The Home Office have concluded that a couple of aspects of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 need to be fixed in order to comply with European law, and are doing a rapid consultation on the changes. Unfortunately although the consultation document is clear about what the problems are it doesn’t give a clear […]
The European Commission has published an overview report of the responses to its recent consultation on network neutrality. It seems that respondents agreed that “traffic management is a necessary and essential part of the operation of an efficient internet” and that its use to address security and congestion issues is entirely legitimate. However there appears […]
Earlier this year the European Community revised its regulatory framework for telecommunications networks, so the UK Government is now consulting on how to implement those changes in UK law. Although most of the changes are not relevant to JANET as a private network, I have responded in three areas: Data breach notification, where the UK […]
The Ministry of Justice has been seeking evidence to inform its input into the ongoing revision of the European Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC). I’ve submitted a JANET response, covering three issues where we frequently trip over problems with either the interpretation or the use of the current Directive and the Data Protection Act 1998 that […]
For a while there has been one pair of contradictory answers to the question of whether an IP address was personal data. Two different German courts were asked about addresses in the log of a web server: one said that was personal data, the other said it wasn’t. Now we seem to have another pair. […]
An interesting presentation at the TERENA TF-CSIRT meeting on how visited and home sites need to work together to resolve complaints about users of eduroam visitor networks. Stefan Winter is both an architect of eduroam and a member of RESTENA-CSIRT, so well placed to understand these issues. Although the JRS and eduroam Policies both require […]
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has published its response to the consultation on how costs under the Digital Economy Act 2010 should be shared. These are the costs of ISPs’ systems and processes to receive and pass on Copyright Infringement Reports (CIRs), Ofcom’s costs in regulating the process, and the costs of the […]
This seems to be a particularly busy summer for consultations! I’ve just submitted a JANET(UK) response to an Ofcom discussion paper on Traffic Management and “Net Neutrality”. The quotes are Ofcom’s and I’m reassured to see them because I’ve always suspected the phrase of being something of a banner that can be waved in support […]
Another consultation response: this time to a European Commission review of the e-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC). The Directive addresses a number of different issues around electronic commerce, but the area of most interest to those who run websites or networks is the rules on liability for content in Articles 12 to 15. For networks, the Directive […]
An interesting report from the French data protection authority (CNIL) that the European Commissioner has announced a delay in the proposed revision of the European Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC. Rather than publishing a draft Directive later this year, it seems that the plan is now to publish a report this autumn with the draft expected […]