Posts by david wilson

RAC prof: Road charges can end the ripoff of motorists

1984???

>>"There is no need for black box recorders / GPS / ANPR tracking which is just an excuse to spy on drivers."

That'd be 'spy on people driving on public roads', I guess?

Would you have a problem with black box data being used in accident investigation?

For example, if someone was doing 70 in a 30 zone just before they were involved in a serious accident, do you think it's unfair for data from their vehicle to be used against them, and if so, why is it unfair?

Some people might see a car as an extension of their personal space, but unless they're driving it around on their own property, how that little bubble of personal space moves around does affect other people in all kinds of ways.

>>"I own a number of cars, but I can only drive one at a time, so why do I have to pay for road tax on all of them when they are not parked on the road, you can SORN but that's not all that convenient."

If I owned a load of houses, I'd still have to pay council tax on them all, even if I only lived in one at once.

If there was going to be some kind of discount for multiple vehicle ownership, that'd be fine if everyone played by the rules, but it'd be pretty certain that some people would start to take the piss, and register as the keeper for multiple vehicles that ended up being driven by other people.

Unless, of course, there was an automated way to make sure that only the registered keeper drove their vehicles, or that multiple vehicles weren't being driven at the same time, but that'd probably be getting too 1984-ish for some people....

@Bernard

>>"By installing GPS monitoring equipment in your vehicle to determine the charges for road-use that will apply to you. Thus, someBODY will have a nice complete record of your movements. No doubt it'll be handily stored next to your phone & email logs, and your DNA records."

That might impinge on your privacy (or at least your car's privacy) but it doesn't necessarily impinge on your freedom to travel,

If you're planning on going somewhere (for legal, dubious or illegal activities) which is so sensitive that merely parking close to your destination could arouse suspicion, then even now you'd probably be better advised to walk the last bit of the journey.

Secretly plotting to overthrow or embarrass the government? Probably best not all drive to the house of your cell leader.

Visiting your mistress (or your Mistress)? Might be an idea to park a street or two away.

Were anyone to get flagged up as someone whose driving records were of interest, likely their movements could be followed fairly well from their mobile records, who they have talked to could be found out from phone and email records, etc.

It seems like the people who would have reasonable reasons not to have their movements possibly traceable would also have to be careful to avoid leaving trails by any other methods.

If they were going to bother being that careful, then they could probably manage to get to suspicious locations other than by driving straight to them.

>>"Done nothing wrong? You don't need to have. With this level of information those in power will be able to fabricate whatever they like about your activities."

Why would they bother?

Aren't there enough people they are concerned about?

If The Powers That Be really wanted to frame me for something, they could easily do it already by planting a little bit of forensic evidence, just as they could easily have done in the past by getting police to make up a confession.

Vehicle movement records alone wouldn't necessarily be much use - if someone could find out my car had been driven from Bristol to Ipswich and back on given dates, that would be useless information for someone trying to frame me for a crime in Ipswich unless they also knew I was in the car, and that I didn't have an alibi for the time they wanted to frame me for.

For all they knew, I could have driven to Ipswich and then immediately got a lift to Edinburgh with 4 impeccable witnesses.

If they'd need to have had contemporary surveillance to be sure where I was and what I was doing, how would the vehicle records actually help them?

Honestly, the feeling I get is that some people have a pretty inflated idea of their own importance.

Given how easy it was for the government to pretty much ignore all the Iraq protests, on the scale *they* were on, I'm wondering which people think their own opinion (and their presentation of that opinion) is so universally convincing and so threatening to the Establishment that a massive state conspiracy will frame them if they even think about speaking their mind?

If such people actually do exist, what is their past history of actually doing anything meaningful?

To frame a critic in order to silence any others only seems likely to really work when people widely suspect that charges were trumped-up.

Try doing it a few times and it gets pretty hard to get anyone to believe that the charges are actually correct.

That's the kind of thing you can only really get away with when you already have a seriously oppressive state, and as such, it's more a symptom than a cause of loss of freedom.

@Iain 4

>>"I could ditch my dull 1.6L 4-pot and replace it with a hulk of V8 Mustang, for little to no increase in running costs. "

You're confident that charging would be a single rate for all types of car?

@Bernard

>>"3) Increase in surveilance (Cameras everywhere, GCHQ plans to tap phones & internet comms)"

You mean they're not *already* doing it to people they consider of interest?

What have we been paying them to do for the last 65 years?

>>"4) Increase in covert policing (Kettling, police officers disguising identity, FIT)"

I'm not sure I'd count ketting and covering up numbers as 'covert' in the strictest sense.

>>"6) Monitoring of movement/restriction of freedom to travel (See this article)"

How does charging people to drive restrict their freedom to travel any more than charging them to get on a plane/train/bus does?

@Jusme

>>"When will people realise that road pricing is not about revenue (fuel tax covers that just fine) or congestion (which is self-limiting), but is about tracking and restriction of free movement."

Even given a database of pretty fine-grained data about vehicle movements, how many people would be likely to *become* of interest to the authorities simply as a result of where they drive, given that most people spend most of their journeys on driving to/from work, driving to go shopping, driving kids to school, etc.

I don't see road pricing as being likely to affect where I drive for privacy reasons, even if (like fuel tax) it might affect my economic choices.

What kinds of legitimate activities (including lawful dissent) would the information coming from road pricing be likely to impinge on, and how does that balance against the potential usefulness of the information for legitimate state functions such as non-oppressive law enforcement?

@AC 11:16

>>"As opposed to currently when the Have Nots drive around without Mot, VED or Insurance and cost the rest of us more."

Wouldn't some kinds of road pricing (such as via loads of ANPR cameras) at least go some way towards catching *them*?

@Mr T

Some kind of charging for heavy overseas vehicles would be an idea, though if that happened, I guess it might cause people to wonder if UK-based heavy vehicles were paying enough to cover the wear and tear that they cause to roads (is it something like wear being proportional to the 4th power of axle weight)?

Would there be competition-based limits on what it was legal to charge foreign vehicles compared to the overall charges levied on UK vehicles?

The generally interesting thing to me is that the "It's easier for foreign truckers" argument seems to come up pretty much every time fuel duty is mentioned, but I've yet to see or hear a single journalist ask anyone making the claim to explain what they actually mean by it.

One could almost be forgiven for thinking that *some* journalists are much more interested in finding people who are angry or who disagree with each other than with helping people actually understand how the world functions.

@Not all trucks go abroad...

So the unfairness doesn't come down to where a vehicle is *registered*, but down to some vehicles (UK or foreign-owned) effectively being fuel-subsidised for inside-UK work by having trips across the channel paid for(*)

I guess that'd maybe make it easier for large UK and overseas (and particularly transnational) firms to benefit by being able to mix UK and international work more easily than an owner-operator might.

Given owner-operators in Dover and Calais, the foreign one only seems to have an advantage if they can get cross-channel work more easily than the English one could.

(*though presumably an avid free-marketeer would suggest that in such a situation, competition should cause hauliers to lower their fees for cross-channel work in order to reap the fuel rewards?)

@Dr Dan Holdsworth

>>"The net effect is to exert a drag on transporting anything in the UK, except if you use a continental trucking firm running on cheap foreign diesel."

Could you expand on that?

It seems to get suggested by someone every time fuel duty is mentioned, but it's not immediately obvious how a foreign trucking firm could manage to run on foreign diesel more easily than a UK firm could, assuming UK and foreign vehicles following identical schedules.

I guess it must be down to some non-obvious fact[s] about the trucking business that people making the comments must know, and assume everyone else knows as well.

Do foreign trucks get cheaper channel crossings than a UK firm?

Do they get access to cheaper fuel if they fill up abroad than a UK trucker would get if filling up abroad?

Are they allowed to have larger fuel tanks than UK trucks, allowing them to work over here on their foreign fuel for longer than a UK truck which hopped across the channel for a fill-up could get?

Are they allowed to import cheap foreign diesel in bulk in tankers to run a trucking fleet over here, whereas a UK company couldn't?

Or is it something else (please explain if so).

@Paul

Indeed - I'd wonder where roads would be supposed to be built in the UK in order to drop vehicle density down by a factor of 2-2.5?

Blizzard exposes real names on WoW forums

@AC

>>"Someone whose "real name" is John Smith has nothing to lose, but someone whose "real name" is Thadaeus Odling-Smee loses their privacy whenever their name is attached to something."

Indeed. Even if this is my real name, I'm probably fairly safe.

Whereas with a mate of mine, just googling his *first* name comes up with the first 5 hits being him.

Fair enough, he does use the internet a fair bit, but he doesn't go out of the way to publicise himself.

Scotland allows collection of children's DNA

@Intractable Potsherd

>>"Nothing you do as a child of less than 12 should affect the rest of your life as a result of government action. Punishment and/or treatment should be swift, finite, and essentially unrecorded."

I'd basically agree with that.

It's just that keeping DNA/fingerprints on file in the short term could potentially lead to swifter punishment for children who repeat wrongdoing.

What happens with records later is a tricky issue.

Someone who has done something seriously bad when very young but seems to have learned from the experience shouldn't necessarily have it hound them for the rest of their life.

It's easy to imagine some dangerous-but-basically-daft things that kids do and generally get away with having serious outcomes simply as a result of bad luck, or things that could have ended reasonably benignly escalating to something awful as a result of just a tiny lack of self-control.

However, when there's someone who seems to be an unrepentant serial (and likely future) offender), does it make sense to discard some or all of their records when they hit a certain age?

Early intervention?

If anything, I'd have thought it might be *more* important to try and nip reoffending by children in the bud as soon as possible, in the hope they might yet be divertable from a long life of future crime.

Also, as far as civil liberties are concerned, what privacy rights do children really have in practice, given the amount of legitimate scrutiny they can be under from parents and others?

For children who have actually done something seriously wrong, isn't that often down to them *not* being adequately supervised?

The issue of what happens to criminal records later, and who has access to them is certainly one that needs thinking about, but seems relatively distinct from the short-term keeping of data to help rapidly detect reoffending.

First true submarine captured from American drug smugglers

Hiding a submarine?

Could a submarine be fairly effectively masked from much detection by shadowing a friendly surface vessel?

Could a sub even be towed underwater for the larger part of a long journey, lessening its need for long independent range, and also providing comfortable accommodation for most of the crew, etc?

Two infosec blunders that betrayed the Russian spy ring

Decoys?

Some interesting speculations about decoys here, but ones that do rather raise a couple of questions.

a) If the people involved were decoys, is the FBI really dumb enough to fall for them as being examples of the best Russia can do, or to assume that because they'd found some agents that must mean there can't possibly be any more?

b) If the FBI really *is* that dumb, then why would some 'proper' spies using effectively untraceable communications be worried enough about them to bother having decoys in the first place?

Misinformation?

>>"That's either rather clever or extremely stupid, depending on what was inside the box it unlocked."

Indeed, especially if a box can be opened multiple ways.

It would seem pretty trivial to use some easily-remembered obscure phrase as a password - some section of a book, or a remembered poem starting at a particular letter, so it's hard to see why a password would need to be written down - even if someone had a bad memory, it's not hard to write a cryptic hint that anyone else would have immense difficulty in understanding.

Though thinking about the story in question, if *I* was going to covertly break into someone's house to copy their hard drive with no guarantee I'd be likely to find the necessary passwords stuck to the monitor surround on a Post-It note, I'd be tempted to install a software or hardware keylogger, to be on the safe side.

If I *had* done that, and got useful information from it, I'd be very tempted to later on loudly tell everyone that I'd found the passwords stupidly written down. The agents and their bosses would know I wasn't being honest, but the agents might well not protest I was lying about that, since they'd have nothing obviously to gain by protesting, and potentially things to gain by playing the game and co-operating at least passively.

It'd be no bad thing for either the US or Russian authorities to have the bulk of people they're *domestically* interested in think that keeping passwords unwritten makes a huge difference to security.

@Bounty

>>"An Ad-hoc setup forces the FBI to be in the area to intercept the data, but if your encryption is setup correctly that isn't a problem. They should have encrypted the message, then steno'd that into some home made porn, anonymously posted to the net. :>"

Indeed - that could be a pretty good cover for communications - hot insatiable couple uploading their dogging or BDSM pictures, and downloading other people's.

Or even someone with a large ego uploading countless pictures of themselves to Flickr or Facebook.

Though I guess the first option could lead to some amusing embarrassment for buttoned-up security officials and prosecutors if things ever did get found out.

@JohnG

>>"An undercover FBI agent managed to convince Anna Chapman that he was sent to help her [...]

After this, she must have realised something was wrong, [...] The FBI must then have realised they had been rumbled and decided to arrest everyone before they escaped."

Surely the act of trying to get someone to report to a fake handler is highly likely to lead to suspicion and then proof of a compromised surveillance operation sooner rather than later, and as such indicates that the FBI either thought things wouldn't last much longer, or that they were bored after spending years watching people who weren't [apparently] doing much of national importance?

Naomi Campbell to appear in war crimes trial

liar?

>>"If she were smart (intelligent) , which she isn't, she'd just admit the truth: that'd do less harm to her image and reputation."

That rather depends what she might have done with the [alleged] rock, if it existed, and whether any forgetfulness with respect to customs or tax authorities might have occurred.

@Thk11

>>"and that includes the ones that work in the investment banks on damn good contractor rates! I know because I've asked them"

Do you think that people who go for well-paid jobs in the banking sectors should be expected to be significantly *less* interested in money compared to the average person, or compared to people who choose to work in professions like medicine or education?

Money?

>>"It's that old money thing again. Oh yes it is. The most important thing on the mind of a women when marrying men is financial security, and if they're loaded, it helps."

I'd wonder if it was more of a commitment thing - though there are some gold-diggers around, I'd have thought that for many (maybe most?) women, it's the extent to which someone might spend more than they can easily afford that would impress more than the absolute value of an object.

A diamond ring that cost someone a months's wages would be more meaningful than one that was rather more expensive but given by someone for whom the cost was chicken feed.

In that situation, the reason diamond-based tokens are valued isn't down to what they're *worth*, but purely to what they *cost*, which doesn't make life too hard for De Beers' promotional tactics.

HK 'Dog Man' cuffed for voodoo ritual sex

@HFoster

>>"I hereby demand a Kettle of Fuckery icon."

There might be some copyright issues there.

I understand it's the name chosen for a new range of downmarket bistros by Gordon Ramsay.

Interesting

I guess it's at a rather different level from someone pretending to be more successful than they are in order to get a one-night-stand, since a lot of the time the 'victim' of that latter practice will suspect more or less strongly that they're being spun a line, but will willingly suspend their disbelief in the interests of a good temporary fantasy.

However, it does raise some rather interesting points.

Is it legally fair to consider someone's religious/spiritual belief as a kind of mental disability or vulnerability while also legally tolerating the promotion of some or all religions?

If someone can effectively say (or have said for them) that they're not fully responsible due to their beliefs when it comes to being the victim of a crime, can they do the same if they're the perpetrator?

What if the guy actually believes or claims to believe that there are ghost embryos and that he can cure them?

Just because he might have something to gain by believing that doesn't mean he can't believe it - were that the case one would have to conclude that all clergy were actually lying nonbelievers.

In the absence of more information (like evidence he was boasting about fooling someone) is it reasonable to say that he can't possibly be daft enough to believe his explanation yet be perfectly reasonable to say that the victim is daft enough to believe it?

New surveillance-CSI method: Beverage hair-isotope trail

Untraceable?

Presumably for the few spies and subversives, and the rather larger number of paranoid people of no interest to TPTB, they'd have to increasingly worry about being tracked *because* they'd paid for a ticket with cash, via cameras in the ticket office/machine, and/or near the turnstile where they swipe that suspiciously 'untraceable' ticket?

'It's as though I've got Jonathan Ive's personal tool in my...'

Hmmm.

However irritating Fry might be at his luvvie best, he can at least write readably.

It's possible to bracket sections of text and still leave things readable, and also to punctuate things into a pig's breakfast. A parody of Fry that is pretty much unreadable does't really work

This article seems to be the literary equivalent of a stereotyped 70's copper trying to go undercover in a gay bar.

Google vanishes Android apps from citizen phones

@AC 25/6

>>"You've developed some software for the Android and decided to sell it. People buy it. Google decide to flick the "kill" switch. Your reputation is pants, and you have all those people knocking on your door asking for their money back"

What about:

There's *no* kill switch. You've developed some software for the Android and decided to sell it. People buy it. Google decide to say your software is a security risk and mail people suggesting they uninstall it ASAP. Your reputation is pants, and you have all those people knocking on your door asking for their money back.

With or without a kill switch, were Google to decide to declare your software dangerous, the end result seems likely to be much the same.

Neuroscientist: iPhone 4's 'Retina display' not bullsh*t

Pixels?

Surely the important thing about a display would be the distance at which lines and edges of various angles and colour combinations look smooth rather than jagged?

Vision seems to be rather more about lines, edges, areas, etc than pixels.

Speed cameras slide out of LibCon budget

@Mike Banahan

>>You have to try that road. The limits vary from 30, 40, 60 almost randomly. There are some substantial clear stretches where any prudent driver is going to assume that the limit is 40 and when you are straining your eyes to drive safely it really is the last thing you want to do to have you attention focused on the apparently arbitrarily placed limit signs - as any fule no it's not exactly going to improve you attention to other vehicles, pedestrians, cycles etc."

The speed limit *should* be something that people can be aware of without much deliberate looking beyond observing the road ahead, via well-placed limit signs and repeaters.

If that isn't the case, it's possible to end up accidentally speeding, but whether you end up caught by a camera or by live police, it's really the signage that's the issue there, not the being caught.

One pet hate of mine is speed limit changes on roundabout exits, especially exits with pedestrian crossings shortly afterwards.

Also, it does seem odd that when they take pains to make the cameras visible, they don't automatically put an obvious speed limit repeater near them.

As for randomly changing limits, I guess sometimes there are reasons for them, even if those reasons might not be obvious (seemingly minor junctions that actually have a fair bit of traffic, past record of accidents, etc.)

@AC 18/6 17:56

>>"I once overtook someone on the motorway who was doing exactly 70mph. He looked at me like I was the devil. It was dry, and light, and empty."

So did he turn round to look backwards at you before you got level with him, were you both driving along looking sideways rather than at the road, or did you turn round to look back at him once you were ahead?

New leader, same old job for Martha Lane Fox

Contribution?

>>"And while I'm here, can anyone please explain MLF's contribution to the history of the Internet? Was lastminute.com even an original idea?"

I always got the impression it was basically a case of MLF/lastminute having friends in the media to give free advertising - it seemed like pretty much out of nowhere lastminute & MLF were getting shedloads of regular media coverage even before starting to really do any business or make any waves online.

That said, at the time it did seem like the media were pretty keen to point out the Next Big Dotcom, so it might not have taken much initial friendly coverage to trigger more from bandwaggon-jumpers elsewhere.

Not that there's anything wrong in doing that, but using effective self-promotion doesn't by itself make anyone an authority on using the internet.

Is your office World Cup sweepstake legal?

@AC 09:37

Sometimes it can be better to have flexibility in enforcement than explicit exemptions in legislation.

If there are rigid limits of what is allowed, that can sometimes effectively be interpreted as saying 'anything more than this is definitely wrong', rather than 'anything less than this is harmless'.

Without fixed limits, it is still pretty hard to prosecute someone for doing what loads of other people do quite openly unless that person is obviously taking the piss, but it can be difficult to define precisely what 'taking the piss' actually is when it comes to drafting legislation.

If you had a fixed [legal] cap on the number of sweepstakes in an office per year, would that make someone (in management?) responsible for keeping a legal record of all the ones that have happened?

What is defined as 'an office'?

What happens if multiple people have their own small sweepstakes on an event in a large 'office'?

etc.

ID cards poster girl laments her £30

What's the story?

So a wannabe journalist decides to use the /launch/ of ID cards to try and get some free publicity for herself, and some people are surprised when she decides to use the /cancellation/ of ID cards to try and get some free publicity for herself?

O2 limits unlimited broadband packages

@John 186

>>"The entire industry is cynically making a profit from a service they're not actually in a position to provide."

They can't *continually* make a profit from a service they can't provide, unless they have

a) customers who don't realise that it isn't being provided (so presumably failing to hit invisible limits?)

or

b) customers who just complain rather than actually acting.

Whatever 'unlimited' might naturally lead someone unaware of the situation to think when they take out a service, once that person has actually run up against (or even heard ab out) a provider whose service isn't as unlimited as they hoped it might be, they shouldn't be misled by it again (fool me once, shame on you, etc.) even if they are still somewhat annoyed that it still happens.

*Personally*, I think it would be much better if the ASA (or trading standards or whoever) prevented people using the word unless their service was truly unlimited, or at least unless any reasonable use limits were both unavoidably obvious in the offer, and also higher than the limits on almost all explicitly limited services available elsewhere.

However, given that TPTB don't seem to be doing that, I can also see how it's hard for any one company to decide to be noble at the expense of getting business.

Revealed: Public sector's web gravy train

@Someone's Anonymous Alter Ego

>>""£100" per year. How the hell does that work? Let me guess, it's some minister's cousin who runs the only registrar allowed to provide .gov.uk domains."

Why guess, when you could actually just put a tiny bit of effort in, and find out?

Effectively, the registrar seems to be 'The UK Education and Research Networking Association', with requests for new names only allowed from approved ISPs.

However, there are rather a lot of such ISPs, who add their various markups to arrive at the prices they charge their customers, as is their commercial right.

I trust that when election time comes around, your research into which political party has the best policies is as exhaustive as your research into domain name allocation practices.

Fat cat fanbois' obscene dream bling

I'm assuming...

...that the Iphone is a bit like Damian Hirst's deeply tacky skull - basically announced for advertising purposes, even if no-one actually buys it (or like the skull, it's only bought by 'a private client i.e. Damian+mates as a publicity/price-fixing operation).

Sky punts 'truly unlimited' 20Mb/s broadband

Hmmm.

>>"Sky "maintains its commitment to being the only major ISP not to... ‘traffic shape’ speeds on any of its network products, giving its customers consistent, reliable broadband anytime of day", it said."

Would that be 'consistent' in the sense of 'depends on how loads of other people are using *their* net connection'?

Reverse-engineering artist busts face detection tech

But is it *art*?

For someone who (like almost everyone) isn't of interest to the government, and isn't planning a crime, this is probably a waste of time.

For anyone (like the great mass of people) carrying a mobile phone, this is probably a waste of time.

That said, I guess one of the defining characteristics of art is that whatever value it has doesn't lie in actually being useful.

Lower termination rates will bring pricey data

@Andy Watt

>>"I think [the EU] stuck their noses in, rocked the boat and will actually make the whole lot worse for most of us, apart from those who are on PAYG and "only put a tenner on every 6 months because why bother with anything else...." lazy bastards, get a landline, you've just meant that the era of (conceptually) unlimited wireless data will come to an end...

Surely, people who only put a tenner on a PAYG phone every 6 months do that largely because that covers how much they use the phone?

Maybe you think they should donate an extra tenner or two, not for themselves, but to subsidise someone else's unlimited wireless data?

Still, thanks for what you wrote.

It''l give me a lovely warm glow inside whenever I do my near-annual £10 topup.

Supersonic stealth jumpjet achieves its first mid-air hover

@Andrew

Indeed.

Presumably, it wouldn't be impossible to have one or more relatively small areas of deck for vertical landing, designed to cope with the heat?

Bloggers spring 'baccy happy landlord from slammer

@Ed

>>"Maybe EVERYONE should have the same rights. You know, smokers, gay people, women, black people, etc. etc. "

I thought that being non-white, or female or gay was just that - it's what people *are*, not something they *do*.

Meanwhile, being a smoker is like being a drummer. There are times and places where the act is OK, and times and places where it isn't, but having public places where it isn't allowed isn't necessarily some breach of fundamental human rights.

Let us legally rip discs, campaigner tells govt

Not really a new technology issue.

Surely, it's not a case of 'who's going to grass?', but a case of 'who actually cares'?

Music companies know pretty much everyone with an MP3 player is doing it, the same way they knew many (most?) people playing tapes in their cars and walkmans were playing tapes of LPs/CDs. As long as someone has bought something once, content owners are unlikely to really care, even if they might hope a few people will buy the same thing in numerous formats.

It'd be a huge PR fail to try and prosecute someone for playing their own music on an MP3 player, just as it would be to go after someone for taping a CD, or copying a video they already own onto a DVD.

If something is widespread, never acted against *and* seems fairly easy to defend morally without resort to dubious self-serving arguments, whether it gets officially classed as To Be Ignored now, later, or not at all doesn't seem particularly important.

BPI rejects scareletter approach to possible pirates

@Ben Norris

>>"

a) They don't prove that anything was uploaded when they log IPs

b) they can't prove that the logged IP was genuinely from the right ISP or spoofed

c) the ISPs records are not reliable enough to tie it to a certain household

d) when you get to the household there is no record to tie it to a specific PC

e) there is no way to prove it wasn't a trojan or somebody accessing a wireless AP

f) and finally there is no way to prove who was using the PC at the time."

I thought that at least some of the tracking *was* waiting for people to be sourcing copyright content before logging their IP address? That way, they can get people for making content available, not merely downloading it.

If that was the case, that deals with a)

As for b), if I actually connect to a machine via an IP address to download content from them, how can I keep a connection running in both directions if they have a fake address? Unlessthere's something between my machine and the internet which is doing some redirection, packets I send presumably must end up at the actual IP address.

Surely it's only if the packets I send disappear *and* someone can generate packets with a fake 'from' address' *and* they can anticipate all the packets I'd expect to get back that they could really spoof the address?

c) Are you sure that no ISP has reliable records of who had what IP address at a certain time?

Even for people with dynamic adresses, they don't change that often, and there are all kinds of reasons (including legal ones) for keeping the relatively tiny amount of data needed for a year or two of connection records.

Also, a lot of people have static IP addresses anyway.

d)+e) you might not be able to tie traffic to a specific PC from outside, but you *could* certainly do that if you had access to the machines, whether enforced, or with the co-operation of a responsible householder.

as for f), if you knew the filesharing was happening on a machine authorised to be on the network, that'd be a good justification for suspending network access if the customer had already had clear prior warnings that something was going on which they had done nothing about.

Even though civil damages don't look like the best way of dealing with everyday filesharing, if someone is unable/unwilling to control people they give network access to, then the buck does eventually stop with them, whether it's a loss of connection or even civil damages.

If someone is actually being *consistently* reckless as to what they allow to happen on the network they control, then they do have some liability.

Also, even though I'd say again that civil damages don't look like the best way of dealing with filesharing, *especially* if there haven't been any kind of initial warnings to deter the casual filesharer, for all the talk of the need for perfect evidence, Magna Carta, longstanding freedoms, hard-fought-for human rights, etc, people should remember that the burden of proof in civil cases *is* lower than in criminal cases - 'balance of probabilities' vs. 'beyond reasonable doubt'.

If there *had* been warnings and someone didn't take any action, they might find it quite hard to defend themselves in a subsequent civil action.

I think that's one of the major problems with letters out of the blue - they seem much more designed to make money than to stop people doing something, which is seriously unfair when there's a chance that the first thing a target ISP customer knows about someone abusing the network connection is a letter arriving.

In practice, in the first instance, there's a whole range of responsibility, from people not knowing that their network was insecure or that someone they allowed to use their network was doing something wrong through people who suspected or knew what was happening through to people doing it themselves.

Giving people warnings does give them the chance to sort things out, and also makes 'We honestly didn't know it was happening' much less of a usable response to future letters or actions.

Still needs some kinds of safeguards, though, so someone who really isn't capable of securing their network can get some cheap/free assistance if they need it. Which also obviously then makes "I didn't know how to/couldn't afford to fix it" less useful a s response to later letters.

I guess that's the thing about a more reasonable approach - the more reasonable and helpful it is, the better it is for the innocent customer, the easier it makes it for the casual offender to stop gracefully, and also the harder it makes it for the persistent offender to claim ignorance of what was happening, or a technical inability to prevent it happening again.

Which is ultimately what I guess many of the music industry people want - to stop people taking the piss, while not getting bad PR in the process.

Defects in e-passports allow real-time tracking

@markp 1

>>"We all make the stand together, and those of us who may be influential in keeping us free in the future, [...] then get the opportunity to work their magic."

Well, if our future freedom relies on people who haven't got the wit to use a simple workaround, I guess we're already screwed.

Also, if we got to the point where everyone was required to carry a unshielded RFID chip at all times *and* that was heavily enforced (like anyone passing a checkpoint without generating the appropriate signal being arrested), that would suggest that the people 'keeping us free in the future' would already have failed

'Tightly bound' stars seen locked in 'diabolic strip waltz'

@Rich 11

So they're basically each orbiting around a point roughly half-way between their centres then, with neither one really going around the other?

Multi-million investment hints at UK battery swap shops

@AC

Good point - probably could do with some expansion.

>>"if you mix non rechargables very bad things can happen when the full cells recharge the flat cells."

There's generally only a safety problem with lithium cells (primary or rechargeable).

Also, for virtually all battery-powered *consumer* kit, cells are in series.

When one goes flat before the rest, if the equipment still carries on drawing current, the dead cell it doesn't get recharged by the other cells, but reverse-charged.

For alkalines, that's not usually a great problem, though it may increase the chances of leakage.

For NiMH cells, reverse-charging can weaken or even wreck the cell, especially if prolonged.

For primary lithiums, reverse charging can lead to cell explosions.

For [common] rechargeable lithiums, reverse charging (or even excessive discharge) can lead to violent problems at the time, or on a subsequent charge, though rechargeable lithium battery pack and cells generally tend to have protection circuits built in to try and stop that happening.

Aussie man convicted for Simpsons smut

@AC 15:03

>>"Studies indicate..."

And do these studies actually indicate what the kind of person who would get a sexual thrill from images of naked children would do if those images aren't available?

Evidently, some people are quite capable of going from being sexually oriented towards children to practical activity without the need for any intervening pictures/chatrooms/whatever, since some people have been abusing children as far back in time as you care to think about.

What reliable statistics are there to show how many practical offenders wouldn't have been expected to do anything in the absence of images of offence?

If you remove the slippery slope, might you just end up with a cliff?

Fairly clearly, with the risks of prosecution and/or serious stigma that exist, for someone to deliberately search out [real] child pornography would seem to suggest that there was already more than just a passing interest.

Also, isn't there always a risk that if everyone is told that a particular kind of pornography leads to further criminal behaviour (or that taking soft drug X typically leads to harder drugs,or whatever) that that can help some people avoid taking responsibility for their future actions, since they can write them off as somehow inevitable and/or someone else's fault?

@cannon

>>"now is this considered illegal as she is being sexual dressed as a school girl."

If it's Australia you're talking of, that might depend how buxom she was.

@Mark 65

>>"That was my first reaction to this piece but then I thought what about the mind of the individual who has been caught doing it for a second time?"

Not only that, but the police [allegedly] got tipped off by someone, which implies not only was he doing it again, but he was telling people he was doing it.

Even if the law is wrong, that does seem a bit reckless.

Which? warns on pirate letters

@Velv

>>"Are there any lawyers out there willing to take on ACS:Law ?"

I guess that depends who's paying, and how sure a lawyer might be that they'd win if they weren't being paid by the target of a letter.

If the letters *did* have some reasonable option for asserting doubt as to the infraction, but someone didn't reply to the letter and went straight for legal action instead, would they risk getting treated unsympathetically by the courts, maybe ending up paying for one or two sets of lawyers bills?

If the letters *didn't* have some reasonable option for replying claiming innocence, you could be fairly confident they would have as soon as a case or two was lost on the basis of letters being unreasonable.

Also, having court judgments that the evidence wasn't strong enough to pursue seem likely to lead to a hard-to-resist pressure for the means to collect better evidence, if those means don't already exist.

@MobiFan

>>"Worked for me when dealing with the DVLA, Passport people etc. Should work with a snotty legal firm."

I'm curious what kind of information the DVLA or Passport guys could have on a person that that person hadn't provided in the first place, and didn't already know.