ContactPoint will include the names, ages and addresses of all 11 million under-18s in England as well as information on their parents, GPs, schools and support services such as social workers.

[...]

However, it has now emerged that police officers, council staff, head teachers, doctors and care workers will use the records to search for evidence of criminality and wrongdoing to help them launch prosecutions against those on the database - even long after they have reached adulthood.

Source: The Telegraph.

We reverse engineer copyright enforcement in the popular BitTorrent file sharing network and find that a common approach for identifying infringing users is not conclusive. We describe simple techniques for implicating arbitrary network endpoints in illegal content sharing and demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques experimentally, attracting real DMCA complaints for nonsense devices, e.g., IP printers and a wireless access point. We then step back and evaluate the challenges and possible future directions for pervasive monitoring in P2P file sharing networks.

From The University of Washington, hat tip: Schneier on Security

Advocates of open source software have hailed a court ruling protecting its use even though it is given away free.

The US federal appeals court move overturned a lower court decision involving free software used in model trains that a hobbyist put online.

Source: Maggie Shiel, Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Local councils, health authorities and hundreds of other public bodies [including the Food Standards Agency, the Health and Safety Commission and even the education standards watchdog, Ofsted] are to be given the power to access details of everyone’s personal text, emails and internet use under Home Office proposals published yesterday…

As the measure is the result of an EU directive, the data will be made available to public investigators across Europe…

The consultation paper published yesterday estimates that it will cost the internet industry over £50m to store the mountain of data…

The measure will also cover VOIP - voice over internet protocol - calls such as Skype…

Source: Alan Travis writing for The Guardian

BT’s long-held claim that legal advice said its Phorm trials did not breach wiretapping laws came under renewed scrutiny today, as documents revealed the firm approached government experts after it had secretly co-opted 18,000 broadband customers into the advertising targeting system.

Source: The Register
Hat tip: z303 (via the ORG del.icio.us tag)

7Digital is in discussions with ISPs to offer downloadable music to customers as part of their broadband package.

Source: PC Pro (via ThinkBroadband)

The Chief Constable of Scotland’s largest police force, Strathclyde, is calling for all Scots to be put on the DNA database.

Source: The Register

The government has continued to argue that international passenger data should be analysed for immigration and non-serious crime, potentially risking its access to other European countries’ data.

Source: Kable

Music companies need to stop resisting and accept that illegal downloading is a fact of 21st-century life, according to a new study by music rights holders.

Source: The Guardian (via Open…)