Fiddling with fiddlers while London turns (into an exclusive haven for the robber barons)
And I guess the British Museum had better check out its ancient Greek library pretty fast.
The final session of Parliament before next year's General Election was opened by the Queen today, who told MPs and peers that the Tory-led coalition government had 15 bills tabled. There was little of note on the tech front, with two exceptions – both detailed within the Serious Crime Bill. The first is that plans are afoot …
Yet again.
I feel a short public information film coming on
> sentences for attacks on computer systems fully reflect the damage they cause
How about requiring some of the responsibility for insecure and badly designed systems to fall on the heads of the people who design or (mis)manage them? One of the properties of being a "professional" person is taking responsibility for the quality of your work (on the basis that it is specialised and therefore beyond the grasp of "ordinary folk" to understand or critique) and that you have a duty of care towards those who place their trust in your services.
Maybe if people who's designs were so flawed - or who cut out every failsafe, oversight, procedural check or protection mechanism for reasons of cost or stupidity - that they amounted to criminal negligence were held to account there would be at least a start to getting some half-decent, secure software. What we have at the moment is like blaming the woodworms when your house falls down.
I agree with you. However, many computer hackers/script kiddies/metasploit users want to make money for themselves and don't pay tax.
Incompetent coders, careless sys admins and sloppily run IT companies usually (tax loop holes aside) pay tax.
The old maxim... "don't bite the hand that feeds you".
> sentences for attacks on computer systems fully reflect the damage they cause
Oh great - damage or 'damage'? - never mind, rhetorical question.
So someone walks past a defective defence and the owners poop themselves, call in consultants, wipe servers, damage databases, and otherwise slapstick fall over their own feet in panic and *those* will be the 'damages' that the 'hacker' pays for then.
Your crime is exposing incompetance. Your sentence will be proportional to the magnitude of the incompetance exposed.
Let's hope they don't take the word of the "victim" for the cost...
The cost of the damage should purely be the loss of business if a system is taken offline by the attack (NOT afterwards when they patch the flaw in a panic) and the real damage to systems or data.
NOT the price or inconvenience of fixing the flaw which they shouldn't have left in the first place, nor the damage their reputation suffers from being made to look stupid for hosting their services on windows 98.
I do agree with the above posters, that perhaps there should be some penalties for bad security, but it's worth noting that if someone physically breaks into a house, the homeowner is not penalised by the law for leaving the door unlocked, although their insurance firm is likely to be less happy.
Anything the government and police don't want you to have I would assume - as I suspect they don't really exist, but you can't find out without the risk of accidental coming into possession of one (or the suspicion of possession)
Though I assume the normal one, used by most paedophiles goes like this
"Find partner"
"Produce child"
"abuse child"
"Any history text that covers the last 500 years? (hint: how old were the wives of Henery VIII?) Wikipedia?"
When they married him they were: 24, 32, 28, 25,19, 31.
What is your point??
The operative word there are 'when they married him'.
Catherine of Aragon, for example, was betrothed to Henry's brother Arthur at the age of three, and married at fifteen. Henry VII may not have been the best choice for this example, but you don't have to spend long looking at English history to find that marriages to girls in their early teens was fairly common and considered 'normal'. By today's standards, this is far from acceptable, but this serves only as an illustration that attitudes, and moral norms, change over time, as they do across cultures. The fact that the rise of Christianity in the British Isles also led to a reduction in the rights of women, and the tendency to view them as property didn't help either.
That was my point.
Books of photographs by Lewis Carroll (which I saw openly for sale in a Fleet Street bookshop in the 80's)
The diaries of a notorious criminal who sold 9 year old girls as sex slaves while committing genocide as a side line. And perhaps they could also imprison anyone who celebrates him on Columbus Day?
>> WTF are 'paedophilic manuals'?
> They're the things that used to be called family photo albums.
I dunno, I was assuming that possession of paedophilic manuals was going to be something along the lines of The Hands of Orlac but where Vasseur is a charlie chester. Seems a bit harsh to do porridge for it though.
The BBC have used the wording "written paedophilia".
So better burn those copies of Lolita now. Surely written paedophilia (assuming it is entirely fictional) is the very definition of a victimless crime, however distasteful it may be. In any case, the Head of the British Library can look forward to a lengthy stretch inside unless they burn a sizeable chunk of their Victorian literature.
Seems like just the sort of laws the Police love - it can mean pretty much whatever they want it to mean, giving grounds for arrest and thus grounds to search for "other evidence". In other words, a charter to go fishing.
Seems to be actually mean child grooming for dummies
I'm not sure that banning them is right as it's verging on legislating "thought crimes", although I can see the reasoning for it. There's certainly a case for having some of that information to safeguard children ("Spotting child grooming for dummies?").
I've no idea. It seems a little silly to me to have a law to cover a specific case of a manual that details how to commit a very specific crime.
Why no legislation on burglary manuals? Or Murder manuals? Armed robbery manuals? (Maybe it's the programmer in me, but why not create an abstract law regarding the dissemination of criminal techniques in manuals and then have a concrete implementation for each crime?)
Is this law really going to accomplish anything? I'm no criminal mastermind, but I don't think that criminals go on to the internet, download a "paedophilic manual" and then start practising.
Why no legislation on burglary manuals? Or Murder manuals? Armed robbery manuals? (Maybe it's the programmer in me, but why not create an abstract law regarding the dissemination of criminal techniques in manuals and then have a concrete implementation for each crime?)
Because that would be sensible and would not pander to the idiots / daily mail readers / voters (delete as applicable). A sane lawyer, yes, I couldn't believe one still existed, recently stated that having more and more specific laws was a bad thing. Unless you are a lawyer. And guess what's the background of a lot of the top MPs...
There were also some statistics about the number of new laws introduced recently compared to historically. The rise is phenomenal, and it's not because there are a great many new or novel crimes being committed. Creating new laws is very different to enforcing them.
Why no legislation on burglary manuals?
...
Because that would be sensible
No it would not, it would be equally poorly thought out. Unless you want the Police to go on fishing expeditions after locksmiths, alarm system maintenance engineers, security researchers, etc. etc.
If you make it illegal to possess information that 'bad guys' can use, the only thing you achieve is making that information exclusive to 'bad guys'. After all, if you're going to commit a crime, you're not going to care. What it does mean is that everyone else knows nothing about the methods and mechanisms used by said 'bad guys', so cannot adequately defend themselves against them.
For example, if it becomes illegal to publish information on flaws in certain types of commonly used locks, Joe Public will not know that these are flawed, and know not to use them.
There is a distinct pattern here that most comments on this thread (the ones with the higher up-vote counts) also have a single down-vote.
Rather than just angry-clicking that down-vote button, why not make a reasoned and thought-out argument against the posts that you don't like? You never know, you might find that others also share your point of view, or even that, in formulating your response, this leads to you having to think about the issues and reformulate your own conclusions?
The problem with this is mission creep. No one will defend that it is a good thing to have such documents, but criminalising the possession rather than production or distribution, seems to me to be the lazy option that does not criminalise the right people. Just because it is easier to "catch" people possessing it, doesn't absolve the state from the responsibility to hunt down the abusers.
As others have said above, the wide ranging and vague wording makes it fodder for a fishing expedition when the state wants to "get" someone, and they cannot find any other actual crime has been committed. We saw the anti terrorism laws, which in response to worries about the vague wording were promised to only be applied in really serious cases. Try explaining to the police that the home secretary said it would not be used for trivial cases and see how far you get. Strangely, the home secretary's vague assurances don't count in court, the wording of the law does.
When they first criminalised possession of child pornography, (and I shouldn't need to say so, because any sane person would know that it is hideous stuff and those that produce it should be dealt with, but if I don't say it, people will assume I am for it, which I am not) I was uneasy because I suspected that having established the principle, it would be extended over time to include possession of other things that were not approved of. Then of course we got the possession of terror manuals, now this. Where next I wonder?
Imagine if someone began issuing a manual of how to kill people, should possesion of that be banned? What about a story told in the first person about killing someone? A story containing a rape? A story where the lead character says something offensive or expresses a view about terrorism/paedophilic manuals that appears to support or "glorify" either?
It is all quite worrying, and I wish people would wake up and pay attention to what is happening to our laws.
They have established the principle, the arguments now are sadly all about where the arbitrary line is drawn, and of course the vague wording means it can be drawn wherever the state wishes.
"Imagine if someone began issuing a manual of how to kill people, should possesion of that be banned? What about a story told in the first person about killing someone? A story containing a rape? A story where the lead character says something offensive or expresses a view about terrorism/paedophilic manuals that appears to support or "glorify" either?"
Why imagine?
At least one has been published (in the USA of course).
1st amendment rights. Not just for the causes you love, but also the causes you hate.
This has some pretty good arguments why those laws never should have existed in the first place (and its not because CP is good):
http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-must-be-re-legalized-in-the-coming-decade/
http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/11/child-porn-laws-arent-as-bad-as-you-think-theyre-much-much-worse/
"I've no idea. It seems a little silly to me to have a law to cover a specific case of a manual that details how to commit a very specific crime.
Why no legislation on burglary manuals? Or Murder manuals? Armed robbery manuals? (Maybe it's the programmer in me, but why not create an abstract law regarding the dissemination of criminal techniques in manuals and then have a concrete implementation for each crime?)"
I assume it's brought to us by the same ridiculous thought process that created the law banning 'terrorist manuals'.
You can legally own any number of books and scientific papers discussing the manufacture and use of bombs. Unless the police need a reason to give you trouble and you're of middle-eastern / Irish descent, then your books magically transmogrify into 'terrorist manuals'.
Sometimes it's even just a matter of marketing;
C.I.A.'s Improvised Munitions - perfectly fine.
Mujahideen's Handbook - expect to spend the next 10 years behind bars.
(FYI, I own none of the above. I'm not keen on being woken abruptly at 3am by stormtroopers.)
"WTF are 'paedophilic manuals'?"
Do you keep getting older while they stay the same age?
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Has your head started turning while walking past schools during playtime?
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This post has been deleted by its author
No doubt fictionalised accounts will be covered by this too, to avoid the accusation of it being a 'loophole' the evil pedophiles could exploit. Better go through your library, make sure you don't have any novels in which the protagonist seduces anyone underage. And no excuses even if set in a historical context, that's just another loophole! Yay for more thoughtcrime.
- Forcing a company to spend money to secure their system by publicizing a hole in there systems. 10 years.
- Making someone important look bad by guessing their email password. 20 years.
- Forgetting a laptop full of unencrypted personal data on the train. A brand new laptop.
Bear in mind that it's 24 years old, i.e. it dates from an era when Internet access was still pretty exclusive. There are all kinds of things that need sharpening up in the modern connected world - unauthorized access comes to mind immediately.
Realistically you have to accept some form of implied consent for things like access to a public-facing website, but that in itself opens up another can of worms if there is some kind of vulnerability: if something is put up there inadvertently meaning you can access it when the company didn't intend you to be able to then rationally that's their problem. If on the other hand you create some pattern of input that triggers a bug that allows you to access something you shouldn't you're breaking the law. The precise boundary between the two is completely undefined.
Ideally you'd address that before it comes up in court. They're not going to so someone is going to either get convicted unfairly or get off when they shouldn't have. It's all clearly foreseeable now but it might need a bit of effort to actually fix it.
The progressive ones use fax machines now? Wow. Most seem incapable of progressing beyond photocopies of photocopies and 2nd class stamps.
This is because they are paid by the hour, possibly including the hours that your documents are in the post.
"This legislation will be written by lawyers. A profession which is still passing documents around by fax machine."
If only.
In the UK the limit on document "bundles" by email is 10 pages or 2MB.
The MoJ has various attempts to sort out just the court time scheduling. AFAIK all have been complete fuckups.
Whilst there is a lot of old-skool document processing going on, I have to say it isn't universal. I'm just int the process of buying a house, and haven't yet met my solicitor despite retaining him about eight weeks ago. Everything has been done by phone or email, which suits me down to the ground.
https everywhere
disconnect
DNSCrypt
VPN
TOR
Anything else I should add to my shopping list? The more they do stuff like this, the more I want to hide my online presence. I'm not doing anything illegal to my knowledge, but who knows. One day I might search for nirvana, have the picture of the naked baby pop up and BAM I'm behind bars.
$Expletive that, the CMA needs tearing up entirely and rewriting from scratch.
To include "the use of digital media, computers or other electronic devices for spying on people by or on behalf of Governments", punishable by hanging by the teeth over a pot of hydrofluoric acid.
Also relevant, as worded there are no exemptions for historical works of art, so expect possession of digital pictures of many Greek statues or Michaelangelo's "David" to be criminalized under the new laws.
"But your Honour, the picture is of someone who not only died over 400 years ago but a statue".. 40 years. NEXT!!!...
(makes preparations to move somewhere more sensible, maybe North Korea)..
More to the point, think of television. I can't count the number of times I've seen a babies bare rear end when an advert for pampers crops up. Everyone who sees that adverts should be arrested, and the people who made it strung up for distributing child porn.
Absolutely disgraceful.
It's about time that Blighty get in touch with reality and digital crime. So far crims in the UK have gotten just a slap on the wrist. Japan's 2 year prison sentence minimum for pirates plus fines and 10 years plus fines for facilitators should be adopted world wide. Hackers should get a minimum of 10 years plus treble damages.
Oh look, it's Anonymous "Burn 'em at the stake" Coward again. I told you before, imprisoning people for piracy costs more than it's worth. Burning them at the stake means you can set an example by terrorising all those evil downloaders into submission!
I just wonder if the rest of the UK, its economy, the populations health and well being is all in check and we are now birds of paradise with nothing else better to focus on ?
I mean for a start I was watching the news (bbc news the other day) when Cameroon said the nation has been in a 7 year recession - I was gob smacked this is considering the BBC has done nothing but to brush the recession under the carpet. They have never labelled it as the recession and always looked at the problem from a global point of view rather than a local point of view.
The health service is crumbling the kids are leaving school badly educated - we have a low level of high end skill workers and lots of low skilled workers fighting over minimum wage jobs.
But hey this is how they like it - keep us all in check - keeping us worried about our next meal on the table rather than what on earth they are doing to destroy the country.
I think it would have been better focused on the uk timebomb - google it - if you have no idea about the 1.4 trillion debt we owe and exactly to whom and for what reason ? Is it the chinese and most of it related to illegal wars over the last decade and the cost of security surrounding this.
No go pat yourselves on the back done a great job in deceiving the nation yet again
Yeah, but consider that the UK will now send an armored tank brigade and about 1000 men to Poland to drive around under Putin's nose like back in the times with Monty. Putin will yet know the power of the english taunt!
Carry on!
"I guess it's a good job that alt.sex.stories text repository is not hosted in the UK then?"
True.
The last outing of the Obscene Pub's Act was IIRC down to a story posted to there from a UK citizen.
Politicians seem to have a huge problem with recognizing the difference between fantasy (as in "not real") with real life (as in "real")
Perhaps because so many of the things they claim are fantasies?
Amend the Fraud & Abuse Act: Excellent then does one also intend to include "Fraudulent Service Providers" spying on the common folk whilst they siphon off Billions of Tax payers revenue into one's personal off-shore tax haven?!?
Perhaps the genuine Fraud is the fact that most software in release to the Public is distributed with no warranty and this is done because of course these service providers actually place the malicious code in there own software and then to add insult to injury sell the vulnerabilities later on.
CIA Sub-Project 11/9 (9-11) MKUltra and population mind control via the Telephone system they would have us all believe is a personal computer system. MJ12 - Magic or Majestic - Wording you'd be hard pressed to miss when examining your Microchips! UFO - Oh they're refering to Plan B & Plan 9 from Outer Space which has no Bugs and is in use by all 9 Major providers otherwise known as MAINWAY to the NSA who seem to operate under the assumption that the Bell-Southern Database is there's to use and abuse but saddly it is in point of fact open source and that means it belongs to the people too.
There was a case, a few years ago, being brought by Kent Police as I recall, where a prosecution was being attempted under the Obscene Publications Act, for the content of an entirely private online chat: the thinking being, presumably, that the scope of the OPA could be extended to virtually anything IF the participants in the conversation could be construed as 'publishing' to each other (for sufficiently warped and twisted definitions of 'publishing'). I believe El Reg reported on it at the time.
I'd very much like to know what the final score was in that case; that hasn't been reported to my knowledge.
(It may be relevant to the attempt to criminalize 'paedophilic manuals', whatever the hell they turn out to be. Probably virtually anything, IF in the possession of someone the police decide they want to charge with something...)
What about all the Trek fanfic then?
Pretty sure that all the stories featuring Kes on ST:Voy are illegal, after all "they only live ten years" is not a defence under the proposed amended Act.
Insert other fanfic here, its pretty much guaranteed that it will be covered under "extreme pr0n", "terror manuals" or other fashionable buzzwords.
A good example is the infamous ST:TOS episode featuring the homemade explosives, which showed the amounts AND how to identify the chemicals by taste.