Think of the Children (again)

Once again, the nanny state is on about censoring the internet because "Think of the Children".

See ISP review article (here).

I have said it all before, but it it may be worth explaining a bit about what AAISP do here.

Firstly, all of our customers are adults, we do not sell to minors at all. And all broadband customers have actively selected that they want no filtering. So I suspect we comply with even these latest suggestions.

But there is a lot that our adult customers can do to take responsibility for their children using the Internet. Remember, if you have teenage kids that want to access porn, they will always be able to - it is not clear that there is evidence that this does any harm to be honest, and a solution to any harm (such as skewed ideas on relationships) is better education - talk to your kids, explain that porn is fiction just like thrillers on TV, and sci-fi. Talk to them about relationships.

However, for younger children, every computer system these days provides a range of "parental controls". Indeed, sometimes it is hard to set up a machine with these turned off! Use these tools.

Also, you can set up additional free and even paid for tools if you need - just search for them!

We can also help - we can set the default DNS servers on your broadband to be OpenDNS, which allows you to set up DNS level filtering that will help stop young children stumbling across the more dodgy parts of the Internet. If you are unsure, call us and ask for help (or chat on the web page, or irc, or email, or SMS). The only thing we don't do is filtering in the connection we provide to you.

Ultimately, as our customer, you are in control of your computers and have access to a range of tools to help.

File sharing crime

As you will see reported, and a good ORG article (here), the Digital Economy Bill is introducing a 10 year jail sentence for the most minor of copyright breaches - things which have so far been a simple matter of a civil wrong for which compensation can be due. Until now, copying for yourself has been civil, much like trespassing is civil, and you could have to pay damages.

However, the wording is bad, and make anything that could cause "risk of loss" to the copyright holder a crime with up to 10 years in jail.

This is bad, but I have to say the full horror will not be with us until this is law.

At present, there are many things which are illegal. If you break the law you break the law, and could, if convicted, face penalties or jail time. However, there are very few things where the fact of the matter - whether you have broken the law or not, is at the whim of someone else.

Yes, if you break the law, and someone else knows, they could agree not to tell what they know in exchange for some money. That is a sort of blackmail. But at the end of the day you broke the law.

However, as far as I can see, there is no reason for someone not to sell a "licence" which allows activities which would not have been legal without one, retrospectively.

I.e. you "file share", but then the copyright holder (or their "agent", aka "troll") can say that they can have to sent to jail for 10 years for a crime, or, for a (not so) small fee, they will sell a licence that covers what you did, making it now "legal". Literally selling a "get out of jail" card!

What is 10 years in jail worth? Well, that is the issue, they can make the fee anything. They are no longer asking for compensation for a loss in a civil case, they are selling "not going to jail for 10 years". That is worth a lot more than the cost of a DVD plus legal expenses.

I pay for my films, but I know people who I am pretty sure do not always do so. It is somewhat scary that they could be on the end of such threats. I wonder if these trolls will also team up with loan companies to lend you the money to pay for the licence over 10 years?!

DE Bill - phone blocking orders

One of the more recent amendments to the Digital Economy Bill proposed the possibility of orders to block use of a device or phone number or something else that may be used with a device if it is, or likely to be used for drug dealing.

There are some problems with this!

Does it make any sense?

This appears to be based on an NCA report that talks of basically telephone ordered drugs. The report talks of people call a long standing and well known (mobile) phone number, and order drugs, then someone gets sent to deliver them. Lots of exploitation involved in various levels, dealers trying to keep at arms length, nasty business.

The proposal seems aimed at disrupting the supply by blocking these numbers. It is not clear that this is an NCA proposal though, so not clear why it had been put forward.

To me that makes no sense. I am not in law enforcement, and do not know how these things work, but surely if you have evidence of drug dealing, arrest someone. If you know the number is used to order drugs, get an intercept, record calls for evidence, physically locate the phone and arrest someone? One comment I got to this is that when you take one person out the number just moves to someone else - well that sounds perfect as you can just repeat the process until the number becomes a poison chalice that no dealer would touch - the same result as blocking the number but also arresting several people along the way.

But assuming I don't know what I am talking about, and the seemingly lazy approach of just blocking the number is sensible somehow, surely all you are doing is driving the dealers to use more covert and secure communications? Phone numbers are so last millennium! For a start the dealer could get a non UK mobile, which is just as easy to use but harder to get blocked. They could use a non UK number that forwards to a UK mobile, the non UK number then not even being on a roaming phone, and the final target being changeable as needed - again hard to block as has to be blocked at all calling telcos, not just the receiving telco.

But forget "phone numbers" for a moment, what of "iMessage moredrugs@example.com" as the instruction you give. Now you have communications that are end to end encrypted, and even the fact of the communication is in the hands of a foreign company. The dealers have just dropped under the radar massively if they do that, and there are many other common platforms for such communication.

So it seems nonsensical and very short sighted to even consider this as a means to tackle the problems, even a lazy means.

What about due process?

Another big concern I have here is that such action, which is clearly harming or punishing someone (the phone user), is done without any actual evidence or conviction of a crime. Indeed, the amendment covers cases where no crime is even committed but the conduct by someone is likely to mean a device is could be used to commit a (drug) crime.

This is a worrying trend that bypasses a proper due process. We seem to have too many of these. It could also be abused - if someone put our business number on some toilet walls saying call for drugs, then we could be blocked, even though no crime committed?

Wide scope?

The other problem I see is this does not just cover devices (how quaint) and telephone numbers (almost as quaint) but anything else used with the device. This means such orders could block domain names. If someone emailed me offering drugs then could I find my domain name blocked? Would there be notice? Would there be an appeal?

Now this would involve a judge, but even so, this is punishment without charge or conviction, and has much wider scope than simple mobile phones.

What should we do?

We need to stop trying to find short term shortcuts and actually catch the criminals. We also need to fix the social issues that create the environment for such criminals to thrive in the first place. But all of that is a lot more work than just making phone blocking orders...

Evaluating a VPN provider

At A&A we are looking in to how we can best help customers exercise their human rights for privacy and rights to net neutrality and to access to legal content.

The IP Act puts in place horrendous snooping powers, and the DE Bill as proposed puts in place a new national censor with the job of blocking porn sites - legal porn sites. We can all imagine how much further such proposals could go.

At present there is no ban on operating a VPN - it would be hard to ban without also banning https used by many web sites and businesses and banks and the VPNs used by industry and even parliament.

There are VPN providers now (sensibly) targeting the UK market - they provide an VPN endpoint which you connect to from your computer or using a router that can do VPN for your whole house. They make a point of having equipment and legal entities in countries that do not require logging and snooping, and make a point of not recording anything or accepting orders from governments like the UK.

So, the next question is how we evaluate VPN providers and even make some recommendations. We may even set up a VPN operation ourselves (well, not ourselves, a foreign company with foreign servers, so no subject to UK jurisdiction).

These are this obvious aspects I can think of, but keen on other comments.

Speed

One simple aspect of the service and the devices you choose to operate the VPN at your premises is whether the service can keep up with the speed of your Internet connection, such as an 80Mb/s VDSL service.

Price

Obvious one, but you want a reasonable price. Free is great but there has to be a catch some how, so you expect to pay a few dollars a month at least for any reasonable service.

Anonymity

Are they really not logging anything, do they have a clear history of refusing information requests?

Trust

Can we really trust them? Very hard to be sure but reputation and how long they have been in business are key factors.

Geotagging

Can they have your traffic look like UK traffic (if that is what you want)? This may be tricky and without it things like netflix may not even work. If someone sets up a service specially for UK use they may be able to convince netflix and others that it is UK IP addresses even if plugged in via another country.

Technical

MTU issues, latency, transparency of IP protocols and ports and so on, IPv6. All things that matter from a technical point of view. Ironically, maybe even fixed IP - if blocking/censorship is your main concern.

First they came for the porn sites

If it was not bad enough with the Investigatory Powers Act passing in to law, we are now facing another wave of stupid and dangerous law - the Digital Economy Bill.

Several people have written some good pieces on that - see one of the latest by Jim Killock of Open Rights Group.

What problem are they trying to address?

"THINK OF THE CHILDREN!"

Seriously, it is not clear what the specific problem is here - but the Government have been after porn sites for a long time. Those of us that are cynical see this as just one more step in censoring the Internet, one small justification for more filters and laws to back them, so that more and more can later be added to the filtering lists over time.

I will be delighted if someone reading this has some concrete evidence of studies showing what problem exists to be solved. Are there any MPs that did not see porn before 18 (or a pig's head maybe?).

Personally I see two issues, the first is younger children inadvertently encountering unsavoury content on the Internet. This is easy to address with existing tools and some education of parents. The second is older children that want to access porn on the Internet but are not yet 18 (e.g. people that are 16, can fight in the army, and can get married and have sex, those sort of people as well as those a few years younger). This is not a "problem" to solve - teenage kids have accessed porn, probably forever, and long before the Internet. The only problem is where they see porn as "reality" rather than "entertainment and fiction", and that is solved by education. No amount of blocking will ever stop a teenage kid accessing porn if they want to and that is a simple fact!

What is the solution they propose?

There are two key parts here, both of which have huge issues.

1. Age verification on porn sites. Unlike whisky selling web sites that have "Are you over 18? Yes/No", they mean something that can actually validate that you are over 18.

This is serious - a lot of people (adults) access porn. It is not unusual. However, the fact that people access porn, and the specific preferences for people's fantasies is very personal information - sensitive personal information which is valuable to criminals, may be very embarrassing, and usable for blackmail and who knows what else. Remember, until surprisingly recently a preference for same sex relationships would make you a criminal suspect! If anything, it is one's sexual preferences that are perhaps one of the main reasons for the basic human right to a private life.

The only real way to do any sort of age verification is to identify the user somehow. This is a huge challenge to do "over the Internet". Almost anything that can be used to identify a person can be copied and used by their teenage kid - and something like a credit card is one of the easiest. Also, bear in mind, kids as young as 8 can legitimately get a pre-payment visa/mastercard now.

No matter how you try - the system will be flawed somehow (what can an adult type or do on a computer that a child cannot copy?).

But no matter what you try - there will be an association of the web site access with the identity of the person accessing it. Steps can be taken to try and avoid this linking together cleanly by some means, but ultimately there will be a link somewhere, and that allows for a huge database of sexual preferences for adults in the UK. That will get hacked or sold or both.

We are talking about a database of the sexual preferences of every UK adult! But I suppose the Investigatory Powers Act allows such a database to be created as well - at least tied to an Internet connection if not a person. This database will tie to specific people.

2. Blocking of porn sites. Only UK sites would have to comply (putting them at a commercial disadvantage and hampering minority groups), so they propose that sites that do not comply can be blocked by an order on UK ISPs.

There is plenty of evidence that trying to block illegal sites that assist in copyright infringement in some way simply does not work. It is a massive game of "whack-a-mole" at best, and totally pointless at worst. This has been tried, and it simply does not work.

But trying to censor completely legitimate and legal web sites, which have financial and legal resources, is going to be a much bigger challenge. For a start, there are a lot of them, a hell of a lot. We are not talking of blocking one web site like piratebay, we are talking every single non UK porn web site that is not going to pay for UK age verification services - they would be much more successful investing in ways for UK "users" to bypass government censorship.

But as Jim Killock points out - the second "age verification" becomes the "norm" for UK porn "users", we see massive opportunity for fraud - porn sites that insist you have to enter card details to proceed and even quoting the UK law on this. Quote a law and link to it and the request seems legitimate. If all of the free sites vanish (unless you try a little to find them), then we will be swamped by the bogus sites collecting personal information. And there is almost no end to how much personal information they can ask for in the interests of "age verification" and a promise not to actually charge your card or log the details. There is no way for people to tell the "real" (and supposedly safe) age verification requests from the bogus ones, and there is a massive incentive for people that are defrauded to keep quiet rather than own up to the site they were trying to access. It will be a secret and undercover fraud that will be a nightmare to track down.

What is the right answer?

You have to assume there is a question/problem in the first place, which is not clear, but assuming there is one - what is the answer.

I think it is simple to say - education is the answer, not censorship.

But I'll try and be a tad more helpful.

For young children you need education of parents and guardians on how to use the many tools available to them, and some education that the Internet is not the ultimate baby sitter. There are many tools - just installing any operating system these days will offer a range of "parental controls". There are safe-search settings on search engines and there are controls that can be set in most ISPs systems that offer filtering as an option. ISP filters tend to be whole house and so a tad crude but there are DNS based systems which are easier to set on a per computer basis and provide controls not only on content but times of day, etc. Lots of tools exist, in the control of the parent/guardian. Yes, they are easy for some teenage kid to bypass, but we are talking here of young children not trying to access porn, and for that all of these tools work well.

For older children that want to assess porn the first thing to realise is that there really is no point trying to stop them doing so - it will never work, sorry. But education matters. Along with sex education you need education for teenagers about porn! I know it seems odd, but teenagers need to know porn exists, and that every type of porn and sexual preference you can imagine (and many you cannot) exist somewhere. They need to now that porn is entertainment and not reality. That it is fiction. That there are many things out there, with which they may feel uncomfortable, and that they have the choice of what they look at and what they do not. And that most of all they need to understand that it is not in any way a guide to any real relationship, just as many fictional and entertainment films are not a guide to real life. With some basic education people can enjoy porn, avoid things they do not enjoy, and still have meaningful sexual relationships in the real world.

Brick wall BT

Hurry up and build that wall, Trump, I want to bang my head against it as it would be easier than BT...

So, simple BT fault, suspected issue on fibre back-haul from an FTTC cab, started after MSO, so probably damaged to dirty fibre. Not a complicated fault at all.

Symptoms are idle levels of packet loss all day, sometimes peaking to 20%, that is shitty!

The dialogue sort of goes back and forth, but we finally go somewhere, after escalation, with a clear statement from BT:

'We have run diagnostics and can see numerous code violations which will require an engineer to liaise with 2nd line DCoE if the fibre escalation team are unable to assist.'

That is pretty clear, so we ask them to fix it.

• Us: Please fix the fault.
• BT: You need to book an SFI
• Us: An SFI is an optional service to check the metallic path to SIN349, nothing wrong with the metallic path here, so silly, just fix it
• BT: No, you have to book an SFI, that is the process
• Us: OK, what is the process for fixing this fault without ordering an optional service.
• BT: There is no other process
• Us: Are you really saying BT have no process to fix this fault without ordering an optional extra service - if so that is breach of contract as contract says you will investigate and fix faults
• BT: We don't see a BT fault
• Us: OK, so you are saying a line with constant loss peaking at 20% is acceptable, is that the formal standard BT work to?
• Us: What actual investigation did you do, and to what standard or reference did you test the line so as to decide there was no fault?
• BT: If you want us to investigate the fault report you raised further then please book an SFI
• Us: No, the contract says you will investigate and fix faults, are you refusing to?
• Us: Repeat of questions about this being "not faulty" at 20% loss?
• …

I'll add some more as it goes. But it goes round in circles.

Either BT

(a) consider this to be acceptable level of service, in which case, especially with ideas of universal broadband service obligations and automatic compensation, we need to take this up with OFCOM, BIS, and the Digital Economy Bill parliamentary committee as a matter of urgency.

(b) accept that this is a fault and BT are breaking contract by refusing to investigate and fix it.

BT just need to pick one and stick with that story to the end. Either that or just damn well fix the fault!

Latest attempt at filtering the Internet

This is serious stuff - the only hope we have is that every time this exact wording has been tried before it has failed. However, we are in 2016 where stupidity reigns at every level of government in all of the major countries of the world.

The proposed amendments to the Digital Economy Bill are detailed by Open Rights Group here.

So two issues.

1. That a filtered internet *must* be offered by ISPs unless the subscriber “opts in” to subscribe to a service that includes online adult-only content; the subscriber is aged 18 or over; and the provider of the service has an age verification scheme which meets the standards set out by OFCOM in subsection (4) and which has been used to confirm that the subscriber is aged 18 or over before a user is able to access adult-only content.

Now some of that is OK as EVERY SINGLE A&A CUSTOMER HAS OPTED OUT OF ALL FILTERING and confirmed they are 18 or over. We have no interest in contracting with under 18's as that is much harder to enforce and hence get paid. The only issue there is the "age verification" aspect - that has a shit load of issues as explained at length by ORG. I really hope that at least that bit is ditched - otherwise all out signup for new services will have an extra cost for us to pay some age-verification provider to check you are over 18.

REMEMBER! THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH USERS OF THE SERVICE! This is only for subscribers, which we want to be over 18 anyway. Their kids can be accessing all the porn they like and we would be 100% compliant.

2. The other worrying clause is CENSORSHIP of the internet at court order. We have this a bit for copyright law now, but A&A is too small to have ever had such an order, and it has been proved time and time again that such orders simply do not work.

There is NO TECHNICAL WAY for any ISP to actually PREVENT access to some part of the internet. If we allow ANY PACKETS in and out, even just DNS, then ACCESS will be possible so it is IMPOSSIBLE to comply with such orders. This needs knocking on the head now. It is nonsense.

Let's be clear here - if every ISP has to pay some third party age-verification service before they can sign up any customer, that will cost, probably several pounds, and that will be added to cost of signing up. For us it would not change our service, we ONLY do opt-out of censorship and ONLY do 18 or over, so nothing changes but paying an extra fee. Why do that?

P.S. Seems like the amendment has been withdrawn - but why do they keep trying to throw this in to legislation - what is the point?