The Digital Economy Bill: Where is it?
Posted by Ceri Davies Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:08:00 GMT
For anyone struggling to find the text of the Digitial Economy Bill, the current text is on the UK Parliament web site.
The Digital Economy Bill: Write to your MP
Posted by Ceri Davies Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:31:00 GMT
The Digital Economy Bill has been proposed. Act now, before it becomes an Act. You can write to your MP via Write to Them right now. Write to a Lord or two while you’re there, it won’t hurt.
As for why, see Cory Doctorow’s summary, the Open Rights Group’s campaign (although I think this focusses a lot on the disconnection and dismisses some of the other crap and what other countries are doing.
Here’s the text of the letter I sent to my MP; it’s heavily based on Cory’s article above. If you’re writing - and if you’re not, why not? You should write even if you support the Bill (but what are you doing here?!), it’s that important - don’t just copy this, put your spin on it.
Dear Jennifer Willott,
I’m writing to outline in no uncertain terms that I feel that the Digital Economy Bill, as proposed, should be rejected by Parliament. This single issue is critical enough to directly influence how I will be voting in the next election.
Firstly, disconnection from the Internet is disproportionate and unacceptable, particularly in order to prevent what is a civil offence. Additionally, the fallout of this on members of the public who are unrelated to the accused offender are non-trivial. Examples:
1) I have bank accounts that I cannot access by any method other than online, I also work from home quite a lot. Another member of my household getting our connection disconnected is an obvious negative impact;
2) Many people do not know how to secure their wireless access points. A malicious person could easily drive around Plasnewydd potentially getting unsuspecting households disconnected by abusing their wireless connectivity (encryption of wireless access points does not really help, as all wireless protocols are rather insecure);
3) Students or young professionals in shared households could lose access due to no fault of their own, possibly directly affecting their jobs.
Apart from the question of disconnection, the new rating system will fail to protect children or consumers as all such rating systems do, and will actually make it more difficult for smaller businesses or startups to enter or stay in the market.
The secondary legislation grant to the Secretary of State is a huge concern, allowing the Secretary of State to pretty much do anything without consulting Parliament, including devolving frightening powers and levels of privacy intrusion, probably to private companies (who, as the T-Mobile data selling story this week shows, are often as poor as the government at protecting citizens’ data).
Finally, the Bill lacks any means of improving the digital economy that it purports to protect. Widening access to the Internet, rather than trying to curb it, should be the focus of the Bill, yet there is no mention of helping the poor to gain Internet access, nothing to ensure that broadband access becomes cheap and operator-neutral. There is no mention of how publicly funded media or intellectual property, such as that from the BBC, Arts Council grantee works, etc. are made available to people to actually access, embrace and use to drive creation of new art.
The Bill seems entirely focussed on protecting the income of industry (many of whom are struggling to create original content anyway - see the huge number of film “remakes” and musical cover versions) at the expense of the citizen’s ability to do what other countries are currently declaring basic rights (http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10374831-2.html).
I urge you to oppose this Bill.
Yours sincerely,
Ceri Davies
Moved
Posted by Ceri Davies Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:43:00 GMT
Since it was set up, this machine has lived on my gateway FreeBSD machine in what has since become the boy’s bedroom. It moved from there to my own bedroom, and I recently started turning it off at night to try to save power (and sleep better!).
This led to a number of people emailing me about outages - which was quite flattering; didn’t realise anyone would care about my crappy blog that much - because they were in a timezone disparate to be trying to get to it during the hours I had it turned off.
Therefore, and with the realisation that I could get a hosted solution for $12/month (US), I have moved this blog to a Solaris[1] zone hosted at Gangus Internet. Service (technically and customer-servicely) so far has been absolutely impeccable.
If you are reading this, I guess the move went OK.
[1] Which is not a reflection on FreeBSD in any way. Questions such as were asked after this commit are unnecessary :)
On interfaces
Posted by Ceri Davies Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:27:00 GMT
On our way to work, there is a crossroads.
The crossroads has traffic lights on each spur, and Stef has discovered that if you press the button at one crossing, it has the effect of causing all the crossings to be activated. Therefore, on the way past the first crossing she hits the button so that by the time she arrives at the crossing that she does want to take, it has made the lights go green.
I pulled her up on this as an abuse of the interface, warning her that there were no guarantees that this functionality would be present in a future version of the lights and that it was users like her who caused headaches for developers trying to refactor and improve older software.
She just shook her head.
What to do...
Posted by Ceri Davies Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:22:00 GMT
I’m feeling really deflated in front a computer of late.
I think this is a mixture of:
Reaching the “write everything up” stage of a fun project I’ve been working on for the last 9 months (perhaps I will write about this sometime);
Not having time to focus on anything at home (Max is lovely but all-encompassing);
It seems that I have read the entire Internet;
Shouty old dicks being rude to each other in a particular open-source project every time I open my mail.
Even while reviewing the new Absolute FreeBSD I had to print everything out and annotate with pencil.
So if you’re wondering where I am, or why I haven’t responded to an email, meh.
Marriott hates babies
Posted by Ceri Davies Tue, 26 Jun 2007 07:05:00 GMT
For the last couple of weeks we’ve been taking the boy to Water Babies, where they help babies to gain confidence in the water, teach them how to grab for a static object when they fall in, and finally work up to getting them swimming on their own underwater.
The sessions are for half an hour each week at Cardiff Marriott hotel’s leisure club, and have been held there for a couple of years. This is apparently all too much for the members of the club, a number of whom have complained about the sessions and had the classes ejected. Not only does this mean that 20 sets of parents have to rejuggle their weekly schedules and travel arrangement, but due to the new venue being far away from my work, it means that I can no longer watch my son swimming.
So, shame on the members at the Cardiff Marriott leisure club, and shame on Cardiff Marriott for not having enough sense of righteousness to tell whichever miserable bastards complained about babies learning to swim to get a life.
Been a long time, been a long time...
Posted by Ceri Davies Tue, 05 Jun 2007 12:26:00 GMT
No, not another blog post opining after the last time I posted.
Like most folk who have to get a variety of jobs done, I have a Windows partition squirreled away on one of my desktops, and had occasion to use it just now. Unfortunately, according to the Event Viewer, the last time I did this was on June 15th 2006, so now I have to suffer applying a year’s worth of updates first. Arrgh.
Update, 20 minutes later: Wow, that was quick, my system is unbootable.
Has it really been that long?
Posted by Ceri Davies Tue, 29 May 2007 18:53:00 GMT
Wow, 24 days passed really quickly…
The trials we were doing with Veritas Cluster Services for UNIX worked out nicely; I’ll have some stuff to write up regarding a consolidation project that I’ll be finishing up in the next few months. On which note, I haven’t forgotten the Solaris Cluster on the Cheap series, I’ve just been crazy busy and away a fair amount of my spare time.
We had a pair of x4500s turn up for some trials today. First trial was getting the damn things to the server room; at 96kg each when boxed it was a matter of removing all 48 disks, the power supplies and the service controller from each, leaving the chassis to be lugged a little more easily.
Huge congratulations to stitch and Dick; they know what for, but I don’t know if they want it common knowledge.
To close, I just discovered that a 16 week old boy can happily hit you from 3 feet away, if you see what I mean…
Never Eat Shredded Wheat
Posted by Ceri Davies Wed, 02 May 2007 19:45:00 GMT
Another quote that will remain unattributed for fear of my life:
“Once you have used the moss on a tree to work out where North is, how do you find out where West is?”
The very hungry caterpillar
Posted by Ceri Davies Sat, 28 Apr 2007 23:21:00 GMT
“What is brain freeze?” asked Stef as she fought her way through a refrigerated apple juice induced ice cream headache.
“Oh, I know”, she continued, “it’s because of the caterpillars in your head, right?”.
