Statement A: The UK government are not planning to build a massive surveillance network to capture the traffic data of all internet users:

“GCHQ is not developing technology to enable the monitoring of all internet use and phone calls in Britain, or to target everyone in the UK,” the statement said. “Similarly, GCHQ has no ambitions, expectations or plans for a database or databases to store centrally all communications data in Britain.”

Statement A, revised: The UK government are not planning to build a massive surveillance network to capture the traffic data of all internet users.

Just not all of them simultaneously.

Or so they tell us. I feel so reassured :S

<rant>

Is it just me, or is the Internet increasingly becoming a bordered world?

From iTunes store accounts linked to credit cards, to GeoIP technology, it seems that services are relying more and more on being focused on one, geo-politically defined audience.

The most annoying instance of this is the BBC iPlayer. The absurd situation of BBC Worldwide, the commercial division of the BBC which sells programmes and formats outside the UK, as well as bandwidth concerns, has led to geographic restrictions being placed on where the iPlayer can be accessed from. Unfortunately, the implementation isn’t linked to having paid for a TV licence (and therefore accessible from anywhere), but rather based on GeoIP technology: checking AS numbers, reverse DNS lookups and other such things against known geographic locations. There are workarounds, but blech to that.

This seems poor to me. The geographic restrictions are some of the main reasons the iPlayer is reliant on DRM and proprietary technologies, things the BBC, as a public broadcaster, should not be involved with.

The same sort of thing is going on with Hulu, NBC.com, and the like. But those are commercial companies, not publicly-funded broadcasters with a public service mission.

It’s unfortunate not only for that reason, but also because end-to-end openness and non-discrimination is one of the best things about the Internet. It’s a positive benefit to me that a I get exactly the same connectivity regardless of location. Things might happen slower, but a lack of discrimination and intermediate futzing is definitely a good thing.

We don’t want to get to a situation where there’s a British Internet *shudder*, German Internet, Australian internet, and so on. So let’s just nip this in the bud, folks. If it’s out there, it’s out there.

</rant>

A couple of days after posting my previous item about the various xDSL technologies which may or may not come into usage in the UK during this century, Slashdot posted a story announcing the UKonline 8Mbps service i mentioned. Which is all fine (though a little delayed by Slashdot standards) until people start posting the inevitable “8Mbps for £40? that’s rubbish! Here in [insert Scandanavian country or Japan here] we have a gazillion gigabit connections for which the telco pays us”. Well, not quite, but it does add insult to the ‘injury’ of the utterly shitty connections we have here. Furthermore, most of the services mentioned are symmetric (same upload and download rates), and have no transfer limits. Just a few tasters:

Expensive! (Score:5, Informative) by silverz (803241) on Wednesday January 26, @09:00PM (#11487672) That is very expensive. In Japan, for example ADSL connection from Yahoo Japan costs you about 4000 yen per month (less than 40 US dollar) for 50 Mbps ADSL. And also fibre optic connection has become very common and cheaper. For example Usen Networks (one of the provider in Japan) provides 100 Mbps fibre optic connection for only 2950 per month. I use the fibre optic that comes with 5 static IPs. And it costs me about 5000 yen per month. Download cap is totally never heard in here. As far as I know, all packages come with unlimited bandwidth.

Which isn’t too bad, as you expect that sort of thing from the Japanese. But then…

France has got UK Beat: 20Mbits/sec @ 30 Euros (Score:5, Interesting) by valmont (3573) on Wednesday January 26, @09:52PM (#11488047) (http://chrisholland.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Monday September 20, @06:11PM) thanks for playing [adsl.free.fr]. You read it well: 20Mbits/sec DOWN and 1Mbit/sec UP. No cap. and that’s for 30 Euros per month. The service comes with free telephony [adsl.free.fr] to any french landline (calls to mobile phones cost something), and very cheap international rate, like 3 eurocents to europe. Once you’ve got all that, you can pay an extra monthly fee to get hundreds of TV channels [adsl.free.fr]. With 20Mbits/sec … that should do it. All of this is given to you thru Free.fr triple-play box, the FreeBox. My Mom’s been with them for a couple of years and has the original, more clunky incarnation of today’s sleek freebox. Here’s a picture of it [flickr.com].

Well thanks for that. You expect that sort of thing from the Swedish but to be beaten in terms of broadband by the French? They were playing catch-up just two or three years ago, and it seems it’s now our turn…