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Why I Hate the #debill

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1 year ago
by John Pennycook in , ,

Well, the ayes have it, the ayes have it; the Digital Economy Bill looks set to become the Digital Economy Act.  A bad day for all users of the internet throughout the UK.

My upset has nothing to do with my support for legalised filesharing — though I do believe that copyright is in dire need of reform and that filesharing creates rather than destroys markets, that’s an issue to be covered another day in a different blog post.

I am more concerned with the fact that the measures outlined in the bill will not work.  Thanks to anonymity networks like Tor, illegal filesharing through otherwise legal technologies (such as BitTorrent and YouTube), the “dynamic” IP addresses in use by most ISPs and an inability to adequately protect ones own wireless connection from serious attacks, we’ve been placed at the top of a slippery slope.

All that this bill will accomplish is pushing illegal filesharing further underground, forcing it to invent new untrackable technologies and/or abuse existing old ones.  It is only a matter of time before the big “creative industries” realise that their sales have not gone up and that their profits have not increased. It is only a matter of time before they claim that nobody purchased Lily Allen’s new album because of people trading files via e-mail, posting DVDs and USB sticks to one another via smail mail, and recording their own MP3s from low-quality media streams.  The suggestion that people don’t want to buy crap music they can hear for free every day on the radio is apparently too radical.

The answer to these problems?  More legislation pushed through by people who do not understand the internet and less freedom for its users.

I’m also very uncomfortable with the way that copyright infringement through non-filesharing means are not mentioned (or, if they are, I’ve yet to hear about it).  Where is the crackdown on the lending of books and CDs?  Where is the legislation that says it is illegal to create copies of television shows you have watched and distribute them to your friends?  Presumably the bill would not have passed, had the elderly been aware they’d have their VHS players confiscated.

Excuse me, whilst I write another letter to my MP.

BBC Encourages Hard Drive Destruction – Why!?

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3 years ago
by John Pennycook in

This blog post is concerned with this BBC news article.

When I woke up this morning and checked my RSS feeds, I was shocked and quite frankly appalled to find that the BBC (following a “study” by Which? magazine) was encouraging people to take a hammer to their hard drives in order to keep their data secure.

Apparently, the “only way” to ensure a fraudster cannot get hold of your personal information when you sell a computer is to completely destroy your storage media.

Given that the economy is currently shot to hell and we’re supposed to be worrying about the environment, surely stopping electronic goods from being put to good use and causing extra waste in the process is nothing short of ridiculous?

Bad move, BBC.

Since the time of writing my e-mail to the BBC, the article has now been slightly rectified (it now contains a video guide that at least mentions filling a drive with zeros as an alternative) — but it still claims destruction is safer.

I used to think their articles were well-researched and useful, but this has taught me to take anything they say with a handful of salt. I suggest anybody reading this blog does the same.

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