Michael Henley

Been playing with my iPhone in Italian. Partly I just felt like using a language I don’t speak very often and have forgotten a lot of. Trying out VoiceControl I found that it really struggles with the English pronunciation of Artists/Tracks/Albums and often plays the wrong thing or simply returns no results. The solution… to employ the most outrageous Italian accent I can muster:

Those who pay attention to the UK and technology will know that the Digital Economy Act is now law with all the threats of disconnection and censorship therein. I am not going to write a long analysis of this; we all know it is a travesty and a terrible example of poorly thought-out legislation that is highly vulnerable to the law of unforeseen consequences, as well as a testament to the kinds of things that really can get fired through Government and into law provided the right people want it to be the case. That scares me, but is a discussion for another day.

My response to this is simple and (for the moment at least) legal. My traffic is encrypted and tunnelled out to a different part of the Internet before emerging. At the moment my computer is Swedish and shall remain that way for a little while. A few mouse-clicks later and my machine can be Swiss. A few more and it is Malaysian. The simple fact is that I can’t change my hard-line ISP very easily, but VPN providers are numerous and many of them cater to exactly my needs. I am now spending a little more each month than I was before for Internet access, but I know that this access is secure be it from corporations, special interest groups or the Government. Oh, and now I donate to the Open Rights Group. You should too.

So who loses out from this? I am slightly inconvenienced but life doesn’t really change, but the people who really have found the majority of traffic being unencrypted useful are the security services. Just from a signal-to-noise ratio point of view until now it was really people who especially wanted everything secret who encrypted and so drew attention to themselves. Now a large proportion of those who are tech-literate will employ encryption, IP-spoofing, use proxies and VPN tunnels. Anything to make ourselves feel less intruded upon. The Swedish example shows that this will be the case, and that it will lead only to a small, and short-lived, drop in downloads.

I finally should give a sincere thank you to people like the ORG, and Tom Watson & Evan Harris, who was until recently my local MP, for not only raising awareness about this issue, but for working to try to make it at least workable. If we had people like this on the Front Benches instead of the Back we might have a Government I had some confidence in.