It's All A Matter Of Perception
Carpal Tunnel Not Caused By Computer Usage

Europe To Make Sure That Investigators Work Harder, Not Smarter

Legal Issues

from the more-must-be-better dept

Wed, Dec 14th 2005 10:32am — Mike Masnick
Arguments over data retention have gone on for years -- and it's already been explained why forcing ISPs to keep all that data generally makes it more difficult to find the important stuff, rather than making it easier to catch criminals -- as supporters contend. However, politicians seem to like easy explanations, and "more" seems like it must be "better." So, the European Parliament has now said that data retention is a must, requiring records to be kept for two years. Each country still needs to approve the rules on their own, though. And, of course, the politicians don't explain how ISPs will pay for all of this data retention. They also don't seem to consider the fact that the more data is retained, the more likely it is to be misused by those with access or twisted by other industries to be used for other, non-terrorism-preventing activities.
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  1. identicon
    Oliver Wendell Jones, 14 Dec 2005 @ 11:19am

    Glad I'm not in Europe...

    ... But if I did, I'd write a program to "wardial" every possible URL in existence and run it at all times when I'm not needing my bandwidth.

    http://000000000.000000000.com
    http://000000000.000000000.org
    http://000000000.000000000.net
    http://000 000000.000000001.com
    http://000000000.000000001.org
    http://000000000.000000001.net
    etc...

    Maybe, just to waste more storage space, I'd reboot my cable modem (to get re-assigned an IP address) every 10 URLs or so...

    I wonder how long it will take before a hard drives run out of space on a long holiday weekend and some ISP gets slapped with huge fines for not capturing all the info?

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Phil, 15 Mar 2006 @ 6:10pm

    Re: Glad I'm not in Europe...

    Good Idea, that would rapidly stop this sort of stupid idea. A good question in the UK at least, might be the question of wether the law is itself legal.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Phil, 15 Mar 2006 @ 6:25pm

    Re: Re: Glad I'm not in Europe...

    sorry, forgot to add this.
    I have a friend who wrote a simple browser which had only one advanced feature (it was a plain text browser), but it could easily be automated so it opens URLs randomly, using, say the words in the M$ word dictionary (preferably in every language). That would really fix them.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]


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Carpal Tunnel Not Caused By Computer Usage
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