Monthly Archives: October 2008

I’m intrigued…

…as to just how the UK government’s Communications Data Bill is going to work, and how it might affect my own server, which is a slow little user-mode-linux installation, sitting in a London datacentre.

Are they just going to snoop all SMTP traffic, and suck the From and To headers from that? Good luck with TLS-SMTP…

Will they by requiring everyone who runs a mail-server to keep their logs for later inspection? Logs are easily faked or changed, so there wouldn’t be much point in that.

Perhaps they will only target ISPs, and ignore small-fry individuals running their own mail-server? That’s not going to achieve much; I’m sure that it is not beyond the capabilities of the average terrorist organisation to run their own mail-server.

Or maybe anyone running their own mail-server will be obligated to install a closed source mail filter that submits logs to a central server somewhere? Easily overridden, of course … and I hope they provide me a binary for my future mail-server, which I intend to be running NetBSD on an SGI Indy.

Maybe mail-servers will just be declared too dangerous for the average peasant to operate, and will be legislated out of existence, forcing everyone to sign up to a mass-mail provider somewhere (yes, I’m getting silly now, but then, so is the notion that this legislation is workable).

Whatever option they take, it strikes me as a very large invasion of privacy, which is more likely to affect the innocent than those who may be planning on committing crimes…

Upsides

Well, for those looking (desperately) for any upside to the world’s current economic issues, then perhaps some might feel better knowing that Nordic holidays need no longer cost an arm and a leg:

Ouch! The BBC has what seems to be a good explanation of what is going on there, at least to someone economically illiterate like me.