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The US Department of Justice subpoena (PDF link) in the Twitter Wikileaks case asks for the following information:

1. Subscriber names, user names, screen names or other identities
2. mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, e-mail addresses, and other contact information
3. connection records, or records of session times and durations
4. length of service (including start dates) and types of service utilised
5. telephone or instrument number or other subscriber information or identity including any temporarily assigned network address
6. means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number) and billing records

I’m not sure they realise that the majority of this this information is publicly available in a profile – they even asked for the information by supplying the user name in the first place. It’s also a free service, so billing information…? Mailing Address? Looks suspiciously to me like they have a template request for information to ISPs they’ve just sent Twitter without thinking about it. They do go on, with the following in part B that looks like a template request to an email or facebook-style service provider:

1. records of user activity for any connections made to or from the Account, including the date, time, length and method of connections, data transfer volume, user name and source and destination Internet Protocol address(es)
2. non-content information associated with the contents of any communication or file stored by or for the account(s), such as the source and destination email addresses and IP addresses
3. correspondence and notes of records related to the account(s)

Other than IP address (Which seems to be requested twice – are 1 and 2 not the same?) I’m not even sure what useful data Twitter could possibly give them that’s not already public. Given that at least two of the people mentioned are known to not be in the US (Julian Assange is one, another is an Icelandic MP) I don’t see how IP addresses will help them.

I wonder if Twitters entire response will just be a printout of the users public timeline and profile information, just with the (Non-US) IP addresses added. How this will help the US DoJ I don’t know.

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According to This is Derbyshire, Conservative MP Heather Wheeler wants police to be able to access raw Streetview footage without needing a court order because proper checks on what the police are up to are “a waste of public money”. This is despite the fact that the UK already tops the Google snoopers chart when measured as a number of requests per person in the country.

South Derbyshire MP Heather Wheeler said: “I am disappointed that Google’s initial reaction is to refuse. It would be sensible for them to enter into a protocol with British police forces to receive and acquiesce to police requests. Of course, the police can get a court order but what a waste of public money in order to do that.”

The police do not have the right to just randomly go digging around and there are checks in place to stop this. Requiring a court order is one of those checks and if they can convince a court that they genuinely need the unblurred image – which should be easy based on the facts given – then everything is working exactly as it should. (It’s entirely possible that the image was not actually taken around the time of the theft, in which case the correct response of the court should be to refuse the request)

I would actually hope on general principle that Google do not routinely keep original unblurred images. Personally, when I received a police or similar request, my response is always the same: “Get a court order, (Or RIPA notice) then we’ll look to see what we have”.

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Since yesterday’s post, I’ve dug up a bit more detail on the new BT service. It’s been attacked in the media as being a “two-tier” system, reminiscent of the Net Neutrality debates.

But far from being able to force content providers to have to pay to provide a decent service to end users, the economics mean that BT will possibly need to give this service away to content providers for little more than a nominal fee to make it work.

The concept is simple – local bandwidth is cheap, internet bandwidth is relatively cheap, (Well under £10 per Mb/s per month in bulk) UK-wide backhaul is expensive. (£40 per Mb/s per month and upwards) A significant portion of the cost of your home broadband (Around half, depending on the package you are on) is not the connection to the exchange but the bandwidth from the exchange to the rest of the world. (Hence fair use caps and lower bandwidth limits on cheaper service providers.)

The solution is to keep popular content as close to the end user as possible. If, for example, I know as a provider that an episode of Eastenders or Coronation Street is going to be watched using an on-demand service by tens of thousands of people there will come a point where it makes sense to just send it out in advance and off-peak (When there is spare capacity) to servers around the country. This does not apply to a YouTube video of a skateboarding dog, unless it’s fantastically popular over a particular timeframe (And you need to know in advance what’s going to be popular), because there is a cost of storing all that data throughout the country to consider.

I do not know the details of Virgin or Sky’s architecture for on-demand services but it’s likely they’ve done the same sums and have worked out if this makes sense for them to implement with their own on-demand broadband/cable services. At least with BT Content Connect, all Content Providers have the ability to submit content but it’s the getting content where BT may struggle.

It’s clearly in the interests of service providers who bear the majority of bandwidth costs to implement this, particularly if they are also a content provider (e.g. Sky/Virgin) but there is less benefit to other content providers like the BBC. Even if the service is free for them, there will still be significant engineering investment to talk to BT’s new Content Connect servers.

So BT will need to sell the idea to the content providers, which they can do by promoting the idea that somehow the content will be better/faster/smoother/gold plated compared to the alternative. But this assumes that there is a congestion problem within the ISP in the first place, which does not currently seem to be the case with BT. Unless BT somehow engineer congestion, which would be a net-neutrality issue, (And no doubt result in complaints of lag from Skype users, online gamers and the like if all services were affected) objecting to content connect on neutrality grounds and claiming a two-tier internet is being created is not quite as easy as some press reports are suggesting: It’s popular on-demand content that’s affected, rather than the internet as a whole and it’s likely similar is already being done in more closed shops (Virgin/Sky) anyway.

In practice, I do not think we will see a wide uptake of this service beyond BT Retail. The technical limitations mean that the majority of ISPs will not be able to use it, although BT Wholesale are (rightly) required to offer any service they provide to BT Retail to everyone at the same price in the interests of competition.

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From today’s Telegraph:

BT is starting to sell a new broadband service that allows video content to be viewed in a better quality than other material, it has been reported.

Wait, what? So video could be viewed in better quality than some text? That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Five seconds with Google gives this flash-driven marketing abomination from BT about the relevant product, “Content Connect”. From what I can see, it’s just a Content Distribution Network that allows content providers to distribute their content so that it’s as close to end-users as possible without the hassle of running a global network. This isn’t new (Akamai have been doing it for years and they’re not the only one) and as far as I can tell, there is no connection to Net Neutrality at all.

I’m not sure if the Telegraph are trying to spin a story out of nothing or if they have misunderstood a story so badly that they’ve destroyed all rational content in the process.

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I have seen some misreporting by LGBT activists over the last few days which I felt I should point out, stemming from the fact that people are typing “LGBT” without thinking. Please consider when reporting on things that a win for LGB folk does not necessarily help Trans people.

The first instance of a non-T “LGBT win” is the real of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The changes will not, according to any source or discussion I can find, allow Trans people to serve in the US Miltary. The text of the motion merely “provides for repeal of the current Department of Defense (DOD) policy concerning homosexuality in the Armed Forces“. Transsexuality is handled as a medical problem, with Army Regulation 40-501 Standards of medical fitness (PDF link) for example lumping together “personality disorders, disorders of impulse control not elsewhere classified, transvestism, voyeurism, other paraphilias, or factitious disorders, psychosexual conditions, transsexual, gender identity disorder to include major abnormalities or defects of the genitalia such as change of sex or a current attempt to change sex, hermaphroditism, pseudohermaphroditism, or pure gonadal dysgenesis or dysfunctional residuals from surgical correction of these conditions“. It’s nice that they think Trans issues should be listed alongside personality disorders.

The second is the UN vote on extrajudicial executions. Again, this has been reported as being an LGBT win but the text of the amendment only refers to homosexuality. Disappointingly, the UNs own reports about the debate mention delegates talking about LGBT when debating the amendment.  The full transscripts are not available so I can not tell if this is misreporting by the UN staff, unclear translation on non-English speeches or misinformed delegates. Either way, it’s disappointing to see this from the UN.

So, if you are involved in LGBT politics, activism or reporting, please watch what you type. It is not always appropriate to say something is an LGBT win. Saying something is when it is not is a form of erasure, as if we should be happy for the rest of the LGB commuity gaining rights and recognition we do not have.

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I have just received a response, reproduced below, to my letter to the education secretary. From private correspondence, I suspect they had not previously talked to GIRES (Although I do not know for sure – I’m weeks behind on much of my email!) so hopefully this did make some difference.

Thank you for your email 25 November to the Secretary of State for Education copied to the Minister for Equalities, Lynne Featherstone and Dr Julian Huppert MP regarding your concern that the recently published Schools White Paper does not make reference to transphobic bullying. As you will appreciate the Secretary of State receive a large volume of correspondence and is unable to reply to each one personally. On this occasion I have been asked to reply.

The commitment in the Schools White Paper to tackle bullying covers all forms of bullying especially prejudice-based bullying. The White Paper highlights homophobic and Special Education Needs and/or Disability bullying as an example of forms of bullying which has a high rate of prevalence but is not being tackled effectively.

The Government wants schools to take a zero- tolerance approach to tackling all forms of bullying and to instil good behaviour in their pupils. This may require schools drawing on the experience and expertise of various organisations that specialise in preventing certain forms of bullying to help them develop their bullying strategies. It is the Government’s intention to work with organisations that have a proven track record in their field including GIRES (Gender Identity Research and Education Society) in order that schools can draw on their expertise to tackle transphobic bullying.

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It seems that Ed Vaizey has picked up on Claire Perry’s idea to “protect” children on the internet and has announced he’ll be asking ISPs to block porn voluntarily.

This is clearly very problematic, as I’ve mentioned previously. There are far too many questions here:

  • Who decides, as a matter of policy, what should be blocked? Under the “voluntary” system, it sounds like it will be ISPs themselves.
  • Who then implements this policy and creates the actual list of sites?
  • What right of appeal do sites have if they believe they have been inaccurately blocked?
  • What level of granularity will be operated? Cleanfeed blocks specific pages/images, but we already seen that blocking a specific image on a busy interactive site like Wikipedia causes problems. Encrypted sites (HTTPS) can’t be blocked on a per-page basis, only per-site.
  • What about sites such as twitter, which are based on user contributions and highly dynamic? (T-Mobile blocked Twitter as part of their “adult” filter for a while)

Putting all this in the hands of individual ISPs for voluntary regulation is the worst possible solution. Their approach will be to block as much as possible to but avoid blocking sites that will cause huge use complaints, such as Facebook. I would imagine that amongst kids interested in such things, Facebook will be the new school playground where illicit copies of Playboy used to be circulated. This will likely be aided by the false sense of security that parents will have, so they will not be checking what their kids are up to online.

Still, I suppose it will promote the ascendency of the school geek, who will suddenly be the ones able to trivially bypass the filters and get the images in the first place.

Whatever policies are created are likely to include Wikileaks, (Just try to imagine the Home Office not putting pressure on ISPs to include “subversive” sites in the policy) sex education including safer sex, abortion information, LGBT information and all the sorts of information sources that someone who is marginalised is likely to want to access. Can you imagine an 18 year old daughter having to explain to her oppressive father why she needs the porn block lifted on their home internet account? I don’t think “Because I need to find out about safer sex” will go down well, nor will the inevitable “I need to find out about STIs” or “I need to find out about abortion” a few months later.

Is there any incentive for an ISP to publicise the list of sites they are blocking? It does not appear so, which means sites will only find out they have been blocked once they start receiving user complaints. There will also be little reason for the same ISPs to run an efficient and quick appeals system (Far quicker to just say “no” without thinking about it) so once you are on the list, it could be the end of your site or online business.

I shall close with a video which I think satirically illustrates the problem very well, Cleanternet:

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Dear LibDemVoice, Wikio, Met Office, National Rail Enquiries and, well, the whole internet,

I get that you need to make money, or at least pay the hosting bills. I also understand that you probably have limited editorial control over the adverts that get displayed. However, between you all you have just made me install Firefox Adblock, ensuring I am not going to see half your adverts and thus deprive you of potential revenue.

Not that I was likely to click on them in the first place.

Why? Because I move around a fair bit and other than my trusty iPad, the device I am most likely to be reading your sites with is a little HP NetBook. It only has a 1.6GHz processor and 1GB of RAM which whilst was a specification I’d have drooled over a few years ago, is rock bottom for Windows 7. (I’d intended to run Ubuntu, but it came with Windows and 7 is surprisingly usable compared to Vista) I’m not alone in this, not everyone has nice new shiny computers. My mothers computer, for example, is perpetually struggling just to turn on each morning, although I suspect that has more to do with the fact that my kids are let loose on it most weekends.

Do you know what happens when you put flash or some other animated advert on your site? My computer slows down. Quite a few people’s computers slow down. Somewhere, god probably kills a kitten.

Do you know what happens when you put half a dozen such adverts on your site? It’s like trying to navigate through treacle. Your site becomes unusable and I either have to install Adblock or not bother visiting. Multiple gods band together and start the wholesale slaughter of while cities full of kittens.

Flash hurts!

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There’s a BBC News story this morning that is highly biased against online pharmacies with the implication that they’re all or mostly evil, corrupt and dangerous spammers. (They even use the image of a mailbox full of Viagra spam to illustrate it)

Sadly, it seems there is pressure on many organisations to shut down online pharmacies – names listed in the story as working against them include Google, Network Solutions, Paypal, Visa and Mastercard although it is not clear if these companies are targeting just spammers or also more legitimate organisations. There is, as ever, an element of the US throwing it’s weight around here. Non-US companies such as Inhouse Pharmacy have been affected by this by having their US domain name taken away but there is some UK involvement too as the UK domain for the company was also pulled earlier this year.

Why is this a problem?

Because of the obsession by the state and by (Fortunately, not all) doctors to control our bodies and our transition. HRT is not illegal to posses without a prescription and it’s not against the law to import either. You’re just not allowed to sell it in this country without a prescription.

Thankfully, there is a swing against this and there has already been talk of making some hormones available without prescription (Not with Trans folk in mind, of course) as they are already in many countries. With a huge waiting list and process for NHS treatment that can take years, many lives will have been saved by self-medication with HRT and the latest medicines such as Estradiol Valerate do not have the same blood clot problems as earlier medication. (I am not aware of a single study that conclusively indicates modern HRT has any risk at all in this area)

Turning up at Charing Cross Gender Identity clinic and telling the doctors you have been self medicating is also no longer the problem it used to be.

Even once you are transitioned, having an online source can be useful, even essential. Many GPs will only give out drugs in 28 day packs, which can be a hassle to sort every four weeks if you do not work locally. Add on to that inevitable disruption caused by missing consultant letters, going on holiday, moving house or just plain paperwork issues and it pays to keep a good month or so of HRT in reserve.

Lack of HRT may not be life threatening – meaning one can not get the necessary prescription from an A&E department but as anyone that’s been through a very sudden menopause knows, it is not a pleasant experience.

But if online pharmacies are hunted down in this way, there will be fewer sources one can trust for medication. Eventually, it will become entirely black market and then you have no idea what you are taking. Estradiol Valerate is to cheap to be worth counterfeiting, unless lack of availability caused by this sort of thing pushes the price up.

The state does not always know best. It would be nice if, at least for drugs that are not dangerous, they let us make our own minds up rather than treating us like children.

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A couple of days ago, an anonymous individual identifying themselves as “Backdoor Santa” published some graphs showing that Comcast, a major US Internet Service Provider, runs it’s transit links at capacity for much of the day. This sort of tactic has depressing implications for any attempt to legislate for Net Neutrality, although I shall need to go through some basics to explain why.

As a mid-level ISP, there are three groups of people who you send traffic to and from. These are your customers, your peers and your transit providers. Customers, logically, pay you to carry their traffic. More customers means more money although for many ISPs, customers who buy bandwidth off you are probably not particularly profitable compared to those renting servers or space in a data centre.

Next come your peers – people who you are happy to exchange traffic with for free. (Or at least for no more than the cost of running a few fibres or other circuits between your networks) There is a careful balance to be struck here as fibre between sites and ports on network equipment cost money. This means there is a certain minimum amount of traffic that needs to exist between the networks before it’s worth doing, plus you also don’t want to peer with someone when you’re in London, New York and San Jose but they’re only in London as you’ll be paying for all the expensive international bandwidth.

Finally, if you have traffic that’s destined for somewhere that’s not a customer or reachable for free via a peer, you need to have paid transit. Some companies are so big that they don’t have to pay anyone else to take their traffic because they can reach everyone else either as a customer or via peering. The number of such ISPs varies, but is usually less than a dozen.

So why do Comcast run their transit links so congested as to cause problems? Won’t their customers complain? Well, yes but as some sites will run fast it will just be those sites that run slow that seem to have the problem and they’re big enough to get away with this. If someone providing content, say Amazon or Apple, want to peer with them in order to make the site faster they either say “Sorry, No, you don’t meet our requirements” or put the peering on a link running overcapacity too. The result is that those providers then need to pay Comcast as a customer in order to get decent service. If they don’t, Comcast users will go to their competitors for service.

This is definitely not “Net Neutrality” and something that should be stopped – if indeed it does occur in this country – as it is abuse of a dominant market position. Sadly, there is no prioritisation of traffic involved anywhere which is the usual topic up for discussion in neutrality debates. I do not know of any way of separating out genuine engineering requirements and complicated calculations on the cost vs. benefit of peering from this sort of activity.