Sloppy and shoddy practices, questionable conduct, failing to provide information. No, this isn’t another post about ACS:Law. Bear these phrases in mind as we take a look at karma visiting a US based legal firm and paying them back big time.
The internet powered age provides many positives. These same positives can also become major pitfalls, as the Steven J. Baum foreclosure firm found out last month.
Another admission of this “government’s” obsession with monitoring everything done by the citizens it is supposed to serve comes from Vernon Coaker, Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing. Already they are looking to use DPI technology such as that proposed by Phorm (and secretly tested by BT without its customers’ consent) to monitor smaller ISPs’ customers.
Coaker said that the EU Data Retention Directive did not cover social networks like Facebook and MySpace, which are growing in popularity for users to send messages to each other.
Such mediums are now commonly used for communication instead of email. This is covered by the directive as ISPs will be forced to keep records for 12 months of very email sent or received.
According to the transcript Coaker said to Carshalton and Wallington MP Tom Brake: “I look forward to his support when we present intercept modernisation programme proposals, which may include the retention of data on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and all similar sites.”
The logical extension of this is that the “government” will impose a law (poorly drafted so as to criminalise as many people as it can) which requires all private messaging systems to keep full records of who said what to whom and when it was said. Naturally the “government” will require 24/7 access to these logs for its own, unaccountable use.
This is Gordongrad. You will have no freedom whatsoever. All opinions contrary to the “government” will be recorded and used against you at some point in the future.
This post has been coming for a while.
Regular readers will know that I am vehemently opposed to the surveillance and database states that this current Labour “government” (I use “government” in quotes because the Labour administration is unworthy of the name) is obsessed with. I believe strongly that stupidity should not be tolerated and should be highlighted and challenged. As this Labour “government” worships the ideas of the surveillance and database states and is demonstrably stupid in areas such as understanding the internet, much of my writings here are concentrated on those issues.
Anyone who values personal freedom and privacy should vote Conservative at the next General Election. If you haven’t read George Orwell’s 1984 then you should.
Yes folks, crank up the Led Zeppelin classic Whole Lotta Love (used to be the countdown music on Top Of The Pops for anyone under 25 who hasn’t got a clue what I’m on about. It’s on my playlist and air guitars are not compulsory *smile*) because here are three reasons why I think Labour is unworthy of being in government*. Better get yourselves a cup of tea because this is a long post:
Did you know the BBC has been using a contraversial tracking system to send personal information about visitors to its site to a US based company?
Chris Williams at The Register has more on this disturbing development.
Kudos to the forum members at NoDPI for discovering this and making this information public. Here’s a snippet of the report. Visit El Reg to read the rest, as ever from Chris it’s interesting stuff.
“Information given to Omniture [by the BBC] included my IP address, my country, my post code, the dates and times I visited the site, the news stories I read and details of every news video clip I watched. You could derive a great deal of information by mining that data.”
“Given that the BBC is supposedly licence-funded in the UK, there was no justification for it to provide an online marketing/behavioural targeting company with this data. For purely statistical purposes, the BBC has its own system.”….
But now the BBC has decided to stop sending UK users’ data to Omniture altogether. In an email sent on Wednesday, it told the NoDPI member: “The BBC has ceased using Omniture in relation to UK users visiting bbc.co.uk or bbc.com from the UK and this has been achieved via geoIP restriction. This means that BBC Worldwide is still able to report on its international audience but that the bbc.co.uk homepage is unaffected by our commercial subsidiary’s use of the Omniture/Visual Sciences product.”
As usual, the comments page after the report makes interesting reading. I haven’t used the BBC as a reliable news source for a long time now. If this is the way the BBC are going to behave then I won’t be using any part of their site at all. There are other respectable and reliable news sources out there.
The BBC appear to be interested in Government Service Broadcasting more than Public Service Broadcasting.
More good news for the internet community in the face of those who make wrong allegations…
The Register reports that Which? (formerly The Consumers’ Association) has reported Davenport Lyons to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) over their campaign of letters alleging illegal filesharing.
One quote from the report:
The group has been contacted by people accused by Davenport Lyons who say they have never used peer-to-peer software. Reports are emerging via defence solicitors of distressed pensioners being accused of illegal filesharing of movies such as Army F*****s.
Amid the controversy over Davenport Lyons’ campaign, The Register recently learned that one of its clients, the videogaming brand Atari, had dumped its services.
That’s right, pensioners being accused of illegal filesharing of hardcore gay porn. That seems pretty unlikely to me. Would my grandparents have done something like that? I think not.
Get on over to El Reg and read all about how Which? have had enough of what appear to be bully boy scare tactics.