After just 2 hours of debate, on April 8th 2010 the UK government passed the controversial Digital Economy Bill. What we needed was a meaningful commitment to upgrading the UK’s next generation of high-speed broadband and universal mobile 3G coverage. Instead what we got was laws that can be used to block websites, ban internet users and gives companies more rights to label those sharing music and film as pirates.
The UK Government in it’s desperate attempts to endear itself to the music and film industries has succeeded yet again to show how ignorant lawmakers are of the how the Internet, and in particular encryption-based services works.
Buying Anonymity
For a few pounds a month file-sharers can circumvent the Digital Economy Act entirely with a VPN (A Virtual Private Network). These services offer an encrypted tunnel between your home connection and an external server and will exchange your IP-address for one in another country where UK laws don’t apply. Besides avoiding being tracked by anti-piracy outfits, a VPN will also allow access to all of the sites that may be blocked under the new legislation.
There are hundreds of VPN services available on the Internet. Itshidden and Ipredator are a popular ones among BitTorrent users, but Hidemyass and Swiss VPN are highly regarded as well.
How it won’t work
If a UK minister orders the blocking of a website, then if the website is hosted in the UK it is fairly trivial to block it. Assuming that the operator of the site doesn’t feel like complying and moves the website’s hosting to another machine outside Britain, then HM Government is faced with trying to block access to this website from the UK in some way.
The problem for the government is that whatever hacks it uses to try and block access to sites by citizens in the UK, (technically DNS or country level firewalling), they can be simply breached by users or site owners. Just look at how porous the Great Firewall of China is!
The downside for UK security
All the technologies needed to circumvent the proposed digital rights legislation already exist.
Over time, as the methods of circumventing the UK’s simple minded hacks becomes more prevalent and knowledge of the levels of surveillance that UK ministers propose to try to impose becomes widespread, it will become the default to work via UK snooping work-arounds.
This is a really bad state of affairs for the UK security services, since they use Net snooping to garner quite a bit of information. Imposing Digital Rights Management snooping is only going to make legitimate national security sniffing impossible.
The unfortunate consequence for the UK Government it that as soon as strong privacy and strong encryption becomes the norm, there will be no going back and they will finally be exposed as being a collection of incompetent, nosy buffoons.
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Response to “The UK Digital Economy Act: a stimulus for the anonymity industry” [latest at bottom]
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Man Trafod - Rhowch sylwad yma
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Bydd eich ateb yn cael ei cymedroli, ac ni fydd yn ymaddangos yn syth. Medrwch paratoi eich tecst yn y rhaglen word cyn ei rhoi yn y bocs, ond ni fydd elfennau megis trwmder tecst a lliw yn ymddangos.
Censorship, either way is a BAD thing. Look at the more extreme cases, like China. I really think that in the next years VPN services and proxies will get more and more popular. I always use http://www.sunvpn.com/ when I travel, I wouldn`t like to use back home too.