Awhile ago I was thinking about how to make a website that couldn’t be taken down by censors. I immediately thought of using Usenet to store the HTML and other page content since it’s a distributed system. The HTML, images, movies and other media could be stored in Usenet articles. Since Usenet servers connect to each other and synchronise news articles it would mean that the information would be spread world-wide with no single take-down point, and the information would be accessible to anybody as long as they had access to a Usenet server, and software that could interpret the articles correctly. continue reading…
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Archive for November, 2009
Originally posted on Friday, 16 May, 2003, 16:51 GMT 17:51 UK 
at BBC News.
Officials in the UK are routinely demanding huge quantities of information about what people do online and who they call, say privacy experts.
Police and other officials are making around a million requests for access to data held by net and telephone companies each year, according to figures compiled from the government, legal experts and the internet industry.
The findings were announced at a public debate into government proposals to widen powers for internet snooping held in London this week.
But a Home Office spokesman disputed the figures, telling BBC News Online it estimated that the number of requests were half that suggested.
The requests include telephone billing data, e-mail logs and customer details, which privacy experts estimate could amount to a billion individual items of data, ranging from credit card numbers to numbers dialled.
Read more here.
Originally posted on Wednesday, 17 July, 2002, 09:15 GMT 10:15 UK at BBC News.
From August net service providers in the UK will be obliged to carry out surveillance of some customers’ web habits on behalf of the police.
Controversial laws passed in 2000 oblige large communications companies to install technology that allows one in 10,000 of their customers to be watched.
The information gathered about what people look at on the web, the content of e-mail messages and their phone conversations will be passed to the police or a government monitoring station.
The demands have been criticised by experts who say the law conflicts with basic guarantees of privacy and that the government is not doing enough to help pay for the installation of the surveillance systems.
Read more here.
I’ve just been banned from mmorpg.com for a discussion about Star Wars Galaxies. Here’s the ban e-mail I received… continue reading…