Posts by david wilson 1300 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
>>"A real BOFH would have saved them on somebody else's computer. "
Making backups of the email system to take home for security reasons gives pretty good deniability.
Ideally protected by encryption one can claim not to have the key for, and/or on media where access won't be recorded.
The above is, of course, entirely speculative.
>>"kill them all...with fire"
Well, technically, by what they claim to believe, that would be perfectly OK, since /anyone/ who dies shows that God hates them - there's no such thing as a wrongful death.
It'd be interesting (and possibly entertaining) to see if they *still* claimed to believe that when someone stepped forward to light the woodpile under them
Presumably rather than having to visit an office, even having the bank ring you up to ask you *why* you want to change your notification phone number would foil this particular scheme?
If the bad guys already actually had full control of your phone, then they wouldn't need to change the notification number in the first place, so in the case of defending against a 'change number' attack, it'd be reasonable to assume that if the bank did ring up, they *would* be talking to you.
>>"Copyright was not intended to "see to it" that people get paid; it was intended, in the US at any rate, "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." In the UK its original purpose was "the Encouragement of Learning". Nothing to do with the quick-buck-mentality-ayn-randist-wank-fantasy you have proposed."
Speaking as a definite non-fan of Rand, surely a lot comes down to what perspective you look at it from?
Allowing people to control (and profit from) their works is a fairly good incentive for people to create things in the first place and make them available to the public in the second place.
Copyright/patents might have an ultimate goal of increasing the amount of stuff that's invented and publicised, but surely a primary means by which they hope to achieve that goal is making it possible to be a professional creator, or more rewarding to be a creator in general.
And that's leaving aside any moral argument as to whether creators /deserve/ to get paid.
If people think they do deserve that, then one ultimate goal of copyright/patent law really /is/ to see that they get paid
>>"Nokia have just had more time to develop such technology, they've had 25 or so years to R&D various crackpot ideas with antennas and so on"
Whereas when Apple got into the phone business, in the interests of free competition, they nobly decided only to employ fresh graduates, who had to work everything out for themselves from scratch?
>>"Did they not factor in when they came to run the cables that it may not be squeeky clean down there."
Well, it's always possible they did trials, and then found out later that the trial areas had been cleaner than average.
Or maybe there had been the traditional game of someone asking the people who know, and then each layer of management adding a bit of optimism before passing the figures upwards.
>>"Both of the examples were legal enterprises until the law was changed?"
Yes, but it's still a classic preach-to-the choir analogy which basically depends on the prior conclusion that copying stuff without paying is some sort of fundamental good, and trying to do anything to cut down copying is Evil.
And the Wilberforce comparison is pretty dubious anyway - since that didn't so much involve law enforcement trying to block him from doing something, as inertia on the part of people who had to change their minds for the law to be changed the way he wanted it changed.
>>"What is very worrying is the idea that you can convict something based on probability. Improbable things *do* happen. That is why they are improbable, not impossible."
Thanks for that lecture on probability. I'm sure we all needed it.
It seems you think that 'reasonable doubt' is wrong and courts should only convict based on absolute certainty.
Well, I guess that *would* save a lot of money in the judicial system.
Though on the other hand, when people start taking the law into their own hands, compared to the numbers of people wrongfully convicted, I wonder how many innocent people would get hurt in escalating vendettas, or as a result of wrongful accusations?
>>"THAT'S WHY WE USE BAYES' THEOREM. It's ONLY by applying Bayes' Theorem that you obtain paragraphs like the above."
No, it's perfectly simple to go from "1 in a million" to "there should be roughly 65 matching people in the UK population" by simple logic and extremely basic maths.
Bayes' theorem might be an expression of that, but the underlying logic would be there with or without any theorem, and for a court case, it would seem better to describe something simply in English than start chucking formulas around.
>>"Bayes' Theorem is not an "option", it is a necessity, otherwise travesties like Professor Sir Roy Meadow will happen constantly."
But surely the first problem there was an expert making the *medical* claim/assumption that cot deaths happen at random.
Given that assumption, if the assumption was wrong, wouldn't *any* maths be bound to give the wrong answer?
>>"My particular dislike of the use of DNA is that everyone is told that DNA is unique, except for identical twins (or clones). What people in court are not told is that they don't sequence the whole DNA (it can't be done, and has never been done)."
Though if people are given probabilities of a random person matching as well as a defendant does, that does at least imply that there isn't uniqueness in the matching process.
And how are you sure what people are told in court ?
Presumably a half-decent defence lawyer could get someone to go into details if they thought it would do some good?
>>"I think that for the layman, they should say something like; everyone's credit card number is unique to them. We found the credit card number of the person who bought the gun, and that 3 of the 16 digits in the defendants credit card number are the same, so therefore it was him."
But that would be highly misleading, since it's close to implying, if not actually implying, that the other 13 digits are different.
Even if someone said the *quite different*
"We found 3 digits from the purchaser's credit card number and the corresponding numbers on the defendant's card match them",
it would still be a fairly poor analogy, since the chance of a random card matching would be 1 in 1000.
>>"When they say no-one, they mean no-one. Seriously, who is going to take any notice of anything when it comes from someone totally unidentified, and who can then deny to have ever have said it?"
Indeed, especially if some people might consider it desirable to make the system untrusted by feeding in bogus messages.
>>"It's a troll's dream app!"
And great for an agent provocteur who wants to be untraceable while simultaneously reducing people's trust in the system.
If 'they' want to turn a demonstration into a riot, they send a message alleging someone was just beaten up or killed by police in a nearby sidestreet.
If 'they' want to get some looters in one place, they send a message claiming there are great spoils at a particular store that's just been broken into, but where there are police and/or good CCTV waiting to catch people.
Etc.
And if I actually *was* paranoid about Big Brother, why should I believe that anyone claiming to make a great anonymising app isn't actually working for Big Brother?
>>"innocent subdomains of cz.cc were brought down too by MS, because MS is too lazy and technically incompetent to block only botnet traffic from cz.cc"
Presumably if they had trusted the guy in charge to be suitably cooperative, they could have done things differently.
Though would many people really run anything *important* on a free subdomain rather than paying for a domain of their own, unless they trusted the provider sufficiently to be confident they wouldn't do things or allow things liable to attract the attention of the authorities?
People using free subdomains from unknown or distant providers are taking a risk that criminals will be doing likewise, with the possibilities of disruption that might involve.
>>"THAT is how it works."
Interesting...
Though how come you know that?
'They' haven't publicly crushed anyone that way yet.
If 'they' were going to privately crush someone, they wouldn't need a long history of trivial comments, they could presumably just crush on the basis of the later serious infraction.
Are we supposed to be living in fear of being crushed, in which case why aren't 'they' more blatant?
Is it supposed to be secret, in which case why do 'they' let people talk about it.
Etc.
>>"I'd also posit that the act of you writing, and me commenting positively on, this "seditious" article is enough to flag both of us on a database within GCHQ, and we are now considered "domestic extremists" and will be the first to be arrested when the oil runs out and the s**t hits the fan."
But surely, if even things as minor as posting on this forum gets you on the Big List, when allowing for all the other things of similar meaningfulness that people do, that would mean that a good fraction of the population will probably be 'first to be arrested'?
Even just practically speaking, how would that actually *work*?
Though if indeed it is true that whenever you try and warn people you are dismissed as a paranoid wingnut, what would 'they' be scared you'd do once the big police state *had* finally uncloaked and started snatching people en masse - walk around annoying people by saying "I told you so!" after it was too late to do anything?
Unless your claim to be being ignored now is some kind of subtle attempt at bluffing camouflage, wouldn't your current doubts (that you claim to be having no success in propagating) logically become *less* threatening once it was obvious to everyone else that you'd been right?
>>"All in all, while I may disagree with his lobbying record I would die for Souter's right to appear on the first page of Google."
Though if someone types in 'Brian Souter', I'm fairly confident he *will* appear on the first page, even if maybe not in ways that he might like.
But then that's what real competition means, Brian.
Not everyone can have their own way.
Not even *you*.
>>"By ignoring this problem Face Book is depriving the business of the value of their return in the business relationship."
Facebook could perfectly easily say "Bored Now!" and delete any or all of its services without needing to give any warnings to users other than those explicitly guaranteed in user agreements. *Are* there any such guarantees?
Even if they may benefit from there being visitors to any content I put there, that doesn't imply any kind of ongoing obligation on their part to provide me with my benefit in future any more than I have an obligation to keep my pages interesting.
Maybe businesses who are getting a good fraction of their business from facebook should get together and suggest having some kind of premium service where they can get the service they might want (backups, extra security, good customer service in case of issues) in return for some appropriate fee that makes it worthwhile on the part of FB.
>>"But when I copied stuff in the playground 40-50 years ago there were no corporate lawyers invading our space preventing non-commercial reuse looking over our shoulders. But that's what they are trying to stop my grandchildren doing now. "
But I bet your playground didn't have countless millions of people in it who were potentially your mates and sharing partners. That's more than simply a minor difference.
And if you were copying to reel-to-reel tapes, that was a fairly slow business, and copies were often not of great quality.
Chances are you'd have known the original buyer of pretty much everything you had a copy of, and copying still wasn't effectively free - tapes of any quality cost enough that copying a dozen albums would have cost a decent fraction of the price of buying one
The restraints on who ended up with copies of what were to no small degree financial, practical and friendship-related.
These days there are few real restraints other than personal morality or fear of legal sanctions, so it's not hard (at least for *most* people) to understand why the issue is maybe of more concern to many content owners now than it used to be.
I really don't think your analogy is of much value - you're trying to equate two situations which are simply too radically different.
You say people have been copying by imitation since before recorded history, as if that means that any form of technology makes no difference as long as it's non-commercial.
Well, people have looked at each other and at each other's dwellings since before recorded history. Does that mean you'd have to be happy if I videoed you everywhere you went in the street, and set up cameras with long lenses and long-distance microphones pointed at your house from all angles, as long as I wasn't selling the resulting recordings, merely giving them away to my friends, or posting them on the internet, since the /principle/ is the same?
+1 for that
Surely, even if Google announced something so cunningly that it that didn't make it into any media outlet, there must be some kind of information exchange between Google and the relevant rights holder organisations which is presumably at least as informative as a press release, and if the rights organisations really didn't like what Google was doing and thought they could do anything about it, /they'd/ wait until a suitable good day for /not/ getting news buried to issue some opinion of their own about what a bunch of thieving bastards Google were?
>>"Using Jesus in advertisements around Easter is just about the most insenstitive thing imaginable. It's like using the holocaust to advertise..."
If that's what you think, I pity your imagination or education.
>>"If you still don't get it then imagine if instead of Jesus there was a picture of Richard Dawkins giving a thumbs up. Then the complaints would no doubt come rolling in."
One might come from Mr Dawkins.
But then He actually exists, and has some legal/moral rights over what gets done with His image.
That's rather different from a character in a religious tale whose real-world basis, to the extent there is one, is likely to be hugely different from what many people who believe stories written and edited long after the person died think it is.
There are people who complain about all kinds of things, like characters in soap operas getting a raw deal, but that just demonstrates something about people.
I'm reminded of Stewart Lee's comment on the protesters about the Jerry Springer opera - "Whether you think of the people behind me as hysterical bigots or well intentioned fools, they are, nonetheless, divs."
>>"Few Kindle users today realise how locked down their devices are: they can get at the books they want and so don't seem to care if the device itself is locked down."
So they not only don't /care/ that it can't do things they didn't buy it to do, but few of them even /know/ how many things that don't want it to do that it can't do, and are therefore wandering around assuming their Kindle could display colour video or be used as a phone or supercomputer if they could only be bothered to find out how?
>>"I believe the 'slippery slope' referred to is the political expediency of giving Plod ever increasing, unchecked judicial 'authority' without reference to the courts. (Cue police state)."
But the basic problem with 'slippery slope' arguments is that they're fundamentally lazy and typically logically inconsistent.
They seem to assume an effective /inevitability/ about the future being a wild extrapolation of some proposed change to the current situation.
However, if that is a valid logical argument now, then presumably if the exact same logic had been applied in the past to one of any number of past changes, the conclusion then would presumably have been that where we currently are is already past what would have been previously imagined as some point of no return.
Either that past conclusion is correct (in which case we may as well give up) or it isn't, in which case the slippery slope argument logically fails.
It's also a fairly patronising kind of argument, implicitly suggesting that /other/ people will be too stupid/idle/sheeplike to do anything in the future even if things actually do get bad, while simultaneously demonstrating how foresighted the proposer of the argument is now, even though many other people taking a more pragmatic view of the situation are perfectly capable of /imagining/ potential extreme extrapolations while understanding that those aren't necessarily the primary thing that should be taken into account when looking at a particular proposal.
Given the *actual* change under discussion rather than paranoid worries about what it possibly could (or 'obviously will') lead to in the distant future, what seems to be important is what would actually happen in the cases where a domain is wrongly seized where that seizure wouldn't have happened in the current situation - how quickly could a decision be challenged, and what (if any) compensation might be available.
>>"Am I to take from your post that you think that giving Plod this level of judicial authority, without formal oversight by the courts, is a good thing?"
If wrongful seizures can be appealed, there would be oversight after the event, as there is in all kinds of other situations, such as considering whether an arrest or seizure of property was legal.
As for how bad or good it might be, what seems most important is not whether there's a theoretical possibility of misuse or abuse, since there will be that possibility in the case of any power granted to anyone, but how much that misuse/abuse will happen in practice and what kind of redress there might be.
How much happens in practice is something that is only clear over time, even if educated guesses can be made, (though I'd venture that the people assuming maximum possible abuse are probably not making the most educated of guesses).
What kind of redress there might be is something that isn't currently clear.
Personally, I prefer to wait for adequate information before making a judgement, though I understand that some other people feel differently.
One thing that does seem probable is that if the suggested power was repeatedly used to seize domains where there wasn't a valid legal case, whether through malice or incompetence (in the way that many slippery slope people seem to assume it necessarily would be), that would be likely to cause reactions which would lead to a modification of the power or changes in its application.
Though even if that happened, it wouldn't seem to be at all likely to make the lovers of slippery slope arguments actually think about what they'd predicted and how things ended up - they'd only see any misapplication of the power as proving they were right all along, but ignore whether the power had actually been used for the common good in other situations, and also ignore any corrective action taken which was seemingly moving the world up the slippery slope, rather than down it.
>>"how do you actually formulate 'meaningful' compensation. And who would foot the bill for said compo? Would that be the particular Plod taking the action personally paying the compo? No, it would end up being the rest of us shelling out for Plod's screw-ups as usual."
I guess in a decent system, it'd be up to courts to consider potential compensation, bearing in mind any losses suffered.
Would personal financial accountability mean that if a judge currently makes a wrong decision in granting a right to seize a domain, (or in other areas, like making an incorrect ruling which leads to a wrongful criminal conviction) the /judge/ should be personally liable to pay compensation?
If so, who'd be a judge?
If not, then why should the police be treated differently?
And as for who ends up paying, surely the logic is that the primary aim of compensation is to recompense someone for losses unfairly imposed on them, with penalising the people responsible and/or getting them and others to be more careful in future being a different issue, and one which could be pursued in various ways.
>>"The whole point of the court order is to inject some common sense and allow the request to be heard from a neutral stand point precisely so that the police do not just arbitrarily go around causing havoc."
At the moment, would an initial court order generally be the result of a one-sided presentation of evidence to a judge by police or lawyers acting on behalf of the state, or would there typically be any involvement of a domain owner?
At least for cases which legality of a site seemed borderline or where it seems an owner might well be unaware of supposed illegal content, I'd wonder how often a domain owner who is actually contactable currently is contacted before attempts are made to seize the domain, and if that happens to a meaningful degree now, would that be likely to change much even after a change to the seizure system?
>>"I can just see the Met in particular using this to silence anybody critical of their trigger-happiness, ignoring of 'phone hacking, etc."
Yeah, right, because if they're bothered about their image, there couldn't be any possible publicity /downside/ to doing something like that, could there?
>>"Whilst I'm all for protecting the average Joe/Julie Bloggs this, to me at least, sounds like the start of a VERY slippery slope..."
But *any* change /could/ be viewed as the start of a slippery slope, given a suitably-chosen direction of gravity.
Except that in reality, once people are actually standing on them, most slopes seem to be decidedly less steep or slippery than some people feared.
I'm sure that there were people arguing that the removal of the requirement for vehicles to be preceded by someone carrying a red flag was a slippery slope to people being allowed to drive at 300mph through village streets.
Isn't the important thing to examine a particular suggested change and make a judgement as to whether that change is good, bad or neutral in itself, rather than considering some hypothetical scenario which may be a bit like the suggested one, but taken to some distant extreme?
And even when examining the possible benefits/drawbacks of a particular proposed change, surely the sensible thing is not to focus /solely/ on the potential worst cases, but on the likely overall balance of good and bad, or consider steps which might be taken to reduce the chances of the worst outcomes happening (like having meaningful compensation in the case of a domain being unfairly blocked)?
>>"I suppose there could be a five year transition period during which the old .net, .com, .org domains would be transitioned into country-based domains, and those names would eventually eliminated entirely."
I could see all kinds of issues where a 'legitimate' .com domain can't transition in to one (or more) appropriate local domains because they're already legitimately taken by other companies with the same basic domain name root, (such as one based on a common surname or company initials, or some other connection).
And I'd wonder what kinds of lawsuits might come from people who'd paid a fortune for some premium .com name, or spent a fortune building up a reputation around one that they'd bought if the name was going to be terminated simply in a supposed attempt to make it easier for some fraction or people to work out where a company does business.
Surely, some kind of meaningful site-related metadata standards that provided good company locality information (and maybe other useful information) to people who were interested would do rather more to help people find what they wanted than causing all manner of ructions in domain names.
There might be some possibility for abuse by people trying to push a crap site up search rankings, but it can't be beyond the wit of humankind to find a mechanism which overall is more useful than misleading.
>>"Then with the already-in-use smart searches and domain handling, if someone types in "McDonalds" then the most likely match would be the one on the street nearest you."
Which is rather making assumptions about what someone actually wants to find.
And even with country-based domains, it still requires a mechanism for finding the local store from all the ones in the country.
A mechanism which seems likely to work just as well even with the existing domain name system, whether it works by trawling through sites with or without metadata assistance, or by people who want to have one or more places findable registering the information in some web directory that makes searches easier.
Personally, if I was going to type in 'mcdonalds' and hit a 'find local' button, or type in 'luton mcdonalds', I'd quite like it to find McDonalds paint suppliers or McDonalds hairderessers at least as much as McDonalds 'restaurant', and that doesn't seem like something that can be much helped by domain name fiddling, even if they start getting very area-specific.
>>"If you are not TRULY international, you register in a local domain: US wide business, you register in .com.us, Kansas wide business, you register in .com.ks.us, UK wide, .co.uk, etc. If you are NOT a network provider, you don't get .net.*, if you are NOT a non-profit, you don't get .org.*."
>>"Too many times when searching for a widget, I find some .com that only ships to the UK (and I'm sure the inverse case is even worse for those of you in the UK) - if they were limited it would be much better."
I guess it depends what 'truly international' means.
If someone doing retail sales wanted a .com under your ideal system, could they qualify by just offering mail order to anywhere at well above extra cost?
If I wanted to justify my 'personal' .com domain (used mainly for email), I guess I could offer one or more of the things I currently sell (sometimes internationally) from my main .co.uk business on the website?
Who would make the decisions - the people who would stand to lose money if the domain vanished?
And how do I know when I start a web-fronted business what territories I'm going to end up selling in?
I wouldn't necessarily want to have to buy more domains as I expanded, even if I was lucky enough to find them still available.
I might want to start with a .com just in case, or stick with a .co.uk after going international.
>>"Trademarks only apply within a specific field. Why should Apple Computer be any more entitled to ".apple" than the Fruit Marketing Board of Elbonia? Why should Halifax bank be able to claim ".halifax" any more than Halifax, West Yorkshire or Halifax, Nova Scotia?"
Presumably it gets decided by who pays the most money to ICANN and/or a pack of lawyers.
Though for me as a consumer, how does it actually help?
No only do I generally get to things via links rather than typing in a URL, as Pete B points out, but if I do type in a URL, I can currently just type 'coke' and follow it with a CTRL-ENTER to get to the right site.
If Coca-Cola do buy '.coke', that's not going to make it any easier for me to access their site, and surely it's obvious that the more seemingly legitimate URLs for a given company there are, the more effort both they and I will both have to put in to be confident that I'm not visiting a fake site.
Even with things like '.music', would there really be a great value in that, since much of the time the expensive TLD is only going to be visible in the middle of one or other mangled auto-generated URL which few people are ever going to look at.
I visit websites, not TLDs, and if one '.music' site is good, that's likely no more a guarantee that any others will be than one .com site is of the quality of another.
If someone was going to police the '.music' TLD sufficiently to assure uniform high quality and allow a reputation to be built, how is that different from someone organising a collection of similarly assured websites linked to an existing .com domain?
I'm still going to need some way to get to individual '.music' websites, likely via links from somewhere I trust, so how is my experience actually changed by the new TLD.
Is there really some great new Web 3.0 dawn that '.whatever' will usher in that 'whatever.com' just wasn't capable of doing?
>>"but were smart enough to get three agreements in writing."
>>>"... By breaking a legal agreement Rusbridger is criminally liable."
No, breaking the /law/ makes someone /criminally/ liable.
Breaching a contract might make them liable to civil action, though it'd be pretty interesting to see Wikileaks trying to argue the case that they ever actually *owned* the information concerned. Somehow, I'm not sure how much sympathy they'd get from a judge *or* a jury.
>>"when a captive audience loses its captivity - change your business strategy. not the laws around it."
That might be what people in general might prefer happened, but the company seems to have found an easier way to keep the audience captive, or at least to stop other companies publicly undercutting them with their own products on a large scale.
Someone doing things on a smaller scale, shipping stuff to the EU for sale on street market stalls might be more likely to get away with it.
But then, I guess that kind of action might not only make a smaller dent on LS's profits due to the smaller size of operation, but might be rather less undermining to their expensively-bought image than having the jeans discounted in Tesco (or continental equivalents) and advertised as being sold cheap would be.
Even if I don't like the current setup, I can understand why they might see it not only as good for them, but even as arguably fair. After all, they're not actually stopping anyone /else/ making jeans and selling them for whatever price they want wherever they want to sell them, they're just trying to reap the rewards themselves that result from promoting their own brand in various places.
If I couldn't find retailers of grey products advertising openly but I could get cheap stuff down the local market, that'd seem like a fair kind of compromise, since people wouldn't be advertising in ways that actually risked undermining the manufacturer's own image-making while still effectively hoping to profit from it to some extent.
>>"Do I understand this correctly. A trader operates entirely in the EU...."
Seems not.
>> >>"Levi Strauss & Co had argued that Papikian Enterprises had violated the EU's Trademark Directive by buying Levi trademarked goods outside the EU..."
Shallow though it may be, what seems to have made Levis fashionable in the EU and still desirable to many even at a high prices is expensive advertising.
The greater the extent to which people are actually buying a label based on an expensively-constructed image, the more understandable it is that the company which has shelled out the cash to build that image wants to get some return on it without being undercut by people who haven't made the investment.
>>"The question you need to ask is "How anonymous will it actually be?"
Well, if the data provided is just numbers of phones turned on in a given area, it's pretty seriously anonymous, even if numbers are relatively small.
In fact, unless there was persistent anonymised identification of an individual phone and its location over time which ultimately allowed it to be linked to an individual, it's difficult to see how anonymity could suffer much.
If the information was simply 'there are X phones in this area at this time', unless X was basically 1, and the spatial/temporal resolution allowed individual phone paths to be plotted accurately enough to know which phone was which after a close encounter, which even current GPS doesn't seem likely to be good enough to do even in the open air, how could anything really be extracted from the data beyond something like "There seems to be a movement of people from area A to area B"?
If you were going to assume that data isn't going to be aggregated or anonymised at all, then you simply wouldn't be talking about the study in the report, but about quite different kinds of potential data release, which really would be a quite different issue.
If fears of a worst-case slippery-slope were are going to be the main concern every single time suggestions are made of potentially useful use of data, how many useful uses would actually happen?
In fact, if we-can't-be-too-careful-'they'-might-abuse-it logic had its way, then we probably wouldn't have an Internet for people to fret on in the first place.
>>"If you are going to an event which is "not approved by the State", would you want even "anonymous" information being collected about you?"
It's already being collected unanonymously (nonymously?) by the phone company, and no doubt many people will assume that GCHQ already has some kind of backdoor access.
If the phone company actually is currently guarding my privacy for ethica, commercial or legal reasons, why should I expect that approach to change even if they were allowed or even required to provide bulk anonymous data, when it's be pretty obvious how anonymous the data was?
If they're not currently guarding my privacy, then I wouldn't seem likely to be losing anything, whatever happened.
Personally, if I was desperately concerned, I'd just turn my phone off or leave it at home.
It's not as if I'll die if I'm disconnected from the network for a few hours.
And if I was going to an event that was likely to be frowned upon, I'd expect that there more than almost anywhere, there would likely be people around who could provide pretty similar information simply by looking, if maybe with a less accuracy, and quite possibly cameras, etc.
Whether at a demonstration or in some random normal situation, if PC Plod was reporting how many people were in their vicinity, even if they were doing it every few seconds and doing it with high accuracy, how would /that/ actually impact on someone's privacy?
If I walk down the High Street while Plod is saying "26 people, 27 people, 29 people, 27 people, .....", even if my presence actually contributes to those numbers for a while, does that actually affect my privacy even in extreme principle?
Do I really have a right to be entirely /unseen/ in public, and not simply a right not to be unnecessarily followed.
Bulk anonymous population information seems like the kind of thing that wouldn't be desperately hard to get an estimate of by conventional means in non-emergency situations, by having people on the ground, even if more accurate numbers might be obtained from mobile data.
Nor is it the kind of thing that many people would be up in arms about if it was a case of some bobby on the beat radioing in every few minutes to say how busy a their current location was.
It's not clear how access to bulk/anonymous data would be a great risk to individual privacy even outside emergency situations.
If I was travelling to some large legal non-unapproved gathering, It does seem I might benefit from traffic control people having some idea of how many people are coming from where.
If I was travelling to or already at some illegal gathering (rave, etc) or some legal but officially unwelcome gathering (demonstration, etc), I'm not sure how officialdom simply knowing numbers of people more accurately makes a great deal of difference to me.
If TPTB are going to break the gathering up, or even just doing crowd control, might well be in *more* danger if their estimates of numbers are seriously inaccurate than if they're actually reasonably good.
What's the difference in terms of privacy between someone having access to bulk anonymous data from mobiles and a traffic sensor telling them how many vehicles have driven along a particular road?
>> >>"“There, there’s no assumption of privacy, everybody assumes the Internet is bugged and that the secret police are after them.”
>>"Whereas, here in the west, we know that's not true, right?"
Well, here, /most/ people /don't/ assume 'the secret police are after them'.
Unless they're one of the fairly small number of people who have done something or are planning on doing something likely to be of interest to the security services, or they'd like to pretend they might be, or they have more serious issues.
I'm struggling to think of people I know who might be of meaningful interest to UK security services, and honestly, I'm not sure I can think of anyone.
I dare say that like most people, I will probably know some people who might be of interest to the /police/, but in the real world, I'm not sure how many of /them/ would lie awake at night worrying that their phone is being tapped or their web access snooped on.
>>"Where you cannot take an organisation down, just cause apathy surrounding them that turns peoples attention away and job done. Simples!"
And you don't think that for people looking to discredit Wikileaks, having Assange in charge is a bit of a bonus?
Or that people looking to 'cause apathy' must be rubbing their hands in glee at all the Wikileaks-inspired trumpeting over diplomatic memos, few of which seemed to rise in interest above the level of suggestions that people don't trust Berlusconi, or requests for more soft toilet paper.
One of the best ways to cause future apathy is to create loads of hype and then deliver boredom.
>>"So to your point, governments will continue to do business as usual. Perhaps they will be more guarded in what they say and or publish... in fact it could mean that less information will be documented and captured."
Maybe some might even use leaks for their own ends more than they currently do - if there's a more common culture of leaking, that might make it easier for information that people want to get out to be disclosed.
In the past, leaks were often specific things leaked on principle.
If there's a situation where things may be leaked in bulk, and with much less discrimination, like someone copying things whatever files they can find randomly onto a memory stick, that would seem like an opportunity for a few desired leaks to be buried in a haystack of irrelevant gossip, from where one hopes some media person will find it and publicise it.
Heck, with citizen journalists looking through bulk releases of information, it doesn't even take a proper journalist to stumble upon something - some random anonymous blogger can 'find' the nuggets of gold and give them their first pushes towards publicity.
Whatever one thinks of the people in charge, it'd be a mistake to think that they're necessarily stupid or incapable of seeing opportunities.
>>"Should this school teacher succeed in her lawsuit then that will effectively mean that if somebody steals my laptop and uses it to send their own mail then I will be violating federal wire-tapping laws by intercepting the email."
>>"It will also mean that it is possible to have your computer configured in such a way that if somebody steals it then you will be breaking the law."
If somebody stole your laptop and it had been (entirely reasonably) set up in such a way as to direct all mail through your mail server, or to do anything else that might impinge on the privacy of someone using it but which was a reasonable way of setting up the machine for your own use, I guess the sensible thing to do would be to report both the theft and the nature of the machine to the police, and let them advise you what you can and can't safely do in terms of keeping or examining any data collected.
Depending where you are, quite possibly local police might not have much of a clue, but at least involving them would seem sensible, since ultimately even if you could find out enough information to locate the machine, you might well need police help to recover it safely and/or legally, and in terms of collecting evidence for a prosecution in a legal manner, they'd seem likely to be the ones who'd know what to do.
There wouldn't be much point collecting emails or intercepting keystrokes from someone admitting to stealing the machine if that might not be admissible evidence, particularly if, taking a different approach, it might have been possible to collect evidence that *was* usable.
>>"The issue is that sometimes, your details can get into the wild. Can you say News of The World?"
Though in that situation, even if it was the case that the greatest risk was number leakage from a mobile phone company rather than a friend or friend-of-a-friend of the celebrity (or *justifiably* famous person) in question, it wouldn't exactly be hard for someone to get a trusted mate or other third party to buy them a phone and SIM card.
In fact, for /most/ people, that would be protection from illicit intrusion, state, media or other which roughly approximated ID-free purchases, while still leaving it open for the buyer to be found and questioned about the identity of the phone user in the case of an actual valid need, such as the investigation of a serious crime.
If I was an activist particularly concerned about being under surveillance, even where ID wasn't required for phone or SIM card purchases, I might well still get someone else to buy on my behalf, to reduce the changes of a connection being made.
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