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Archive for the ‘UK’ Category

BBC News: BNP members ‘targeted by threats’

BNP members have told BBC News they have received threatening and abusive phone calls and e-mails after a leaked document was published online.

The membership list includes police officers, who are banned from BNP membership, teachers and soldiers.

It includes names, addresses, telephone numbers and jobs of 12,000 people.

It has been removed from the blog it was published on after protests by BNP leaders but members say they are still receiving threatening messages.

One woman, who did not want to be named, told BBC Radio 5 Live she received a phone call at 11pm on Tuesday night saying she should be “very careful” as someone could come to her house.

The BNP’s regional organiser in Northern Ireland has advised members to increase their personal security because of the risk of attack from dissident Republicans. The leaked list names 39 people with Northern Ireland addresses and two with addresses in the Republic of Ireland.

‘Strange phone calls’

But BNP members interviewed by Victoria Derbyshire on BBC Radio 5 Live gave a mixed reaction to the leaked list, with some saying they had nothing to hide.

John, from Redcar, told 5 Live he had been inundated with abusive and threatening e-mails since the list was published.

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News Blog - Times Online - WBLG: To link or not to link?: “To link or not to link?

Zaffar from London left a comment after reading the Times Online report on the leaking of the BNP membership list. He wrote: ‘this is a joke read this article typed in google got the list in seconds’.

You can quibble with his punctuation, but not with his logic. Anyone could Google the phrase ‘BNP members’ and get the list too, although the original weblog on which it was posted has been taken down.

But The Times decided not to link to the list, even though we often do link to material without taking that as some kind of endorsement.

There were various reasons for the decision, most of them expressed in other comments on our various online reports. Firstly, BNP members have as much right to privacy as anyone else. Secondly, last time we checked it was still a free country: there is no law against membership of the BNP.

It is also a particularly emotive subject. One reader bragged of having spent his evening making prank phones calls to those on the list. A couple of others said that they had found friends or neighbours on it - and had already taken the offenders off their own Chrismas card lists.

Both on Times Online and and on various blogs, BNP members expressed their concern at the leaking of the list. They are not necessarily police officers - a job from which BNP members are explicitly banned. One, for example, runs a computer shop and is frightened that he will be put out of business.

The list is out there now, even if a Google search no longer throws it up. The anti-fascist campaigners and phone-prankers are having a field day. We don’t need to help them.

Posted by Times Online Newsdesk on November 19, 2008 at 11:05 AM in From the newsdesk | Permalink”

BNP members list leak gathers pace online - to link or not to link? | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog: “BNP members list leak gathers pace online - to link or not to link?
November 19th, 2008 Posted by Laura Oliver in Legal, Online Journalism, Press freedom and ethics

Removing the original online posting of the leaked list of members of the British National Party (BNP) has failed to contain the spread of the information online.

The list and reactions to it are being avidly Twittered, as a search for BNP on Twitter search engine Summize shows, while the document has made its way onto Wikileaks.

According to the party’s website, the blog that posted the ‘outdated’ list was removed from Blogger ‘after urgent legal action was instituted by the BNP leadership’.

In a Guardian.co.uk article, BNP leader Nick Griffin has admitted that the party is relying on the Human Rights Act, which it opposes, to help protect its members’ privacy.”

BNP races to get membership list off the net: “

Brown shirts trousers

Updated The BNP membership list containing over 10,000 names and addresses, which we revealed yesterday is still plastered over the internet despite the far right party’s desperate efforts to get it yanked from websites.…

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(Via The Register - Public Sector.)

BT silences customers over Phorm: “

Down banhammer

BT has banned all future discussion of Phorm and its ‘WebWise’ targeted advertising product on its customer forums, and deleted all past threads about the controversy dating back to February.…

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(Via The Register - Comms.)

Anti-Piracy Lawyers Start Protecting Gay ‘Gestapo’ Porn: “

After going after thousands accused of sharing video games in the UK, lawyers Davenport Lyons are now branching out into other areas. This week sees them start going after those it accuses of sharing the movie ‘Army Fuckers’, hardcore gay porn featuring ‘farm boys’ and Gestapo officers. Accusing the wrong people this time could prove very costly indeed.

(Via TorrentFreak.)

Internet shoppers to get duty relief for Christmas: “Internet shoppers who wait until December to look for a Christmas bargain may save more money than they thought when HM Revenue and Customs eliminates customs duty on personal purchases costing less that £105.”

(Via OUT-LAW News.)

Web providers to be named and shamed over offensive content

Politicians are ready to introduce league tables naming and shaming the speed with which internet service providers take down offensive material.

The culture minister, Barbara Follett, and her Tory shadow, Ed Vaizey, have backed the idea that web providers must be embarrassed into dealing with violent, sexually explicit web content.

Follett said she wants to see the pre-screening of material on sites such as YouTube, as occurs at present on MySpace. She admitted there was growing chaos out there on the internet, and order needed to be brought.

She has also admitted barriers aimed at preventing children from accessing over-age material on the internet are not just porous but leak like a sieve. ‘People can get straight through it, or straight by it.’

Follett warned: ‘We must teach children of the dangers of the internet. It is sad to make children more scared than interested, but fortunately the internet is so interesting that children tend to overcome their fear.’

Discussing the internet and video games at a Westminster debate and facing suggestions that the industry is lax about controlling content, Follett said: ‘We agree information about take-down times and levels of search need to be much clearer.’ Asked if she supported league tables of take-down times by internet service providers, she said ‘name and shame can sometimes can work very well indeed.’

Follett said: ‘Many people have said that the internet is like the wild west in the gold rush and that sooner or later it will be regulated. What we need is for it to be regulated sooner rather than later.

‘We need the service providers to come forward and show that they are the sort of responsible organisations whose services we can trust to our children.’

She added: ‘We must ensure that search engines have a clear link to child safety information and safe search settings on the front page of their website.’

She also said she saw ’some value in some form of age identity card for the internet. It is useful when it comes to alcohol and cigarettes and it is certainly useful when it comes to buying video games and other material on the internet.’

She added parents needed ‘control software to communicate automatically with websites’ age verification systems to prevent children from signing up to sites with false dates of birth.’

In theory social networking sites are not supposed to be accessed by anyone under 13, but this guideline is totally ignored. She said she was interested in some form of ‘age identification card’, or requiring banks to specify on credit card statements that the card had been used to access internet sites or games, so parents could be warned of their child’s activities.

She also said she backed pre-screening of user-generated internet content saying she was glad this was being carried out by MySpace. ‘It is that kind of responsible action that we are looking for, as it means people can trust a company.’ Ministers and politicians have been locked in battle with Google, the owners of YouTube, who claim that there is too much material going onto its site for it to be pre-screened.

The proposal for a ‘take-down’ league table is backed by Vaizey. He said: ‘The government is in a position to put out the information, and it is up to the internet service providers to react to it. If they are happy to be 55th in a league table of take-down times so be it.’

Overall, Follett’s remarks suggest she will be more interventionist than some other ministers, although she has stressed she favours the internet and largely thinks self-regulation is best option.

She also insisted there was not yet compellingly persuasive evidence of a link between watching violent video games and subsequent acts of violence.

Ministers have just set up a new child internet safety council following the review conducted for the Department of Children, Schools and Families by Dr Tanya Byron, the psychologist.

(Via Latest news, sport, business, comment and reviews from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk.)

Post from: TorrentFreak

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No Solace for Bond: Movie Pirates Evade Camcorder Spies: “

Hitting US theaters this week, the latest Bond movie ‘Quantum of Solace’ has already been released in the UK. However, despite searching the bags of paying customers, monitoring movie audiences with Bond-style night vision goggles and proffering misinformation, the industry has failed to stop the movie leaking to the Internet.

There’s no doubt about it, Bond movies are very big business indeed and MGM will be hoping James’ latest outing in ‘Quantum of Solace‘ will prove no different. However, movies of this importance are usually released in the US first and, on the whole, they enjoy the first couple of days at the box office without pirate copies being widely available. Inevitably, and within a short period, copies do appear on the Internet - certainly by the time the movie migrates to other territories. However, Quantum of Solace was released in the UK first, so additional effort has been made to stop the movie appearing online in advance of the US theatrical release.

Last week, the extent of the measures became clear, when reporter Kathryn Carr spoke with Alan Coward, a team leader at Vue Cinemas in the UK. ‘We have staff going in for the first 20 minutes with the goggles, and the last 15 minutes. They also make regular checks in between,’ said Alan, adding, ‘We have also been searching people’s bags on the way in.’

Spying on theater audiences is not an unusual event - US theater-goers have been subject to this treatment for a while now, but such actions are comparatively rare in the UK. Not that the UK is completely innocent when it comes to being a source for camcorded movies. It has been in the past, with movies such as X-Men: The Last Stand, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Pirates of the Carribbean 2 and V for Vendetta, all rumored to have first hit the ‘net from a UK cammer. But despite this handful of high-profile leaks, UK theaters are not a hotbed of camcorder piracy.

The fact that the UK is not a major source of camcorded movies is probably down to most movies being released elsewhere first. ‘Cammers’ like to get the movie quickly, and that usually means recording it from a US or Canadian source, so a UK release is usually unattractive since it comes too late.

However, there are other attractions for those looking to cam a movie in Britain. ‘If someone is found to be recording the film they would be banned from the cinema for life, and they would probably be arrested,’ said Alan Coward. One can’t argue with the ban, but Mr Coward’s assessment of an arrest is fanciful. While criminal law in the UK makes it illegal to offer for sale (or rent) an infringing copy of a copyrighted movie, unlike the United States, Canada and Japan (and much to the disappointment of the MPAA), simply ‘camming’ a movie on its own is not a criminal offense in Britain.

In September 2007, Dan Glickman of the MPAA visited the UK to have meetings with senior people from the UK government and representatives of the UK Film Council. His mission was to persuade the government to introduce legislation to change ‘camming’ from a civil infringement, to a serious criminal offense. So far, that legislation has not appeared. Since theater staff cannot detain a suspected ‘cammer’ by force because the law simply does not allow it, they instead attempt to disrupt the recording by ‘peaceful means’ and notify FACT for further instruction.

However, all the lobbying, bag searches and James Bond-style night vision goggles in the world don’t seem to make any difference to the availability of pirate material. Quantum of Solace is already available on the Internet in Telesync format (video recorded via a good camcorder, with audio added from a ‘direct’ source, such as a T-Loop). It has been available for a few days in French and maybe even another couple of languages but it is now fully available in English, with what many will consider to be a half-decent picture quality.

I’d end this post with a Bond catchphrase, but for Quantum they banned them all. Shame.

Data retention laws: what they mean for ISPs: “Under an anti-terrorism law passed after September 11 2001, details of every website visited, email sent and phone call made in the UK can be made available to authorities. For ISPs faced with storage and retrieval, it is cause for financial concern.”

(Via OUT-LAW News.)