It's a con trick by the BBC.

No-one wants DRM on the BBC's broadcasts; not even the BBC themselves. But many content providers, especially American ones, are trying to insist on it. So the BBC have devised a very clever way to con the content providers.

The trick is to put DRM into the broadcast version of the program guide, that tells you what is on when. This was announced with great fanfare as "the BBC is adding DRM to its broadcasts", with no mention of the small technical detail that the actual video and audio will have no DRM. So the content providers think that they have got their way, but there will be no impediment at all to (for example) capturing a broadcast off the air and making a torrent out of it. Articles like TFA are part of the con: they help convince the content providers that they have got what they want, which in turn induces them to sell stuff to the BBC that we might otherwise not see.

The commercial set-top-box manufacturers don't care, because they have to cater for genuine DRM on the commercial channels anyway. And the hobbyists who are running software such as MythTV don't care, because they download the program guide from the BBC website, which conveniently provides it in machine-readable form with no DRM.

Of course industry will argue that: they don't want to do anything, so they want a law that will allow them to do nothing.

From the point of view of the public, the ideal response from industry would be to take every possible measure to prevent a break-in, but to be open and honest when one occurs, rather than hiding it. The economic incentive to behave like this would be to punish companies that admit they have had a break-in (so that they take steps in advance to prevent it), but to hang the CEO of any company found to have covered up a break-in.

Or better still: revoke their entire CA, and *don't* start a new one.

Unfortunately, the previous, very pro-US, government in the UK signed a treaty that allows the US to extradite anyone from the UK, more or less on demand, with no requirement to prove that any crime has been committed.

Of course "terrorism" was used as an excuse, but the treaty is being invoked in many cases where the person concerned seems to have committed only a trivial offence, or in some cases to have done something that was perfectly legal in the UK.

The treaty is very controversial here in the UK: many people feel that the US is using the mere process of extradition as a form of punishment in itself. Sadly, there is a public perception here that the US legal system is vindictive and heavily biased.

And yet you continue to sell your product to the government, despite knowing that it does not do what they want it to do, and that in consequence it will ruin the lives of innocent victims.

Are you overcome by greed, or just plain evil?

If I were a nefarious evildoer, I would simply join the trusted traveler scheme myself.

Why not? If "do you intend to become a suicide bomber" is one of the questions, I can simply answer "no". How would anyone know that I was lying?

• There is a blacklist of banned web pages. Each entry on the blacklist also specifies the IP address of that page.
• The routing at the ISP is set up so that IP addresses on the blacklist go to a transparent proxy, and other IP addresses are unaffected.
• The transparent proxy blocks the web pages on the blacklist, but allows access to all other web pages on the affected IP addresses.

How do I know? Because this is the system (called cleanfeed) that most ISPs in the UK have already installed to do the government-mandated web censoring that we've already got.

Lots of people do this with their utility bills.

Fine, if you trust the utility company to never make a mistake. But why on earth should anyone who is using a Paypal account to receive money, allow Paypal the facility to take as much money from them as it chooses? Once you've set up a direct debit, they can clear out your bank account, and there's nothing you can do about it. And why would they ask for this facility, unless they think that, at some time, they are going to take your money without your permission?

They'll be making a loss at that price, though. They'll make their profit from the cost of the calls. You can't do that trick with a computer.

1. No, presumably because they are not actually censoring very much. When a Wikipedia page got onto the list, the performance went to hell.
2. Yes. I believe this has happened.
3. Hard to say. Presumably the cost is that of the filtering hardware, plus the cost of the people who maintain the list. All of it seems to be paid for by the ISPs themselves.
4. It can't be. There can't be many kiddie porn websites, given that they are illegal everywhere, so if there's any real trade in that sort of stuff it will be underground, so unaffected by the censors. My guess is that it's main effect is to allow half-a-dozen or so perverts to spend their working days looking at stuff that secretly turns them on, without any fear of reprisal. And, of course, the filtering hardware is all there ready for the day when the government decides that we shouldn't be allowed to see whatever it is that they are going to ban next.

So how many of his women did he offer to you?

It's just as crazy as paying money for a string of 1s and 0s in an mp3 file.
So maybe these criminals were not thieves at all. They must have been pirates.

I can't see why a domestic user needs that speed.

So that you can exceed your download cap in 5 minutes instead of half an hour?

Boron nitride is not diamond at all, and lonsdaleite is described by Wikipedia as an allotrope of carbon that is found in meteorites and is harder than diamonds. Perhaps these people have just re-discovered something that was already known.

"Did this particular guy "learn from his mistake"?

Well, he claims to have "inadvertently" forgotten what he did. If he forgot about it, he can't have learned much from it.