislative basis for the claim that the "law" is invalid because it has not been notified to the EU.
Surely, though, an EEC Directive can only govern issues pertaining to trade between EU countries?
Not true.
Past directives have affected topics like: anti-discrimination measures, the environment, intellectual property, privacy and data protection, technology and safety, weights and measures, pharmaceuticals, culture, and wildlife and nature conservation.
Even if true, your restriction would be no more limiting than the US rule about for the purposes of regulating interstate commerce.
An anonymous officer said.... "These people are in the cell for a reason, it's not like they've come here on holiday. We are getting asked all sorts â" to get them celebrity magazines, to put air con on, to bring them a salad. It's not funny after a while let me tell you," he added.
There is always a reason - it could be murder, assault, drunk and disorderly -- or being too tall in possession of a camera (though he avoided the cells by the skin of his teeth).
Of course prisoners need to be treated with respect, but I wonder if the target-driven culture is going a bit too far here. Whatever happened to professionalism and pride in doing a job properly?
This isn't one of those corporate surveys that carefully avoids any questions on what the real problems are? Surveys for the sake of "we need a survey" are often a waste of time.
Since there is not much info in TFA or the summary, here's some more.
Colin Holder was a Detective Sergeant with the Metropolitan Police for 33 years or so, and left in 2004. He now works in "security and investigations".
At some time he amassed "approximately 120 million personal records that have been phished/hacked and sold between criminals on the internet". Now he's offering a free summary of the information he has, and a £10 full listing, available once you verify your identity. £10 is also what you'd pay if you made a request under the Data Protection Act for the data he holds. Also, he's not storing the information you provide to do a lookup (which is name and either postal or email address) -- unless you buy the full version of a report, clearly. He also provides information on what he's doing, guidance on security, and an explanation of why, for instance, it's not necessarily helpful to victims for him to report the data loss to credit card companies.
I think he's trying to offer a useful service, and does not intend this as a scam. It's even probably socially useful to be able to know if your data is "out there". But it's hard to see if it's legal under the Data Protection Act in the UK or equivalent legislation in any EU state - assuming the collection and processing of the data happened or happens in an EU jurisdiction.
The DPA requires data to be "fairly obtained" - there is lots of guidance on exactly what this means. He may try to argue that gathering such "freely (or criminally or commercially) available" data from the net, for the limited purpose of alerting the victims, is "fair". Good luck with that - I don't think there is any precedent for that, and the legal costs could exceed the £160K he's spent so far.
The DPA also limits how long the data can be held, and the uses to which it can be put -- it has to match the purposes for which it was gathered. It's an interesting question when this legal "collection" happened - whether it was the original collection from the victims (in some case legally), any intermediate hacking (unlikely), or the Mr Holder's scraping up exercise (in which case, how could there be consent to his "purposes"?).
One issue this highlights is that, if you ever allow an EU company to share your data, or ever give data to a non-EU company, there are no limits on what they can do with it. Your data is now an asset of the company, and they can change their T&C retroactively to allow whatever use they like. So can anyone who purchases the information, or who obtains it when the "owners" go bust.
You can see why it might be useful to know if your data is "out there", and even whether it is limited to commercial organisations, or crime / hacker networks.
Maybe a change in the law to allow that might be good -- on a carefully regulated basis, so the data is not just another tradeable asset!
Not really - If a politician is taking bribes, it's in the public interest for him to be named, so he can be stopped, and punished.
If whistle-blower is anonymously revealing details of wrongdoing by his superiors, it is NOT in the public interest for him to be named, since his superiors are likely to punish him, or prevent further revelations of their wrongdoing, and thus avoid punishment themselves.
If the whistle-blower has, however, been identified, the Judge says the law cannot compel those who unmasked him [the Times] to keep his identity secret. Even though it is not in the public interest to unmask him, it is not in the public interest to prevent publication where a person does not have an additional right of privacy -- and the judge held that engaging in public debate removes any additional right he might have as a non-public figure.
Slashdot Mirror
Competition does not necessarily cause the saintliness you hope for...
...There are plenty of examples throughout the world where there is good competition at the ISP level, with consumers benefiting from better infrastructure, services, and prices. And the great majority of it is from introducing competition, not allowing monopolies to get larger and larger. Net Neutrality probably wouldn't even be on the radar if infrastructure and services were not tied together in government granted monopolies.
In the UK there is plenty of competition, but the ISPs understandably want to increase profitability. Thus they cloud the market with "unlimited [with "fair" usage limits]" deals and offers of "up to" XYZ - note that free market theology assumes a perfectly informed customer base, and its benefits don't necessarily follow where that doesn't happen.
More seriously, they want to move away from being "dumb pipes" to entities that can "monetize" (read "charge for") everything. Just the same as the USA's local monopolies do.
So competition will not necessarily guarantee good behaviour - especially where customers don't understand the market, and where providers collude in a race to the bottom.
It's all very well to point out that some people abuse the system. But the solution to that is not to abolish a system that is there for a very real reason - the solution is to tackle the abuse.
As with Social Security and benefits, so with regulation of communications. Some regulation is needed to stop abuses like... well I'm sure you can think of some... but bad regulations (like the bizzaro US local telecomms monopolies) are an argument for BETTER regulations, not for none at all.
Why would they head to Fox when their contract expires? Don't Fox have that rule about cancelling shows if they are any good?
Copyright is not just about the criminal law:
I think the factor you're neglecting is that filesharing is also a civil matter between the infringer and the copyright owner. The owner can sue for damages - as they always could. Nothing I see in the Pirate Party platform suggests they want to abolish that right.
On the other hand, copyright owners tended not to sue the students who indiscriminately taped copies of their music and distributed them to their friends. The studios produced advertising campaigns claiming that "home taping is killing music", but still the music did not die.
I don't think that filesharing is quite the death sentence to the "creative industries" that you seem to fear. There is some evidence that filesharing has an promotional effect on the shared music and artists. There is also clear evidence that the number of lost sales is significantly lower than the number of shared copies - not all copiers would have purchased an copy (any more than they would have done in the days of taping music from radio, CDs or LPs). There is also clear evidence that there are people who will pay for a legal copy, even where "free" unauthorised copies are available, and "value adds" can assist this - things like like album art, the higher quality of CDs over MP3s, and availability of the full catalogue without depending on vagaries of fileshare networks.
So, while there is some damaging effect from non-commercial filesharing, it's not as big as the studios pretend, it's NOT going to kill music, and it's not an area that the criminal law (funded by the taxpayer) needs to get involved in. The last people who need state/corporate welfare are the music and movie industry!
You're wrong! It's pretty safe to join, without making civilisation collapse.
From the Aussie Pirate Party FAQ:
What are your main policy areas?
We aim to protect civil liberties and promote culture and innovation, primarily through... [various free speech, privacy and anti-censorship issues... ], and
* Reforming the life + 70 years copyright length
* Decriminalisation of non-commercial copyright infringement
Do you support abolishing intellectual property entirely?
No. We believe that the original goals of intellectual property protections, which are to promote creativity and invention, are reasonable. We don't believe that prosecuting non-commercial file sharers for copying a song from the 1940s is reasonable, however.
Do you think that commercial copyright infringement or patent infringement is ok?
No. Our position is that companies should pay for the use of copyrighted works and patented designs.
It's something called public service broadcasting. I know for some slashdotters that's a bit like socialism, and therefore evil... but there is broad support for it in the UK. Not least because the Public Service output of the BBC seems... better than Fox. People like the system because (on the whole) it works.
Maybe it's because the BBC doesn't have that strange Fox TV rule that if a series is any good it must be cancelled :-)
Everything but Top Gear, it seems...
So where does Murdoch's mythical right to extract money from the public come from? Or, more to the point, Murdoch's right to prevent anyone from competing with services he might prefer we pay for?
Especially when the public have already paid for the news to be gathered, and the BBC are only making available (at modest extra cost to the BBC) the information they have already been paid to gather - to the people who paid for it (even if it is also available to non-licence payers).
Isn't it the BBC's mission to inform and entertain? And why not do that via the internet as well as the airwaves?
And if we're being even pickier, we should probably mention the law and practice of the Police Service of Northern Ireland in retaining DNA (I don't know what it is, but suspect it matches the situation in England, policing and justice not being devolved yet).
That's without considering what the law and police practice might be in other related "British" jurisdictions like the Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Gibralter, and various overseas territories.
It's complicated. And mostly it's wrong.
If we're being picky, it should probably be all the police forces in England and Wales. There are quite a few of them.
But (given the speed technology moves at, and the slowness of laws "catching up"), it makes more sense to legislate what people can and cannot do, rather than the technology they use.
So if the problem is tracking users without warning them, ban that - and make the ban apply whether they use cookies, flash cookies, or magic spy-rays from their monitors. Just like the law forbids murder, without a special law for murder with guns, murder with hammers, murder with rolling pins.
...if Autodesk or any other developer of specialized software were not able to dictate the terms of their licensing, including licensing the individual rather than having the license apply to the copy of the media itself, then many specialized markets would fail. Why? Because there are limited sales opportunities to support the employee base required to develop and maintain the product... Second-hand software sales in specialized markets would kill those markets...
If you are not getting enough money, raise the price.
If you need a continued revenue stream from old sales, move to a rental model.
If software was sold, rather than rented or leased, then it should stay sold. Devious tricks like Autodesk is trying should be banned.
How do we put a corporation in jail?
We don't have to. The thing that everyone seems to forget is that corporations as such don't do anything. People who work for corporations, and people who run corporations do.
Jail the person responsible - be it a director, or some other manager or drone - and the risk-free abuse will suddenly seem much less risk-free!
Yes, I'm talking about removing all legal accountability for slanderous statements. Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.
So if a business rival makes allegations that you are a convicted thief or rapist or something, or your products kill babies and destroy the planet, and your customers desert you as a result, you think it would be wrong for the law to provide any recourse?
That is the sort of thing the law of defamation is designed to protect against. Some words can do real harm!
If Slander were legalized, then people would be more critical of possibly defamatory statements...
I'm not sure why you think "legalising" spoken (or otherwise published) defamatory statements would change human nature in this way.
I'm not even sure what you mean by "legalising" in this context. Are you talking about removing any form of legal accountability for what people say or write about other people? Preventing people from obtaining compensation if they are seriously harmed by somebody's lies about them?
That law gives legal effect to any treaty designated as a "Community Treaty".
European Council Directives are a different matter, and need to be specifically implemented by each member state.
There is a treaty obligation to do this, but it is not automatic. Different states often implement rules with very significant differences.
Hence the earlier discussion as to how exactly parliament had enacted the requirement to notify "standards" to the EU, and whether there was any statutory basis for regarding the Video Recordings Act 1984 as invalid without such notification.
> if it wanted, it could ignore any such rule.
I imagine it could, at the cost of essentially withdrawing from the EU.
Which is why I described such an (unlikely) step as causing a constitutional crisis.
Which seems a rather drastic solution for the right to not tell anybody how you label your DVDs.
This is not considered a constitutional crisis, just an administrative oversight. The law was passed in 1984, and the EEC directive in 1983. They probably just hadn't gotten the hang of it yet.
Quite. That would be a drastic step... and not a solution to any "problem" discussed in TFA.
But my main point remains that nothing in the article or summary or the parent posting states WHETHER OR NOT, when implementing the directive, PARLIAMENT DID introduce a requirement to notify the EU of "standards". Nor have we heard whether any such a requirement included the feature that a failure to comply would render invalid any or all of the relevant legislation.
It is the UK Law that counts, not the directive. If parliament did not explicitly lay down that laws would be invalid, then there is no reason to believe the law is not valid.
The FUD may be true:
Based on the leaks we've seen so far, fears and doubt may well be indicated -- and public uncertainty is the whole point of having secret negotiations.
And what are the chances of an open and honest debate about the impact the treaty will have on ordinary consumers, and then a congressional vote depending on the results of that debate? If we're not getting honesty in the healthcare debate, why would you expect it for ACTA, where big business has just as much to gain or lose?
ACTA (and any other controversial debate you care to imagine) will show up the same weaknesses in American society, media, and democracy that the healthcare debate now exposes.
Some of the "problems with the Internet" are not technical problems so much as social, legal, and financial ones.
SPAM would be an example - except that today's legal approach has failed catastrophically to address the issue. The US has a weak "you can spam" act, and the UK is worse (Spam can only be stopped, one spammer to spammee "information" flow at a time, starting from the second message any given spammer sends to any given recipient). But the problem is not IP. Nor is the problem, fundamentally, that anonymous virtually-free email is possible (it is a system that has many important benefits - from global accessibility, to anonymity). The problem is unscrupulous users who exploit the internet by sending spam.
The Network Neutrality debate is driven by under-investing ISPs who want to run an under-resourced cheap network, and split it into many segmented markets, where they can charge each separate segment as much as it will bear without going into bankruptcy. This will fossilise current usage models of the network, and be a huge barrier to innovation.
Many of today's security "problems of the Internet" are no more Internet problems than mugging or burglary are a problem with streets. The real problem is undetected criminals, and insecure computers and protocols.
Most of these issues either are being addressed - or can be addressed without "fixing" the Internet.
TFA says that the internet was just an experimental demo that worked too well and ended up getting adopted. Wrong. It started as an experimental but real network that was to be used for real work. The basic principles were deliberately, and well, chosen.
The environment has changed, but the basic principle of a simple network with intelligence at the "edges" - in the devices that connect to the basic bit-shuffling network - is sound. That above all is what has allowed so many innovative services to be rapidly and successfully deployed.
This allows some less desirable features, but that's the price of flexibility. Same with roads: they are a flexible network, which means the bad guys can use them for trafficking or drive stolen cars. If you build too many controls into a system, you make it less versatile.
The problem with "sweeping technical improvements" is that improvements are often tradeoffs, and (as someone else pointed out) any changes will have the grubby claws of "stakeholders" all over them. They are most likely to serve powerful interests rather than users and they are much less likely to foster the innovation that has made the internet such an explosive success, and such a multiplier of potential.
The article also has a slightly US-centric view of the IP6 issue. In other parts of the world there is not the same relative abundance of IP addresses, and IP6 deployment seems to be a bit further ahead. The Beijing Olympics used IPv6, and ISPs in India and Australia for example run commercial IP6 services.
But the directive would only have effect in UK law under the enabling legislation subsequently introduced in the UK (or resulting from ECJ judgements based on the doctrine that the UK had failed to properly implement the directive). The UK implementing legislation could have stated that standards must be notified to the EU, but whether or not it did, and whether it specified that standards-related legislation would not come into effect without such notification are two further and distinct questions.
Even if both were true, parliament cannot bind its successors (at least according to diehard "parliamentary sovereignty" constitutional theorists), so that if it wanted, it could ignore any such rule. If it did not explicitly disclaim such a restriction (assuming there is one) courts might well hold that the restriction had implicit effect due to the earlier legislation implementing the directive.
As a side issue, if any law explicitly disclaimed such a requirement, you could have a constitutional ambiguity (crisis?) on which the UK courts (and possibly eventually the ECJ) would have to rule. If the UK wanted to push things, and the courts were minded to agree, UK courts could refuse to implement or observe the ECJ rulings where specifically overridden by the UK, and there would be a full blown EU constitutional crisis. It's unlikely to happen though, but that would probably be the shape of the underlying doctrine.
So it's not been shown that there is any legislative basis for the claim that the "law" is invalid because it has not been notified to the EU.
IANAL etc...
Not true.
Past directives have affected topics like: anti-discrimination measures, the environment, intellectual property, privacy and data protection, technology and safety, weights and measures, pharmaceuticals, culture, and wildlife and nature conservation.
Even if true, your restriction would be no more limiting than the US rule about for the purposes of regulating interstate commerce.
There is always a reason - it could be murder, assault, drunk and disorderly -- or being too tall in possession of a camera (though he avoided the cells by the skin of his teeth).
Of course prisoners need to be treated with respect, but I wonder if the target-driven culture is going a bit too far here. Whatever happened to professionalism and pride in doing a job properly?
This isn't one of those corporate surveys that carefully avoids any questions on what the real problems are? Surveys for the sake of "we need a survey" are often a waste of time.
Since there is not much info in TFA or the summary, here's some more.
Colin Holder was a Detective Sergeant with the Metropolitan Police for 33 years or so, and left in 2004. He now works in "security and investigations".
At some time he amassed "approximately 120 million personal records that have been phished/hacked and sold between criminals on the internet". Now he's offering a free summary of the information he has, and a £10 full listing, available once you verify your identity. £10 is also what you'd pay if you made a request under the Data Protection Act for the data he holds. Also, he's not storing the information you provide to do a lookup (which is name and either postal or email address) -- unless you buy the full version of a report, clearly. He also provides information on what he's doing, guidance on security, and an explanation of why, for instance, it's not necessarily helpful to victims for him to report the data loss to credit card companies.
More data on his site.
I think he's trying to offer a useful service, and does not intend this as a scam. It's even probably socially useful to be able to know if your data is "out there". But it's hard to see if it's legal under the Data Protection Act in the UK or equivalent legislation in any EU state - assuming the collection and processing of the data happened or happens in an EU jurisdiction.
The DPA requires data to be "fairly obtained" - there is lots of guidance on exactly what this means. He may try to argue that gathering such "freely (or criminally or commercially) available" data from the net, for the limited purpose of alerting the victims, is "fair". Good luck with that - I don't think there is any precedent for that, and the legal costs could exceed the £160K he's spent so far.
The DPA also limits how long the data can be held, and the uses to which it can be put -- it has to match the purposes for which it was gathered. It's an interesting question when this legal "collection" happened - whether it was the original collection from the victims (in some case legally), any intermediate hacking (unlikely), or the Mr Holder's scraping up exercise (in which case, how could there be consent to his "purposes"?).
One issue this highlights is that, if you ever allow an EU company to share your data, or ever give data to a non-EU company, there are no limits on what they can do with it. Your data is now an asset of the company, and they can change their T&C retroactively to allow whatever use they like. So can anyone who purchases the information, or who obtains it when the "owners" go bust.
You can see why it might be useful to know if your data is "out there", and even whether it is limited to commercial organisations, or crime / hacker networks.
Maybe a change in the law to allow that might be good -- on a carefully regulated basis, so the data is not just another tradeable asset!
IANAL, WMMV, yadda, yadda...
Not really - If a politician is taking bribes, it's in the public interest for him to be named, so he can be stopped, and punished.
If whistle-blower is anonymously revealing details of wrongdoing by his superiors, it is NOT in the public interest for him to be named, since his superiors are likely to punish him, or prevent further revelations of their wrongdoing, and thus avoid punishment themselves.
If the whistle-blower has, however, been identified, the Judge says the law cannot compel those who unmasked him [the Times] to keep his identity secret. Even though it is not in the public interest to unmask him, it is not in the public interest to prevent publication where a person does not have an additional right of privacy -- and the judge held that engaging in public debate removes any additional right he might have as a non-public figure.