A friend emailed me a link to a BBC article¹ discussing the 'landmark' judgment handed down by an (out of his depth?) judge regarding the enforced blocking by BT of Newzbin2 to stop its customers from accessing copyrighted materials in a piratey manner.

Everyone's dancing around the topic. (I do not advocate piracy as a means to solve the current problems the creative industries face, but I haven't paid for every single song I've ever listened to.) However the older I get, the more I understand about the importance of paying your dues - and understanding the value of a piece of music or film, and understanding why it's right to pay a fair price for it. I have, quite literally, spent thousands of pounds on my music collection, with a heavy investment into vinyl along with many CDs and even a few C90s Regrettably I believe this judgment could have serious ramifications for not only the future of entertainment industries but personal rights and freedoms. My email back to my friend turned into somewhat of a long one... And here it is reproduced for your enjoyment.

The Open Rights Group man has it right. It won't really make a dent in the numbers of people using the services - indeed, I suspect anonymous VPN proxy services (which cost from as little as £3-£5 a month) will get a lot more popular as people realise they can just use these to completely mask what they're doing with their Internet connections. I already VPN some of my web traffic, for privacy purposes, web development testing or perhaps if I'm just feeling particularly paranoid.

In an email interview before the verdict, Newzbin 2 threatened to break BT's filters.

"We would be appalled if any group were to try to sabotage this technology as it helps to protect the innocent from highly offensive and illegal content," said a spokesman for BT.

Emotive language like "highly offensive" doesn't help - who's  to say what people find offensive? Is Mary Whitehouse back in charge? I could argue that I find the mass worship of Jesus Christ as a representation of the one true God highly offensive - but they're never going to even consider a block on Il Papa (Hello Your Holiness, hope you're doing well!²). In the meantime all this does is place increased load on the ISPs - effectively policing what are CIVIL copyright claims from private sector companies - and the end result? Everyone's broadband becomes more expensive.

The issue of p2p and downloading things for free boils down to something far more fundamental - it's now a mindset firmly stuck in a subset of society. And who's to say, taking a broader look at general 'consumption' of music and video, that their outlook on the value of recorded music isn't legitimate? However you look at it, we've lost the fight with those people - so let's move on to the next generation and explain to them in a helpful, unpatronising way why things, people, works of creative and cultural value deserve to be supported and funded through paying a fair price for their creations.

My personal opinion is that if you download music and films which you quite like and enjoy listening to/watching, you should pay a few quid of your hard earned - out of respect for the artists if nothing else! Consider the price of a CD - still about £10, even though the cost of everything else (including the materials to make CDs) has risen steadily with inflation ever since the CD was first introduced. Then, think about how many times you'll play the CD (dozens of times in the car or the kitchen, probably hundreds of times once you've put it on the MP3 player and carry it round with you). Then, think about the dozens of people involved in its production, including production, mastering, engineers, the musicians themselves, studio facilities, label promotion, management, distribution...

Once you've thought about that, go take a look at the price of a gig ticket for that artist - probably £20-£40 for most mainstream groups, sometimes more. That £10 CD price suddenly looks like VERY good value for money! And there's literally thousands of people involved with making a film, how do they pay their rent and electricity bills? The machine of the "industry" obviously tries to maximise its own profits whenever possible but there has to be some kind of infrastructure in place for everyone else to be employed by it. You can't just have a wifty wafty cloud of disorganised people all just saying "yeah ok, whatever, I'll do a bit of work here and magically get paid sometime in the future". I don't particularly like how some aspects of the music industry work, but it's a vicious circle (less money's made, the industries have to try and make quicker and quicker profits with the manufactured bands which inevitably leads to a lack of *artist development* - you could never have someone like Bob Dylan around today, he'd be too expensive to fund whilst he was songwriting and 'developing' as an artist).

This could quickly turn into a 1,000 word essay on why I'm so pissed off about the music industry - I think that people who just download everything they ever watch or listen to without ever paying for a single thing are being very disrespectful towards artists and creative individuals who produce the entertainment they're enjoying. As my boss said to me a while ago, this is the essence of the divide: these people are consumers - they simply gobble up everything they can find without a thought to the sustainability of the approach... Then then bitch and whine when TV shows go under after one series or a band breaks up because they couldn't afford to live on a musician's wage. Fortunately there's still enough respectful CUSTOMERS who understand the value in paying a fair price for what is ultimately a very long-lasting, high quality piece of work. In some respects (and forgive the crude analogy) the creative industries are a little similar to a pension fund (the more people paying in, the less each person has to pay and the more everyone receives at the end).

Blocking newzbin2 will not change the mindset of a consumer, it'll only set the precedent for them to be taken to court and locked up for downloading a film. Is copyright infringement - a civil offence - akin to a criminal offence such as GBH or fraud? No. Does it therefore merit a similar level of punishment? Absolutely not. This whole issue regarding enforced blocking of sites and services is a very slippery slope; it further reinforces their opinion that Big Content (aka the "MAFIAA" - Music and Film Industry Associations of America, and their European counterparts) are simply trying to sue people into stopping downloading. Then they'll just go download even more stuff out of spite! This kind of prosecution is also a massive waste of taxpayers' money.

1. "BT ordered to block links to Newzbin 2 web site", BBC News, July 28 2011
2. he's a Friend of the Blog

However, I'm still healthily paranoid :> and I run Peerblock on every machine I touch, including work machines.

Now, dearth of available IPv4 addresses aside - and what seems to me like the increasingly futile idea of blocking ranges of IPv6 addresses! - it's incredibly difficult to accurately maintain a blocklist of IPs, let alone administer or implement dozens of them. There's too much "collateral damage" from innocent IPs. And as more lists are used and combined, the usefulness and accuracy of the blocks exponentially decreases.

Case in point (and this has made me reevaluate the usefulness of apps like Peerblock with lists from services such as iBlocklist): in the past couple of days, on machines running Peerblock with default lists and Kaspersky Internet Security have been unable to finish their daily definitions updates. How come? It turns out that all of the Kaspersky update servers are classified on half a dozen lists as "bad" IPs. To finish an update, you must disable Peerblock - hardly its intended purpose!

Currently, all Kaspersky IPs between 38.113.165.68 and .86 are in a fair few blocklists hosted on iBlocklist, for various reasons - you can view them by going to the iBlocklist query page and tapping in (for example) 38.113.165.86. Here's what I got on a query just now:

This is clearly incorrect, and as an added inconvenience Kaspersky cannot finish a definitions update until PeerBlock is temporarily disabled.

There still seems to be no easy way of flagging up specific IPs or ranges for review if they have been reassigned or are no longer under the control of the original company (as I suspect is the case with these Kaspersky IPs) - how best should we go about notifying iBlocklist as to the inaccuracy of the blocklist entries?

Anti-Infringement

BayTSP:38.0.0.0-38.255.255.255

level1

Performance Systems International-ed2k/ap2p:38.113.114.164-38.113.175.255

level2

Performance Systems International / Cogent Communications:38.108.107.69-38.114.63.255

level3

PSINet, Inc:38.0.0.0-38.114.63.255

rangetest

Performance Systems International Inc:38.0.0.0-38.114.63.255

Primary Threats

Performance Systems International-ed2k/ap2p:38.113.112.43-38.113.175.255

Business ISPs

Performance Systems International:38.0.0.0-38.255.255.255

ipfilterX

TMEOH PSI:38.0.0.0-38.255.255.255

United States

United States:38.0.0.0-38.255.255.255

Now, this is obviously far too much of a kneejerk reaction; some lists have the entire Class A range blocked and the rest have a good old dollop listed! Hammer to crack a nut anyone? Obviously one need not use every list, but the problem remains that popular programs such as Peerblock download and use several of these lists by default (including the "level1" list), and these are not being kept up to date by Bluetack, the supplier. (This has been an ongoing problem for some time).

The more you use these lists, the more you'll find legitimate IPs being blocked - I explicitly have to allow all the BBC IP addresses to use their web sites, which is intensely frustrating. My "permallow.p2b" exceptions list grows in size each day... So take everything with a pinch of salt! Disabling HTTP is a bodge workaround, but programs like Kaspersky will often use UDP on port 2001 (for example) to update, and those will always fall foul of the egress traffic block as long as people keep on using the massively popular, but stale, blacklists.

Keep watching the log windows...

I then came across an article from September this year written by postie of seven years 'Roy Mayall' (geddit?), where he quite matter-of-factly describes the scenarios faced by RM staff on a daily basis: edicts are implemented from upon high with no real workforce consultation; posties essentially forced to lie about their work volumes in the logbooks and regularly do unpaid overtime just to keep up with the sheer volume of work; union representatives railroaded out of any serious decision-making... Plus something which surprised me the most: Royal Mail's official average of mail per bag, which they use to calculate yearly volume through their network, was not even close to the actual amount when a manual count was undertaken a little while back.

So, setting aside some of the very worrying (and arguably endemic) problems 'Roy' describes one of the Royal Mail's core claims - that volume has been down year on year necessitating all the cost-cutting measures - is most likely little more than a spurious, disingenuous statement, completely contradicted when the hard facts are examined.

If you're undecided about the postal strikes, I strongly suggest you read the article. It's a real eye-opener, and might just convince you to change your view to supporting the RM staff in their strikes if you're not 100% sure just yet. The full article can be found on the London Review of Books web site - click here to read it.

How do they send you convincingly-written letters? Well, they just poll the public whois information for your domain names (which includes expiry date, full address and full name). So, be mindful also that whatever information you provided during registration will be available for the whole world to see! You may consider anonymising some of the data, or going through a third party anonymous registrar service (which will cost extra on top of the domain registration fees - GoDaddy currently charge $20 for two years).

The Domain Registry of America is one of the older scam organisations making money off the backs of unsuspecting Internet users, but sadly their 'business' persists. UK-Cheapest has published an article detailing the DROA and their various other companies (with similar names) - read and avoid if you get a letter through the post from them!

First of all, I do agree that a school is an horrendous choice of location for any high power base station - developing brains with their young neural tissue are certainly more vulnerable to being damaged by omnidirectional radiation than adults, and mobile phone masts aren't a great choice. That said, WiFi access points (with their much lower output range) are a far lower power - I consider those quite safe for school environments and other areas where there are kids.

I sent my full comment into the Beeb, but I'm sure it'll either be edited or probably not used at all because they're after the quick two line responses. So, I decided to post it in full on here. The questions the BBC asked were these: "Would you care if there was a phone mast or a wi-fi hotspot near your home? Or are you not worried? If you are bothered by this, would you be prepared to give up wireless communications altogether?"

My response:

Mobile phone masts are a necessary evil. We desire ubiquitous connectivity but develop a bad case of NIMBYism when we see a large phone mast.

What many don't realise is that we're already blanketed by mobile masts and their radio waves; large masts are disguised as flagpoles on the top of churches and other buildings or made to look like an unused lamppost, picocells are bracketed to shop walls on every high street... They literally are everywhere!

Never mind UMTS and GPRS cells, you also have a much thicker blanket of (lower power) wifi - BT hides hotspots inside phone boxes, The Cloud and other providers put access points all over public spaces and buildings in our major cities. There's even wifi hotspots on trains! And then there's the other types of signals - FM radio, UHF analogue and digital television, and, weaker still Z-band satellite TV from space.

There's a LOT of fear, uncertainty and doubt about the power output of phone masts. A post on the IET Forums describes the actual typical power output of a 3G mast as "around 20W (43dBm)." The Health Protection Agency indicates that the power output of a mobile phone during a call can start at 2W and step down to around 2mW based on signal strength and quality, but you're holding it right next to your brain. A phone mast 100 metres away at 20 Watts, or a mobile phone with its omnidirectional radiation outputting at up to 2 Watts - which you push against your skull and keep in your pocket the rest of the time... which do you think is more dangerous in the long run?

As a reference, the Sutton Coldfield transmitter pumps out FM at 250 kiloWatts ERP (the mast uses two transmitters, each rated between 20-40 kiloWatts, one for each half of the aerial). We've all been blanketed by this stuff for decades!

I work in an office with a T-Mobile UMTS (3G) mast about 30 metres away. The mast's about 50/60 feet high and we're on the ground floor - my phone therefore only has to use a very low power signal and as a result its battery lasts longer and it pushes out less radiation.

Is mobile technology (and the ensuing mast networks) as safe as not having it at all? No, of course not. But would we be able to go back to a life before mobiles? I'd wager a large amount of money that people would revolt if the phone signal was made worse by taking away some of the most important masts. They have to go somewhere!