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Articles

“Blocking” and Anti-blocking

Given the outcome of previous hearings on copyright infringement, the court’s conclusion this week that the UK’s major ISPs should be ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay was no surprise. However the judgment raises an interesting technical issue. In a previous hearing, it had been pointed out that there was a way to […]

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Articles

IETF on Botnet Detection

A bot is a program, maliciously installed on a computer, that allows that computer and thousands of others to be controlled by attackers. Bots are one of the major problems on the Internet, involved in many spam campaigns and distributed denial of service attacks, as well as allowing attackers to read private information from the […]

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Presentations

Consent – the last resort?

I did a presentation at the EEMA eID Interoperability conference last month on alternatives to “consent” in federated access management. At the moment consent seems to be the most often cited justification for processing personal data – websites frequently say that “by using this site you consent to…”. The problem with this is that the […]

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Articles

IWF Annual Report 2011

The annual report of the Internet Watch Foundation was published yesterday. The highlight is news that through closer collaboration with hotlines and Internet industries in other countries, the average time for removal of an illegal indecent image of a child from the Internet has dropped from over a month to twelve days.  That is the […]

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Articles

US Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights

Having been studying Europe’s proposed Data Protection revision for several weeks, it’s interesting to compare it with the proposed Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights recently published by the White House. This, too, recognises that the Internet is different to the paper-based world, but it seems to me to put this in a more positive way […]

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Closed Consultations

MoJ Evidence on EC Data Protection proposal

I’ve just sent in a Janet Submission to the Ministry of Justice’s Call for Evidence on the EU Data Protection proposals. Our response mentions the good and bad things about the proposal, as discussed here previously, for Internet Identifiers: still no clarity on when IP addresses etc. are personal data, but at least more realistic […]

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Articles

Government Response on Draft Defamation Bill

The Ministry of Justice has published their response to the Joint Parliamentary Committee’s comments on a proposed Defamation Bill. As discussed in a previous post, those comments included a novel suggestion that third party postings on websites be treated differently depending on whether the posting is attributed or anonymous. For organisations that allow such postings […]

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Articles

Copyright blocking – recent UK cases

The latest case brought by rightsholders under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 has found that bittorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay does infringe copyright according to the Act. Following this decision it seems likely that rightsholders will seek injunctions under s97A of the Act requiring ISPs to “block” access to the site, as […]

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Articles

ECJ on Copyright Injunctions: Hosting Providers

After ruling last year on the balance between the rights of copyright holders, users and network providers, the European Court of Justice has now ruled on the same question applied to the case of a hosting provider, the social network Netlog. As in the earlier Scarlett case, the copyright collecting society (SABAM) had asked the […]

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Articles

Understanding Threats to Mobile Computing

An interesting talk by Ken van Wyk on threats to mobile devices at the FIRST/TF-CSIRT meeting last week. While it’s tempting to treat smartphones just as small-screen laptops (let’s face it, users do!) there are significant differences in the threats to which the two types of devices are exposed. These need to be recognised in […]