Guy Jarvis, MD of NextGenUs, which is installing a hybrid fibre-wireless network in Cumbria told Br0kenTeleph0n3, “I can confirm that NextGenUs will challenge any CCC (Cumbria County Council) award of taxpayers’ money to BT on the grounds that the market, without any public subsidy, is either delivering superfast service in Cumbria or has firm plans to so do.”

Bill Lewis, MD of Kijoma Networks, which provide high speed wireless broadband in southern counties like East and West Sussex, said he supported such moves.

Lewis told Br0kenTeleph0n3, “I have been challenging WSCC (West Sussex County Council) over their blatant pro-BT stance for years and will certainly wish to continue to do so!
“In this county we have the added stitch-up with the three non-ADSL exchanges. I am informed that they have gained permission from BDUK to spend some of the money to enable these exchanges for a ’2 Mbps service’.
“As the commercial incumbent in these areas for ~7 years I am a bit miffed obviously as when we asked about funding (for) our networks back in 2003-2004 they snubbed it.”

Kijoma’s network provide greater than 10Mbps wireless service to the non-ADSL exchanges. However, maps prepared by WSCC indicated they were broadband “not-spots”. The maps were removed from the WSCC website after Lewis complained that they misrepresented the true situation.
There are plenty of other small network operators that could join forces to challenge awards under the BDUK procurement rules which were written to exclude them. They include Rutland Telecom, now part of Gigaclear, and Vtesse Networks, as well as a host of local wireless network operators.

Open access

EU procurement rules insist that any network operator who receives public money must provide “open access” to its physical infrastructure. So far only one firm, Call Flow, which operates in south-east England, has indicated it will take up BT’s PIA (physical infrastructure access) offer. Fujitsu Telecom, which complained earlier that BT’s charges were excessive, has experimented with BT’s PIA offer. It has yet to say if or how it will proceed.

Four pilot studies announced earlier by the government, designed to test alternative solutions to rural broadband, have seen all alternative suppliers to BT pull out. The main reason is believed to be related to BT’s PIA charges.

BDUK aims to disburse £530m in the next two or three years to achieve the government’s goal of “the best broadband in Europe”. It has sought blanket permission from the European Commission’s DG Competition for money granted under its procurement framework to be rubber-stamped without further investigation.

A DG Competition spokesman told Br0kenTeleph0n3 it had received BDUK’s request, but could not say when the matter would be heard or a decision given.

“I cannot reply on substance, or even on timing which depends on several factors, such as the complexity of the case and cooperation with the relevant authorities,” the spokesman said.

Update

I’m told on good authority that Fujitsu has not pulled out of the Cumbria procurement.

Curiously, the story broke in the same week that Canada introduced a “Crime Bill” to permit surveillance, allegedly to give children the same online protection that others countries give, but which looks a lot like the IMP.

Basically the law enforcement people want to be able to tap phones they way used to, but the change in technology to packet switching means this is hard to impossible.

The initial cost of IMP was put at £12bn. This was mainly for the centralised GCHQ database, to be run by US outsource outfit EDS. This was to house all the emails, social network chit-chat, telephone calls, and especially voice over IP calls, that originate in or transit the UK. GCHQ then apparently opted for a £2bn pilot study. No-one outside the security establishment knows whether it worked, or to what extent it failed.

The UK, and to be fair, most other countries, have been deluged with draconian surveillance legislation ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In Britain, the Information Commissioner’s Office even produced a report that asked whether we were sleep-walking into a “surveillance state,” and answered its own question with a “yes”.

Communications service providers like BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Sky etc, are required under data retention laws to keep header information about the messages that transit their networks for a year. This information is essentially the same as one might find on a postal letter: name and address of sender and receiver, and the time of sending. NOT the contents. Or at least, not yet.

The data retention laws are supported by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA). Under RIPA warrants to intercept messages (i.e. the entire communication)  must be signed by a secretary of state of a Scottish minister. “The authorisation can only be given in the interests of national security, for the purpose of preventing or detecting serious crime or for the purpose of safeguarding the economic well-being of the United Kingdom,” the Interception of Communications Commissioner (ICC) says in his 2010 annual report.

In 2010 the Home Secretary signed 1,682 warrants, and there were 1,048 still in force at the end of the year, a 10% rise over 2009. Scottish ministers approved 183 warrants, down from 204 in 2008, leaving 46 still in force at the end of the year a 5% rise from 2008. The ICC does not report how many requests were refused.

RIPA also allows hundreds of thousands of civil servants to request communications data (i.e. the “envelope information”). And they do. Those allowed include the intelligence agencies, police forces, the United Kingdom Border Agency (UKBA), the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) and other public authorities such as the Gambling Commission, Financial Services Authority (FSA) and local authorities.

The ICC’s annual report for 2010 says there were 552,550 requests for communications data for that year. This was up from 525,130 and 504,173 in the two preceding years respectively. Some 65% were to find out who owns a mobile phone. In the light of investigations into police corruption allied to mobile phone hacking, that may cause some concern.

There is without doubt a terrorist threat: the 7/7 London bombs show that. But with the death of Osama bin Laden and the apparently destruction of  of Al-Queda, what threats remain?

One would not like to think that the entire panoply of anti-terrorist measures are to be used to fight RnB music pirates, as SOCA did this week.

The fact remains that this entire area is virtually evidence-free, certainly with regard to costs and benefits. One imagines that MI6 could buy an awful lot of human intelligence with £12bn, without affecting the law-abiding majority of the population.

These are the questions I would like to see answered and debated in public.

What evidence must the authorities produce for minister to grant a warrant to permit surveillance?

How can ministers test it before they grant the warrant?

How many warrants does the government expect to issue a year?

Under what circumstances will the evidence gathered from surveillance be permitted in court?

How do the investigators account for IP spoofing, for temporary IP address assignments, for TOR’ed messages and for encrypted messages?

Who bears the cost of collecting, storing and accessing communications data?

What is the budget for the collection, storage, retrieval and subsequent processing of this data?

What protections and sources of restitution are there for people falsely identified and investigated?

What estimates are there of the number of residents who buy or sell pornographic images of children?

How many convictions have been secured in the past five years in which evidence gathered using surveillance laws, particularly intercept and communications data, proved conclusive to the prosecution?

What is the split between convictions related to terrorism and to economic crime (including smuggling)?

What about the new EU idea about the right to be forgotten, or the old one, to have multiple online personalities?

Google says doing what it wants with your (or my) online record will result in a better search experience for the billions of people who use it daily.

What’s in it for Google is clearly more billions of advertising money. So what’s in it for you and me? Well, Google didn’t know, or at least it doesn’t provide the answer in the first page of search results.

Instead it suggested the thought-provoking introduction from RedTape’s Verisign hack story, “It should be clear by now that nothing online is sacred…”

I prefer to have a disaggregated identity when I’m online. In other words, I like the anonymity that goes with being a dog, unless I explicitly make my identity (and my preferences) available. I don’t think Google or anyone else should be messing with that.

Neither does Mirjam Remie, who writes for Bits of Freedom, a Dutch website. She’s trying to live Google-free for a week.

Here are some of the alternative tools to Google’s she says she may be using, in case you’d like to try them too.

Search: DuckDuckGo, Start Page, Scroogle
YouTube: Vimeo, Metacafe, Break, Dailymotion
Google+: Facebook and MySpace (poor options from a privacy point of view), Diaspora

Google Chrome: SRWare Iron, Firefox, RefControl, Safari, Ghostery (add-on)
Gmail: Hotmail, FastMail, Neomailbox, Lavabit and GMX

Google Maps: OpenStreetMap, Nokia Maps

Bloody marvellous, what!

AM was at pains to say that these technologies are in use or planned in the United States (AT&T’s U-verse), in Netherlands (KPN) and even Pakistan (PTCL), because they allow incumbent telcos to compete on sheer speed using their existing copper access networks against fibre and cable companies, and in some cases beat them for coverage.

Of course, there are caveats (see here for attenuation issues). Fibre to the cabinet, the most expensive part, has to be pretty well ubiquitous. The line length from the cabinet to the premises must be under two kilometres. The copper in the lines should be good quality. The homes should have at least two pairs of wires that could be bonded. The telephone pole to the cluster of homes it serves should be not be multiplexing services ie 12 homes each with two pair cables should have a 48-wire cable on the pole.

AM says it’s a secret how many homes have just a single copper pair. Br0kenTeleph0n3 understands that many, if not most, premises actually have four pairs, something AM doesn’t dispute hotly. And 99% of homes are within two kilometres of a street cabinet, it says.

Slam dunk, game over, right?

Well, no. There’s a problem with quantifying demand, which goes to the commercial or business case.

OK, so what’s the cost of just building it and hoping they will come? Remember this is only for the one-third of the country that BT says it requires taxpayers’ money to make it worthwhile. AM reckons the extra costs represents about 15% of monthly revenues from those subscribers.

So would BDUK’s £830m cover it?

AM’s answer to that is not clear and explicit. That’s because I asked if that money was applied mostly to put in fibre to the cabinets rather than upgrade the “last mile”, might it not contravene European Union rules on state aid?

Apparently this was getting into an area where conflicts of interest might apply, and the interview ended. Abrup…

They appear to have ignored the recommendation that the European Parliament (EP) postpones ratification of the US-inspired agreement on at least two grounds: firstly, because it does not comply with existing European rules and agreements (acquis) as it stands, and secondly, because the European Court of Justice has not had a chance to evaluate the method for calculating financial damages for copyright infringements.

The haste with which the UK and 21 others joined the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Switzerland may also have led to the resignation of Kader Amir, the Acta rapporteur. Amir was responsible for shepherding the agreement through the EP ratification process, scheduled for June. He quit on the day of the signing, describing the process as a “masquerade“.

The recommendation to postpone is in a 76-page technical assessment ordered by the EP as to whether Acta is compatible with the existing acquis communautaire and the World Trade Organisation’s Trade Related intellectual Property rights (TRIPs) Agreement. (For my highlighted copy see here.)

The authors found plenty that disturbed them. Some of it may be why Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia did not sign up.

They also said it was “difficult to point to any significant advantages that Acta provides for EU citizens beyond the existing international framework”.

“The apparent lack of intent to seek congressional approval and thus actually implement the treaty in US law begs the question of what, if anything, the EU gained from the US. There are serious concerns regarding whether Acta will have any effect under US law and thus be able to be treated as a treaty under international law,” the authors said.

They added that the exclusion of China, India and Brazil (which were apparently not invited to the secret negotiations and which have all raised questions over Acta) meant that major competitors to the EU are not bound by its provisions.

The authors said the EU had won one concession, that Acta signatories would act against faked geographic indicators (GIs). GIs cover brands like Parma ham and Champagne. But counties that do not already protect GIs are not bound by Acta. This exempts the US, Australia, Japan and South Korea, the study said.

The authors found that proposed measures on copyright piracy seen in early leaked documents published on WikiLeaks had been watered down. However, the proposed financial penalties go further than existing EU and international agreements.

“Damages apply not only to a knowing infringement but also to infringement due to negligence,” the report says. “Thus those who could be considered to have reason to know they were or might be infringing, would be liable for damages even if they did not intend to infringe.”

This would appear to nail websites like The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload. These pointed to sites that held infringing material, even though they did not host it themselves. Both have been shut down using other laws.

But it could include search engines such as Google, which index and point to sites that host infringing material. Google is clearly the focus of a secret document, now public after a Open Rights Group Freedom of Information request, that calls for search engines to delist sites that hold infringing material.

Penalties

Acta provides for judicial authorities to order four types of financial penalties: for the infringer to pay his profits to the rightsholder, to pay pre-established damages, or a presumption of the harm caused by the infringement, or additional damages.

The authors objected to the way in which damages are to be calculated. They said, “The focus is not on objective tests but on any ‘legitimate’ measure of value the rightsholder puts forward.”

The list of measures to be taken into account when assessing damages contains “two novel approaches that are problematic” and not in the existing rules. These are the market price of infringing goods, based on the concept that each infringing product constitutes a lost sale; and the suggested retail price, which they describe as “another proxy for the concept that each infringing product represents a lost sale”.

The authors said, “This latter authority is only mandatory for cases of copyright and trade mark infringement, not for the infringement of designs, patents or geographical indications.”

The authors noted that rightsholders could allege copyright infringements to prevent competitors indefinitely from entering markets. This could include makers of generic drugs (drugs that are out of patent protection), but only in signatories’ markets.

Acta also excluded copying for personal, no-for-profit uses, including “fair use” for study, teaching, new reporting, commentary or criticism, they said. It also sought to criminalise unauthorised copying by anyone.

“(Acta’s) criminal measures (are) most problematic in the field of copyright and related rights, as these cover not only economic actors, but address private individuals in equal measure,” they said.

The authors accepted that it is important to protect intellectual property, but added that “knowledge” has a sell-by date.

They raised questions over who stands to benefit from such protection. The said countries with more established knowledge-based capabilities (ie research-intensive manufacturers, pharmaceuticals, software, or creative products such as music, films, etc) will benefit, not least through enforcement.

“Countries with weaker knowledge-based capabilities are likely to benefit most by being outside such an international system, so they can freely exploit and imitate IP-related products in their own domestic economies,” the authors say.

“Where they are successful, these countries may even be able to compete with the original IP owners, thus becoming exporters of such products themselves.”

From the start Acta has aimed to further the interests of the US music and film industry, almost exclusively. It has been negotiated in secret, with US president Barack Obama stating at one point that it was a US national secret. It does nothing to enhance protections the EU has already secured in public forums, and may severely curtail the ability and capacity for its people to use what is already published for legitimate ends.

Rejecting ratification means that the EU writes off the cost of the negotiations, and possibly some political capital. Accepting it lock, stock and barrel potentially exposes EU citizens to unquantifiable criminal and financial penalties for an indefinite period, while allowing its main economic competitors free reign.

If you were an MEP, what would you do?

]]> http://br0kent3l3ph0n3.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/why-the-eu-will-repent-acta-at-leisure/feed/ 1 iangrant52 http://br0kent3l3ph0n3.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/learning-to-love-big-brother/ http://br0kent3l3ph0n3.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/learning-to-love-big-brother/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:02:38 +0000 Ian Grant http://br0kent3l3ph0n3.wordpress.com/?p=1122 ]]> There have been startling developments in the field of online copyright in the first few weeks of 2012.

Yesterday saw the European Parliament’s rapporteur, Kader Arif, hand back the dossier on the controversial Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta). Arif’s job was to shepherd it through parliament so that member states can get on with enacting it.

Arif said he was no longer prepared to be part of the “masquerade”, and denounced the process that had brought Acta to the point where yesterday 22 countries signed up to it.

This followed less than a week after the US Congress withdrew two bills to clamp down on online copyright infringement, and the FBI shut down MegaUpload, a website that allegedly traded or pointed to infringing copyright material.

In the past week, the music industry produced figures that showed that while sales of CDs were down, legal digital downloads were at record levels.

Meanwhile, the UK government has asked former Ofcom boss Richard Hooper to look into the feasibility of setting up a digital copyright exchange, where creators can license their work to others who want to reproduce or reuse and distribute it.

All this follows the abortive eG8 meeting last year, where “new media” representatives crossed swords with advocates for harsh penalties for copyright infringers.

The copyright issue is simply this: people who were prepared to invest bought the right to copy and distribute the original work from the creators. The machinery, materials and transport were relatively expensive, too much so for most individual creators. But thereafter the rightsholders enjoyed an effective monopoly on sales of the work, and made a lot of money from it. The internet threatens that monopoly because digital content is easy and cheap to copy and distribute by anyone with a computer and internet access.

This is not a new problem. The music industry in particular has gone a long way to coming to terms with it, even if it doesn’t like giving 30% of the sale price to Apple for stuff sold through iTunes. So the question is why it is suddenly big news?

Deep in the heart of the debate is the issue of control of the internet.

The concerns of the rightsholders are valid, but they are a sideshow. Much more important, in some circles, is to legitimise the power to censor content on the internet and to monitor troublemakers.

There can be few governments that looked on the Arab Spring, and not shiver at how fast legitimacy can wash away. Wikileaks’ release of official video footage that showed the apparent murder of civilians by US armed forces shocked millions. Wikileaks’ subsequent release of embarrassing diplomatic cables, and the reaction to it, showed how potent the net is in helping to shape public opinion. For most governments, it is simply too dangerous for the internet to be left uncontrolled.

So governments are content to let or even encourage the music and film industries to make the running for the legislation to shut down offending content and websites. The faceless MEPs in Brussels offer a convenient mask, as Arif says.

Forget about copyright piracy – it is a red herring. This is really about political control of the net. No doubt, like Winston Smith, we may all have learn to love Big Brother.

This was and is not the case, as Kijoma’s Bill Lewis tried to make plain at the meeting. Kijoma’s coverage could and did and does cover them, according the green-shaded bits of the map here that Lewis has just sent me.

West Sussex County Council's broadband coverage map overlaid with Kijoma's green-shaded coverage (subject to site survey in case of trees etc that might block a signal)

For some reason, the official map prepared by West Sussex County Council does not reflect Kijoma’s coverage, although it is possible to discover Kijoma on the SamKnows site, as I did earlier with respect to West Chiltington.

Not including Kijoma’s coverage may lead one to conclude that there is no broadband available to residents in those towns. But Lewis argues, strongly, this is not the case.

So why does WSCC, and how many other county councils, not include existing wireless broadband coverage, when the official line is that wireless is one of the technologies that will have to be used to deliver broadband for all?

BT estimates this West Sussex dial-up line will get a "typical line speed" of between 750kbps and 2.5Mbps. It presently gets 40kbps.

A reader in the (fixed line, pax, Kijoma) broadband-starved county of West Sussex has just sent us this screenshot. It shows that BT estimates the dial-up line in question will get a “typical line speed” of between 750kbps and 2.5Mbps if the subscriber upgrades to broadband.

Our reader says previous correspondence with BT revealed that the a line length of “8.5-9km/DB losses of between 82 and 86 DB”, which probably makes it impossible to achieve those speeds. “I am most impressed with the BET they are obviously going to employ here!” he writes.

More seriously, he adds “Does this flawed data get into BDUK’s/LAs systems? We need to know. This customer is possibly ABOVE the USC (universal service commitment) according to BT, but is only getting 40kb.”

This is not the only flawed data that BDUK or even Ofcom might hold. Bill Lewis of Kijoma has been fighting to have his wireless broadband footprint included in the coverage maps – to no avail. Kijoma provides high speed broadband to parts of West Sussex, including areas served by three of the four BT exchanges in the UK that cannot deliver broadband. West Sussex County Council’s map of the area do not show Kijoma’s footprint.

Everybody involved the the next generation broadband project, including BT, is on record saying that there needs to be a mix of technologies, including wireless, in the local access loop. Why then are existing wireless providers being ignored? Why do the maps not reflect truly what’s available? What other incorrect data are being used to support claims to £530m of taxpayers’ money?

Enough people have raised the incorrect data issue with BDUK, DCMS, Ofcom and the government that for them to ignore it is wilful. We must ask why.

Would it shrink the areas eligible for state-aided funding? If so, in whose interest is that?

Scrap the upcoming spectrum auction, give the 800MHz and 2.6GHz spectrum at stake to Arqiva and let the present and future operators rent it.

Discuss.