Unfortunately, the previous, very pro-US, government in the UK signed a treaty that allows the US to extradite anyone from the UK, more or less on demand, with no requirement to prove that any crime has been committed.
Of course "terrorism" was used as an excuse, but the treaty is being invoked in many cases where the person concerned seems to have committed only a trivial offence, or in some cases to have done something that was perfectly legal in the UK.
The treaty is very controversial here in the UK: many people feel that the US is using the mere process of extradition as a form of punishment in itself. Sadly, there is a public perception here that the US legal system is vindictive and heavily biased.
And yet you continue to sell your product to the government, despite knowing that it does not do what they want it to do, and that in consequence it will ruin the lives of innocent victims.
There is a blacklist of banned web pages. Each entry on the blacklist also specifies the IP address of that page.
The routing at the ISP is set up so that IP addresses on the blacklist go to a transparent proxy, and other IP addresses are unaffected.
The transparent proxy blocks the web pages on the blacklist, but allows access to all other web pages on the affected IP addresses.
How do I know? Because this is the system (called cleanfeed) that most ISPs in the UK have already installed to do the government-mandated web censoring that we've already got.
Fine, if you trust the utility company to never make a mistake. But why on earth should anyone who is using a Paypal account to receive money, allow Paypal the facility to take as much money from them as it chooses? Once you've set up a direct debit, they can clear out your bank account, and there's nothing you can do about it. And why would they ask for this facility, unless they think that, at some time, they are going to take your money without your permission?
1. No, presumably because they are not actually censoring very much. When a Wikipedia page got onto the list, the performance went to hell. 2. Yes. I believe this has happened. 3. Hard to say. Presumably the cost is that of the filtering hardware, plus the cost of the people who maintain the list. All of it seems to be paid for by the ISPs themselves. 4. It can't be. There can't be many kiddie porn websites, given that they are illegal everywhere, so if there's any real trade in that sort of stuff it will be underground, so unaffected by the censors. My guess is that it's main effect is to allow half-a-dozen or so perverts to spend their working days looking at stuff that secretly turns them on, without any fear of reprisal. And, of course, the filtering hardware is all there ready for the day when the government decides that we shouldn't be allowed to see whatever it is that they are going to ban next.
It's just as crazy as paying money for a string of 1s and 0s in an mp3 file. So maybe these criminals were not thieves at all. They must have been pirates.
However, there is no way at the present to compare them to the artificial ultra-hard diamonds known as lonsdaleite and boron nitride, Ferroir said.
Boron nitride is not diamond at all, and lonsdaleite is described by Wikipedia as an allotrope of carbon that is found in meteorites and is harder than diamonds. Perhaps these people have just re-discovered something that was already known.
I don't know about the law in the US, but here in the UK you must NOT tell the police if you come across kiddie porn accidentally like this.
In the UK, possession of this stuff (even cartoons) is a "strict liability" offence. If you've got it, you've broken the law, no matter how you came by it. So, if you tell the police that you've got it, they can (and will) prosecute you.
There are lots of laws like this in the UK, and they are becoming more common: the government likes them because they eliminate any possibility of people successfully defending themselves in court. Of course they leave open the possibility that you can be forced to commit a crime against your will - even by the police - and then punished for it.
Another indicator of the decline of democracy is the rise of the power of the military. Considering that Aristotle was employed as the tutor of Alexander the Great, you would have thought he would have pointed that out.
the rule should be a simple one: if you are an EU national you are allowed residency in the UK, otherwise not
Why?
OK, we've got a political treaty with the EU, but if you were starting from scratch, why pick on any one country and give its people more favourable status than any others?
If they're so locked down that the students can't do what they want with them, then no, they won't.
They will just teach the students to accept spoon-fed information and not to try to investigate anything for themselves.
I stayed with them for a few months after their takeover by Thus, until a new ISP installed ADSL+ in our exchange. In that time, the bandwidth I was getting deteriorated enormously, and their customer service changed from an engineer who understood "I can see your pings hitting my firewall" to a call centre worker in India who could only say "reinstall windows". And after I left, they forgot to remove me from their billing system, so they kept sending me letters threatening court action and bailiffs.
That must have been a couple of years ago now, and they were trying to get this e-billing system to work back then. They kept on sending me emails about it, but I could never log in to it. If it's taken them until now to get it working, their competence must be worse than I remember.
Fantastic, so after you are done rounding up all the teenagers posting with attitude and skinheads, how is this system going to help find competent threats?
There was a case here a few days ago, where some teenagers who wrote in their diaries some fantasy story about blowing up their school were arrested and held in jail for some months and then tried as terrorists. Luckily they got a jury trial: the jury acquitted them straight away, and then took the trouble to wait outside the court to congratulate them on their release.
The next step for the authorities will have to be to abolish jury trials for terrorist offenses.
Actually, the metadata (program times, etc) can be downloaded for free, in machine-readable form, from one of the BBC's own websites: they also supply the data from all their rival broadcasters. So programs like mythtv get this data for free.
There's a disclaimer that it's for personal use only: I think they are at the same time providing the data feed free to everyone, and also selling it to Microsoft for use by their media player program. I hope they're charging Microsoft a lot of money for it.
Since most mammals manage to feed their babies without obvious breasts, it's generally accepted by biologists that human breasts *are* for waving around in public.
Having sold "unlimited" access at a fixed price, ISPs run on tight margins, so one simple email or phone call, plus the subsequent dealing with the customer, will wipe out the whole year's profit from that customer. So what in practice will happen if ISPs go down this route is that they will simply start blocking the ports for IRC and mail. And then the malware will move to another protocol, and that will be blocked, and so on.
I suspect the the law of unintended consequences will mean that we'll end up with ISPs that provide access only to http and https.
Absolutely. Thank goodness these people were caught and put in prison for talking about doing something. And thank goodness that their guilt was so obvious that a jury could be convinced that they were guilty after only only two trials for the same offence. Although I see that they are going to get a third trial, as they weren't found quite guilty enough the first two times.
Some might think that keeping on trying someone with different juries until you find a jury that gives the answer you want would be some sort of abuse of the legal process. But not us Brits!
There certainly is a political entity called the Republic of Ireland. Most people in Britain either call it that, or else call it Eire, in order to distinguish it from Ireland the geographical region, which is not a single political entity.
Of couse the name of the Republic of Ireland is just Ireland (or else Eire, depending on which language you are using). But all attentive readers of Alice Through the Looking Glass will know that there is often a difference between the name of something, and what it is called.
Yes, because it's really confusing when we get mixed up between (say) heroin, a wicked and dangerous drug, and diamorphine, a useful medicine. Or between medical marijuana and the addictive stuff. Or between codeine and cough mixture. Or...
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Unfortunately, the previous, very pro-US, government in the UK signed a treaty that allows the US to extradite anyone from the UK, more or less on demand, with no requirement to prove that any crime has been committed.
Of course "terrorism" was used as an excuse, but the treaty is being invoked in many cases where the person concerned seems to have committed only a trivial offence, or in some cases to have done something that was perfectly legal in the UK.
The treaty is very controversial here in the UK: many people feel that the US is using the mere process of extradition as a form of punishment in itself. Sadly, there is a public perception here that the US legal system is vindictive and heavily biased.
And yet you continue to sell your product to the government, despite knowing that it does not do what they want it to do, and that in consequence it will ruin the lives of innocent victims.
Are you overcome by greed, or just plain evil?
If I were a nefarious evildoer, I would simply join the trusted traveler scheme myself.
Why not? If "do you intend to become a suicide bomber" is one of the questions, I can simply answer "no". How would anyone know that I was lying?
How do I know? Because this is the system (called cleanfeed) that most ISPs in the UK have already installed to do the government-mandated web censoring that we've already got.
Fine, if you trust the utility company to never make a mistake. But why on earth should anyone who is using a Paypal account to receive money, allow Paypal the facility to take as much money from them as it chooses? Once you've set up a direct debit, they can clear out your bank account, and there's nothing you can do about it. And why would they ask for this facility, unless they think that, at some time, they are going to take your money without your permission?
They'll be making a loss at that price, though. They'll make their profit from the cost of the calls. You can't do that trick with a computer.
1. No, presumably because they are not actually censoring very much. When a Wikipedia page got onto the list, the performance went to hell.
2. Yes. I believe this has happened.
3. Hard to say. Presumably the cost is that of the filtering hardware, plus the cost of the people who maintain the list. All of it seems to be paid for by the ISPs themselves.
4. It can't be. There can't be many kiddie porn websites, given that they are illegal everywhere, so if there's any real trade in that sort of stuff it will be underground, so unaffected by the censors. My guess is that it's main effect is to allow half-a-dozen or so perverts to spend their working days looking at stuff that secretly turns them on, without any fear of reprisal. And, of course, the filtering hardware is all there ready for the day when the government decides that we shouldn't be allowed to see whatever it is that they are going to ban next.
So how many of his women did he offer to you?
It's just as crazy as paying money for a string of 1s and 0s in an mp3 file.
So maybe these criminals were not thieves at all. They must have been pirates.
So that you can exceed your download cap in 5 minutes instead of half an hour?
However, there is no way at the present to compare them to the artificial ultra-hard diamonds known as lonsdaleite and boron nitride, Ferroir said.
Boron nitride is not diamond at all, and lonsdaleite is described by Wikipedia as an allotrope of carbon that is found in meteorites and is harder than diamonds. Perhaps these people have just re-discovered something that was already known.
"Did this particular guy "learn from his mistake"?
Well, he claims to have "inadvertently" forgotten what he did. If he forgot about it, he can't have learned much from it.
I don't know about the law in the US, but here in the UK you must NOT tell the police if you come across kiddie porn accidentally like this.
In the UK, possession of this stuff (even cartoons) is a "strict liability" offence. If you've got it, you've broken the law, no matter how you came by it. So, if you tell the police that you've got it, they can (and will) prosecute you.
There are lots of laws like this in the UK, and they are becoming more common: the government likes them because they eliminate any possibility of people successfully defending themselves in court. Of course they leave open the possibility that you can be forced to commit a crime against your will - even by the police - and then punished for it.
Another indicator of the decline of democracy is the rise of the power of the military. Considering that Aristotle was employed as the tutor of Alexander the Great, you would have thought he would have pointed that out.
Have you tried a tinfoil hat?
Why?
OK, we've got a political treaty with the EU, but if you were starting from scratch, why pick on any one country and give its people more favourable status than any others?
If they're so locked down that the students can't do what they want with them, then no, they won't. They will just teach the students to accept spoon-fed information and not to try to investigate anything for themselves.
I stayed with them for a few months after their takeover by Thus, until a new ISP installed ADSL+ in our exchange. In that time, the bandwidth I was getting deteriorated enormously, and their customer service changed from an engineer who understood "I can see your pings hitting my firewall" to a call centre worker in India who could only say "reinstall windows". And after I left, they forgot to remove me from their billing system, so they kept sending me letters threatening court action and bailiffs.
That must have been a couple of years ago now, and they were trying to get this e-billing system to work back then. They kept on sending me emails about it, but I could never log in to it. If it's taken them until now to get it working, their competence must be worse than I remember.
There was a case here a few days ago, where some teenagers who wrote in their diaries some fantasy story about blowing up their school were arrested and held in jail for some months and then tried as terrorists. Luckily they got a jury trial: the jury acquitted them straight away, and then took the trouble to wait outside the court to congratulate them on their release.
The next step for the authorities will have to be to abolish jury trials for terrorist offenses.
Actually, the metadata (program times, etc) can be downloaded for free, in machine-readable form, from one of the BBC's own websites: they also supply the data from all their rival broadcasters. So programs like mythtv get this data for free.
There's a disclaimer that it's for personal use only: I think they are at the same time providing the data feed free to everyone, and also selling it to Microsoft for use by their media player program. I hope they're charging Microsoft a lot of money for it.
Since most mammals manage to feed their babies without obvious breasts, it's generally accepted by biologists that human breasts *are* for waving around in public.
Having sold "unlimited" access at a fixed price, ISPs run on tight margins, so one simple email or phone call, plus the subsequent dealing with the customer, will wipe out the whole year's profit from that customer. So what in practice will happen if ISPs go down this route is that they will simply start blocking the ports for IRC and mail. And then the malware will move to another protocol, and that will be blocked, and so on.
I suspect the the law of unintended consequences will mean that we'll end up with ISPs that provide access only to http and https.
Absolutely. Thank goodness these people were caught and put in prison for talking about doing something. And thank goodness that their guilt was so obvious that a jury could be convinced that they were guilty after only only two trials for the same offence. Although I see that they are going to get a third trial, as they weren't found quite guilty enough the first two times.
Some might think that keeping on trying someone with different juries until you find a jury that gives the answer you want would be some sort of abuse of the legal process. But not us Brits!
There certainly is a political entity called the Republic of Ireland. Most people in Britain either call it that, or else call it Eire, in order to distinguish it from Ireland the geographical region, which is not a single political entity.
Of couse the name of the Republic of Ireland is just Ireland (or else Eire, depending on which language you are using). But all attentive readers of Alice Through the Looking Glass will know that there is often a difference between the name of something, and what it is called.
Yes, because it's really confusing when we get mixed up between (say) heroin, a wicked and dangerous drug, and diamorphine, a useful medicine. Or between medical marijuana and the addictive stuff. Or between codeine and cough mixture. Or...