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...The Register: Spain warned on filesharing cut-offs, in which we are told that Commissioner Viviane Reding (the saviour of internet privacy in the UK) has said:

"If Spain cuts off internet access without a procedure in front of a judge, it would certainly run into conflict with the European Commission."

I think Lord Mandelson should take note, in light of his Digital Economy bill.

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The unelected Sith Lord Mandelson, who appears to have collared vast acres of political power in the UK via his all-encompassing ministry has his Digital Economy reports Ars Technica: UK "Pirate Finder General" law innocuous now, could get ugly.  This bill seems to fit the needs of big media rather than any form of human rights and justice.  Ars Technica reports:

The bill implements the Digital Britain report, which was completed earlier this year and attempted to chart a course forward for Britain in a high-tech world. It initially imposes two obligations on ISPs: they must forward warning letters from copyright holders to their subscribers, and they must maintain an anonymized list of the number of such warnings received by each subscriber. If a copyright holder asks, they must be shown the list, at which point the rightsholder can go to court and seek to uncover the names of the top offenders, and then sue them. There are no sanctions, but such sanctions could be coming. The government has written "reserve powers" into the law that can be deployed at a later date without needing Parliamentary approval.

It's these "reserve powers" that raise question marks - "The Secretary of State may by order amend Part 1 or this Part for the purpose of preventing or reducing the infringement of copyright by means of the Internet, if it appears to the Secretary of State appropriate to do so having regard to technological developments that have occurred or are likely to occur."  This is a bit of a worrying development. Whenever the Secretary of State thinks you're behaving badly, he can order your disconnection or other actions against your internet connection.  Sith Lord Mandelson has always shown a great affinity with the rich and powerful - lately he's been hanging round the media mogul David Geffen - is it too cynical to suggest that there's a connection?

The Open Rights Group reckon there aren't enough safeguards in the bill - "The Bill doesn’t require any test of evidence before harsh punishments are imposed on people accused of copyright infringement, and opens the door to a ratcheting up of unwarranted powers without democratic scrutiny.", while the EFF complains that the bill effectively changes the balance of power in copyright matters, with Mandelson (or his successors) able to rewrite legislation via fast-track procedures lacking full parliamentary provision. And of course, the bill could be used to compel ISPs to monitor traffic, record transactions, filter content etc.

Presumably the passage of the Digital Economy Bill through Parliament is by no means assured: there will be a General Election during 2010.  But I doubt the likely successor to the present Government will be any less authoritarian.

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I've been playing around with a number of blogging tools, looking for something that will run with each of my blogs (I'm using Joomla! 1.5, Wordpress and Blogger).  An additional complication is that in this website, I'm using a specific blogging module called MyBlog.  Over the last few weeks I've tried the following:
Blogilo (formerly Bilbo Blogger - a name I prefer!) - this is a Linux desktop application with which one can compose blog posts offine, then upload to the blog when ready.  It definitely works very nicely with my self-hosted Wordpress blog, but whenever I try setting up my Blogger account, it just dies.  For Wordpress, then, very versatile.  I couldn't at that time see how to hook it up to my Joomla sites (but see below).
BloGtk - A Gnome application for the Linux desktop.  I couldn't get either Wordpress or Blogger accounts set up with it.
Gnome-blog - potentially really nice toolbar app for the Gnome desktop.  I persuaded this to connect to my Blogger account ona desktop PC, but not using my laptop.  I couldn't find much advice on the interweb.
Drivel - An attractive name and interface, but again, I couldn't make it see the Blogger account, and couldn't figure out how to get it to work.
Deepest Sender - a Firefox add-on for blogging while exploring the web.  Has a very attractive interface, seems to set up well with Blogger, but throws an error when posting the article.  Didn't test with Wordpress.
And finally - ScribeFire - another Firefox add-on, and a bit more fully functional that Deepest Sender.  This definitely works with Blogger, and I've set up an account for the Wordpress blog.
I wondered whether ScribeFire could be made to work with Joomla - a quick Google search came up with this blog article: Posting to Joomla with ScribeFire.  I've followed the steps, and this is the first attempt to post in MyBlog within my Joomla site.  Here's hoping. (Though I can't see how to add tags to the post, and nor does it offer to complete meta info fields)

software, blogging, internet

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I figured I'd better make sure my own house was in order if I was going to blog about web tracking!  I've reviewed my websites and blogs, and find the following.

Flies & Bikes (this website) - Ghostery doesn't reveal any trackers.  Joomla sites do, I think use cookies however.

North Bucks Road Club, Northwood Wheelers and Team Grumpy as for Flies & Bikes, no apparent tracking.

Wonderful Life - this is a Wordpress blog.  I identified a few trackers, as follows:

Ghostery identifies the following running on Wonderful Life:
Quantcast – this is associated with the IntenseDebate commenting plugin.  Blocking this tracker with Ghostery doesn’t appear to affect the functionality of IntenseDebate.
MyBlogLog – This is associated with the MyBlogLog widget in the main page.
Google Analytics – Possibly the most widely used tracker on the web.  I kind of figure that anyone using the web will encounter sites using Google Analytics. 

The Team Grumpy Blog - a Google Blogger hosted site, naturally has a Google-related script running, with two others:

Google Friend Connect Seems to enable connections between blog-readers. - Collects data on visitor numbers. MyBlogLog - as above, associated with a MyBlogLog widget.
Stat Counter - associated with counting site visits.

I advise Firefox users to download Ghostery, a plugin which identifies tracking scripts running on a website.  It provides links to further information on those scripts, the vendors’ privacy policy, and offers the option to block these scripts.  Noscript is a powerful Firefox plugin that allows blocking of a wide variety of scripts (and is particularly aimed at blocking malicious scripts).