Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
News Your Rights Online

British ISPs Mad About RIP 15

Posted by michael from the tech-support dept.
msuzio writes "Wired is reporting on British ISPs who are mad as hell about RIP. The report talks about the ISPs dealing with unreasonable requests (archive all traffic for seven years), stupid cops ("What is a Hotmail account?"), and the threat that ISPs will move offshore. There is also a great teaser at the end about Moot, a product to enable commonly available data encryption to UK users to combat RIP."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

British ISPs Mad About RIP More

British ISPs Mad About RIP

Comments Filter:
  • Here is another fool thinking the Government is your friend. When freedom is lost for promises of safety, it is always for false promises.

    The government cannot protect you, you must protect yourself.

    Many have died defending freedom, think how life was in the 1920's-30's. People were free to do a lot more than we can today, and were responsible about their actions.

    WW2 was fought by Americans with idealistic notions of preserving world freedom. They would be appalled at the straight-jacket we now are confined to.

    Come on, whenever someone waves the flag of child abuse/porn and stridently calls for ever-increasing restrictions on freedom or privacy, they are flapping a chimera. Society assumes the worst of anyone who objects, must be a child abuser/pornographer. This is the insidious way that your freedom is stolen. Someone wraps their cause in the cloak of something so hideous, no one will dare object becase if they do, they will be painted with the obcenity that the freedom-thief is piously opposing.

    In summation, don't fall for this crap.

    To the Moon! http://www.beefjerky.com
  • /. references and encourages criminal acts (violations of DMCA / UCITA. The MS Kerberos document, posts of DeCSS source code).

    Let's ban it!

    Or make Rob/Hemos responsible for sifting through everything. After all, a few bucks added to your /. membership for this is little to pay for smacking down evil hackers.

  • So this arguement is the old one of "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about"?

    At the moment in the UK the police have to obtain a warant from a judge if they wish to tap a phone. This will not apply to internet communications, and as such this piece of legislation is a blanket permission for police to potentially intercept and read all email without judicial oversight (I don't wish to get into a discussion over whether this is technically possible).

    The chimera of paedophilia and terrorism is used as justification for all types of intrusive legislation - these are all covered under existing legislation.

    For comprehensive coverage of the RIP legislation see

    • www.fipr.org

  • Re:That's all very well (Score:3)

    by Technician ( 215283 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @08:31AM (#496229)
    Think of the storage cost. If you stored everything you viewed online in a year, you wouldn't have enough room. This includes all pictures, streaming audio, e-mail including SPAM, FTP, wallpaper, themes, trial software, Software upgrades & updates, ICQ & AIM chat sessions, Movies, Web broadcasts, Napster MP3's ... You think a Windows temp swap file is big, make it 7 years long. Then it must be all indexed so the data could be mined to find things like other e-mail boxes or ISP a user uses, including web based. No wonder the ISP's are fleeing. Storing the data is one thing. Digging thru the city dump of data for a diamond is another.

    The ISP's are fighing massive bloat that will overwhelm them. Remember not all users receive stuff on a 14.4k baud dial up modem. ISP's will either have to limit bandwidth (Charge per meg) or carry fewer users at a higher price to meet the requirement.

  • Okay, fine. They want to log stuff and be able to go back and look at it later. I have an idea to defeat it, let's all use formats that become intentionally obseleted quickly, use PGP/GPG, high bit encoding, etc, and see if it does them any good. I'd start working on methods that made each email ~500K in size, so they flat out can't log it all. What are they going to do then? tell me that I can't exchange email that large? we'd all still do it anyway.

    through this rant, the one point I'm trying to make is that everyone can just send a "Fuck you" to the government by making their seven years of logs and logged traffic take so incredibly much space that it isn't feasible, and we can make the logged information utterly useless through encryption and obselete formats that may be difficult to convert from. I think it should be done.

    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
  • > stopping the abuse of children in child porn

    You think the individual freedom the ISPs users had in the UK is the cause of child abuse and child porn? Have you seen any statistics about reports of and detection of these crimes and how they have changed since the popularity of the internet? Do you know how these criminals operate?

    Given the choices (a) and (b) that you propose, I would agree but they are not the choices we are presented with. The real choices are:

    (a) Remove the rights of innocent users in case they might do something wrong in future. This will make the uninformed public feel safer whilst actually doing no good at all.
    (b) Allow individual freedom to innocent citizens (unless and until they are proven guilty) This also has no effect on crime.

    Why are you talking about the IRA and "criminal materials" and child porn?
    In case you didn't realise, these things have been going on for a long time, since well before the internet was popular, and you haven't said one thing to suggest that the internet is making any of these problems worse. Would you know how to go about getting hold of a gun in the UK? I can tell you one thing - you wouldn't look on the internet.

  • Consider a [very] small ISP with a 10Mbps link to the net, for simplicity we will also assume a zero logging, & indexing overhead.

    600 Mbps a minute

    3600 Mbps a hour

    864,000 Mpbs a day

    31,536,000 Mbps a year

    2,207,520,000 Mpbs each 7 years

    This single link from one small ISP passes ~>260 TeraBytes in Seven years, Now consider that this is a small ISP, 100Mbps and 1Gbps links are not unusual, the largest ISP's have Terabit links, now multiply these by the number of ISP's.

    RIP apparently expects UK ISP's smash the laws of physics, RIP is pointlessly ineffective and simply impossible to obey & enforce.

    Should the Post Office be responsible storing copies of every letter sent, or British Telecom be responsible for recording and indexing the content of every telephone call, should Kodak be responsible for coping and archiving every photo taken, or Xerox, etc, etc...

  • If the UK government is so stupid as to pass this fecal matter, then there will be no need for high-encryption of e-mails. They'd be so stupid that you could encrypt it with rot13 and they'd never figure it out. :)


    Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
  • Hell, from reading the article, you could encrypt it with rot26 and they'd never figure it out.
  • 'nuf said

    To the Moon!
    http://www.beefjerky.com
  • OH dear O dear

    Typical american crap

    1. Inprecisely what ways were we free-er in the 1930's - free-er to starve?

    2. WW2 fought by americans? - of course us brits, the russians, aussies etc had nothing to do with it

    3. Governments have many flaws but without governments you have the law of the jungle with no protection whatsoever - eg the power of the employee does not match that of the employer.

    4. No I don't think governments are always right or perfect (guess my politics from the userid)

    BTW I don't agree with the legislation but ridiculous arguments like yours do no-one any good

  • &nbsp

    "They that would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Ben Franklin, 1759"

    "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
  • Do you know how much traffic the Internet carries? According to the latest stats I had (sorry, I can't find the address) it's many TB/s, that is Terrabit/s = 1000 Gigabit/s = 125 Gigabyte/s. Let's assume for simplicitys sake that with the limited amount passing through britain, it is 1 TB/s, probably a decent estimate. Multiply that with 60*60*24*365.25*7 = 220903200 seconds worth of data, you get a total of 27.612.900.000 Gigabyte, or 345.161.250 80 Gb Maxtor Drives. And that is not counting a) The huge internet growth in data amounts due to broadband. b) The people, CPU time, lines, facilities and floor space needed to collect *and* secure it (unless you want to add the cost of an encryption system), far less a system that will allow you to index and search it in order to make it useful. To make a real-life connection, I find the RIP bill as reasonable as a bill stating that everything everywhere in Britain should be videotaped, so that the police could merely look at the right tape to solve the crime. Why wouldn't that work? Privacy, cost, easy circumvention to mention a few. So why is the RIP bill passed? I'm glad I don't live in Britain. Kjella
  • What is this? You group Kiddie Porn together with "Pornographers"? "Something so obscen"? You sound too British to be true, man... I think we should protect our rights to post and view pornography! It is free speech, and quite pleasant to watch, you know. You should try it. -HypnoDave
  • Disclaimer: I am a US citizen by birth.
    1. Inprecisely what ways were we free-er in the 1930's - free-er to starve?
    More free to create, more free to talk, to move, to disappear... disappearing is now a crime in the USA if you are subject to certain penalties which amount to peonage. Until 1934 you could buy any kind of gun or accessory you wanted including machine guns and silencers (silencers used to be popular with farmers taking out predators in the henhouse); you could go to jail if you committed a crime with such articles, but mere ownership was not even cause for suspicion. You could buy a huge variety of chemicals and other things which are now restricted or "scheduled" (banned for personal purchase); people did a lot of really neat stuff that you can only read about in old amateur scientist articles today, because you can't buy the materials any more (you cannot do a very good job of educating yourself in laboratory chemistry, for example). People were free in a lot of ways I'm happy are gone (free to poison the water and air going over their land and pass the costs off on to their neighbors, free to fire people because of their skin color or religion; perhaps I should call it license instead of freedom), but I don't see any conflict between the freedoms I mourn and the licenses I'm glad are no more.
    2. WW2 fought by americans? - of course us brits, the russians, aussies etc had nothing to do with it
    Maybe if the USA hadn't had several times the population of Britain and Australia combined, and the only real energy and industrial base outside Axis reach, you might have a point. If it hadn't been for the USA Britain would have been under German rule starting about 60 years ago.
    3. Governments have many flaws but without governments you have the law of the jungle with no protection whatsoever - eg the power of the employee does not match that of the employer.
    The author to whom you responded wrote "When freedom is lost for promises of safety, it is always for false promises." Note, he said freedom, not the right to seek redress for harm. People in the USA have lost a lot of freedom to act in ways which harm no one because someone (often a self-aggrandizing government official) demanded that government Do Something To Prevent This Outrage, when the only thing that was necessary was to identify the harmful acts and punish the actors appropriately. Laws criminalizing acts which just might have some relationship to the alleged harm are a huge blow to freedom, and the USA has such laws by the thousand.
    4. No I don't think governments are always right or perfect (guess my politics from the userid)
    Finally, something I can agree with w/o reservations.
    --
    Knowledge is power
    Power corrupts
    Study hard

Slashdot Top Deals

"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs

Close