But in the end wht can we do??U’d better start hiding your screwdrivers!!

Would that mean that the MSDOS would be banned as well?
Hacking can be done with just about any tool.

I can see the value in honing in on the actual providers of the shared files (that said - piracy used to mean making money off other people’s work, whereas now it’s given away for free..) but any kind of random searches are an awful breach of privacy. Why should anyone be expected to be monitored or checked out based purely on a lottery.

I’m sorry for any repeated points from previous posts but here’s what I believe. Passing legislation would be like the Patriot Act but much more deadly. With a law like this, the government would technically have an excuse to monitor anyones internet without a good reason (terrorist vs 8 year old downloading music… hrmmm… Who to watch…). Like zupakomputer said, actually tracking the data would be nearly impossible as well as classifying illegal content. There have been a lot of problem with groups such as child pornography people hiding their pics within encrypted files so it becomes amazingly hard to track. I also agree with the overflow in the courts with the odd explanations for the multiple OSs. Overall, it seems like allowing police to check any car they wish to make sure the car is working properly.

As one of my government teachers used to say “the best way to argue a point, is to argue both sides”. Here is my argument for a method of doing something like this, taxes. In the US at least, taxes are audited. For those of you who might know what this means, this is a rough translation. The government will randomly select tax forms and look at all the paperwork to make sure people are not cheating on their taxes. If caught the person gets huge fines as well as being forced to pay interest on the money they cheated. Relating this to the internet, the government could simply select random computers (yes I know there would be a lot of variables involved but bare with me). Another method would be flagging the torrenting/warez sites and when a computer visits those sites a certain number of times the government has enough reason to pay a little visit to the computer.

Feel free to argue both points although I bet it will be the outrageousness of this proposition (which I personally support).

I hope they where or will be informed, but I guess they will have a hard time getting to grips with the info. They usually are very capable of listening to spin-doctors but with real world info they tend to be a bit slow/find it rather incomprehensive

Are they going to issue certificates to security people, something like “So-and-so: licensed to pen-test”. Are they intending to fill up the courts with people having to explain why they have several pen drives all set to live boot varying OSs.

Even on a tightly secured LAN, it’s only feasible to go as far as the likes of packet sniffers on routers - they can check for suspect frames going by their headers (senders, recievers, etc) and the size of packets, but even in that scenario they can’t actually have a router and/or separate server to check the contents of data packets or download them first, open them up and examine them (and then how do they determine if it is actually an illegal share?!), then forward them on to the actual file requester…..or they can - but these are like Fort Knox places with black-budget billions (from drug money, arms money, and taxes) to spend on dedicated 40GB fibre lines and 20 RAID 0 SCSIs so there’s no massive bottlenecks in their network cause they have to download and check everything before sending it on…

Another interesting aside to this - given it’s perfectly do-able to conceal data within other forms of data (like within an image file for example), how do they expect to check for things like that.

nb - comparing this to what Germany is doing overall with their networks isn’t a true comparison, because there it is not likely you’ll get free or unprotected wireless access, plus they are security-conscious in educational establishments and have switched over to Linux. The UK won’t be doing that!

Fun fact
Russia is now the spam capitol of the world (as in where the masters of spam are)