BBC To Deploy Detection Vans To Snoop On Internet Users (telegraph.co.uk) 212
product_bucket writes: The BBC has been given permission to use a new technology to detect users of the iPlayer who do not hold a TV license. Researchers at University College London have apparently developed a method to identify specially crafted "packets" of data over an encrypted Wi-Fi link without needing to break the underlying encryption itself. TV Licensing (the fee-collecting arm of the BBC) has said the practice is under regular scrutiny by independent regulators, but declined to elaborate on how the technique works. Dr Miguel Rio, a computer network expert who helped to oversee the doctoral thesis, said: "They actually don't need to decrypt traffic, because they can already see the packets. They have control over the iPlayer, so they can ensure that it sends packets at a specific size, and match them up. They could also use directional antennae to ensure they are viewing the Wi-Fi operating within your property." The BBC has been given such authority through the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
Two bugs (at least!) (Score:2, Informative)
First off, Ethernet. Now that it's known, it's easily defeated.
Secondly, false positives. Now that hackers know what they're looking for, these will be trivially easy to implement: just send whatever traffic with the packet-size signature, and people will look like they're using iPlayer when they are not.
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On another forum, I have noticed a sharp rise in the number of users who claim to have no ready access to a PC. What major smartphones and tablets support Ethernet?
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All of them? [amazon.com] Or has Apple reached the point yet where their phones have no ports left at all?
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I acknowledge not having rigorously defined 'supports'. Without one of these USB OTG or Lightning NICs that you linked, a device does not support Ethernet. So let me ask a second question:
What fraction of smartphone and tablet users own a compatible NIC?
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I acknowledge not having rigorously defined 'supports'. Without one of these USB OTG or Lightning NICs that you linked, a device does not support Ethernet. So let me ask a second question:
What fraction of smartphone and tablet users own a compatible NIC?
I don't know what the number is in England, but I expect that that fraction is about to distinctly increase. Not all devices do support USB OTG at least, but the fraction of those in use are going to drop either way--if nothing else, as they age out, though this might help accelerate the process.
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You're kidding yourself. If you think people are going to go "you know what, I want to watch iPlayer illegally so badly that I'm going to go out and buy £100 network card for my device, that's of dubious reliability, then tether myself to right next to my router, or lay ethernet cables all around my house, rather than just paying the £145 license fee, or taking a risk that they might detect me." then you're truly on the next level of insanity.
Good luck. (Score:5, Funny)
I think it'll be quite obvious when I notice the cat5 snaking up from a parked van to my wired network. :)
Re:Good luck. (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, I remember the old days. BBC and a bailiff come with a knock on the door of our squat.
"We are here to deliver notice of operating an unlicensed television, and register collection of a license fee." Mind you, the license fee in those day were less than 145 quid, but despite all, we were skint and didn't have it.
Well, I insisted we were exempt, 'cos the telly was free, left behind in the flat before we came - and for good reason! The only button that worked was for ITV.
I tried to demonstrate this to the assembled officials by summarizing the most recent "Lady Loves Milk Tray" and just how funny it would be, if the secret agent had been revealed in closing shot to be Leonard Rossiter.
We were delivered a bailiff's notice to pay the fee or surrender the telly. I'm pretty sure that that was the beginning of the MDMA period, come to think.
Re:Good luck. (Score:4, Funny)
Resulting a deadmau5.
Privacy? Fuck you. (Score:4, Insightful)
If the BBC just proved that they need to be completely destroyed they just handed their anti-BBC crowd the ammunition to do it. Bet it won't take more then a few weeks before people start making honeypots to bait them, and wouldn't that be very fun to see in court.
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But Your Honour... They were transmitting data in packets of... 1024 bytes! What are the odds of a computer system using such an arbitrary number?
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It should be painfully obvious that if your system repeats the same varying sequence of 1000 consecutive frame sizes the iPlayer sends (taking into account possible difference introduced by potentially different framing), you are receiving the signal. Or otherwise you should buy a lottery ticket.
Re:Privacy? Fuck you. (Score:5, Informative)
Tory policy since Thatcher has been to squeeze and mis-manage public services deliberately until the public tips in favour of privatisation. If you don't think this fucking ridiculous claim is an extension of that, you're either young or have newly immigrated.
Re:Privacy? Fuck you. (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, while I'm not British, I do have to agree with the view that this is a half-assed way of having a public service--just tax everybody, if you're going to do it at all. Ignoring the fact that they are flat-out admitting to engaging to mass surveillance--and assuming their claims are the complete and accurate truth--it still raises some serious questions on if the BBC's programming needs to be changed if enough people can be caught by the vans to hit the break-even point.
If the vans can't hit the break-even point? It's an unjustifiable waste of public money, and the fig leaf of justification for invading the public's privacy ought to depend on it not being that.
Meanwhile, if the vans are doing anything other than exactly what they're claiming they're doing? It is an unjustifiable invasion of privacy, and we can know this precisely because they're not admitting to it.
Personally? I figure it's not even going to be passing the 'does only what they claim it does' test, and wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if monitoring for people streaming vid is at the bottom of the vans' priorities...
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The point of the "vans" isn't to catch people but to intimidate people into getting a license.
The idea that at any moment there could be a knock on the door.... That is what works.
Of course having a database of every dwelling which has had a TV license previously and currently doesn't also helps ensure a brown envelope drops on the right door mats, for years.
I've only once actually come across anybody having an inspector turn up on their doorstep. The fella who answered the door was a Hells Angel and he jus
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The point of the "vans" isn't to catch people but to intimidate people into getting a license.
This is the right answer.
The Beeb has had "TV detector vans [google.ca]" for generations, now, and they haven't had a single conviction of license evading solely through detector van evidence.
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having a database of every dwelling which has had a TV license previously and currently doesn't also helps ensure a brown envelope drops on the right door mats, for years.
I moved house, let the old BBC licence shortly expire, and the old house was empty for nearly a year before I sold it. I'd go back to it once a week to pick up mail, and those brown envelopes soon arrived. They got increasingly hysterical about I was going to be visited and fined for having no licence. Then after about the third letter they'd stop and I'd hear nothing for a month. Then they'd start from the beginning again.
I tried phoning them to say the house was empty but I was led round an automated
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Except the BBC is not funded by public money. They are funded by TV licences.
Re: Privacy? Fuck you. (Score:5, Insightful)
The BBC needs more Clarkson and less political correctness.
Re: Privacy? Fuck you. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, they kept giving him shit for his supposed racism but keep putting out job ads that state 'no white people'.
BBC are now cunts and although I still enjoy the programming more than other channels and greatly appreciate the lack of adverts, they need a proper fucking rebuild to eliminate the bigots.
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The ads are no longer up, but:
http://www.express.co.uk/news/... [express.co.uk]
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... [dailymail.co.uk]
http://www.breitbart.com/londo... [breitbart.com]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... [telegraph.co.uk]
Note those are from May. More recently:
http://www.express.co.uk/news/... [express.co.uk]
BBC are racist cunts, and the fuckwits modding me 'troll' can go chew on a brick.
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Yeah damn that political correctness. How dare people think that someone should be fired for punching a co worker. This is a celebrity we are talking about. Don't the bbc realise that common decency shouldn't apply to this upperclass?
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Super heterodyne receivers can actually be detected. This poster presentation [neu.edu] may be of interest.
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If you think that the BBC is one of the finest and high profile institutions around, you spend too much time in news bubbles listening to things that only support your viewpoint. The fact that the BBS has been investigated multiple times for manufacturing the news and carrying a bias contrary to the truth should tell you a lot more.
Ethernet (Score:4, Interesting)
I just came to say what everyone else already has - I use ethernet for streaming so fuck you BBC!
Although I don't watch it anyway - anything good appears on other streaming services eventually anyway and I'm long past caring about seeing things on day zero. I already get letters almost weekly telling me they are now in the last stages of their investigation (for not paying my license fee). They are welcome to visit anytime, but unless they have a warrant my answer to any of their questions will be " "
Re:Ethernet (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually- surely this is bollocks anyway. If you can determine who's watching iplayer by looking at encrypted packets then surely encryption is broken? Anyone with more experience care to comment?
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Re:Ethernet (Score:4, Interesting)
This vulnerability has been known about for a very, very long time. TOR actually defends against it by randomly combining, splitting and padding packets.
Thing is, the detector vans have always been bullshit. They could never detect TVs, and have never been used as evidence in court to get a warrant or prosecution. They are just too scare people.
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Thats really what I was wondering - is this a vulnerability in encryption. Thanks for answering. It seems that all they are doing is drawing attention to a flaw in the general use of encryption, which will then hopefully be fixed.
And yes, I agree the vans are bullshit. My very first thought when reading the article was that its just PR for another non-existent scheme designed to scare people into compliance. Its the same deal with their letters - they will bombard you with threats regarding investigations a
Re:Ethernet (Score:4, Informative)
Actually- surely this is bollocks anyway. If you can determine who's watching iplayer by looking at encrypted packets then surely encryption is broken? Anyone with more experience care to comment?
Yes. You fundamentally don't understand what encryption does, it protect what you're sending, not to who and when. If you SSH to a server, does your ISP see what IP you contacted? Yes. Does it see how much data you transferred and when? Yes, obviously. Same thing about wireless, only it's public for anyone to pick up when you used it and how much. Any normal network will rush to pass on data as quick as it can and you can use that by intentionally staggering. Say you request a 100 kB image from me, I send it as 1kb, pause, 3kb, pause, 5kb, pause, 7kb, pause, 11kb, pause, 13kb, pause, 17kb, pause, 19kb, pause, 23kb, pause, 10kb. Then I watch the packets on your WiFi and it's the same pattern. Coincidence? Pretty quick it won't be.
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That seems like a pretty big security flaw in encryption. I guess I always assumed that with encryption it would stagger and mix the content of packets because otherwise it is such an obvious hole..
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Encryption relies on trust. The problem in this case is that Alice is working with a third party to screw Bob. If they weren't working together encryption would still render this attack useless.
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I didn't pay for a licence for probably 5 years, telling them I had cut the cable and removed the antenna. The worst I ever got was a letter every year or so and one visit from the licence people. They came up, saw I had a TV and DVD player, and left. It was exactly what I told them they'd find.
I didn't need the broadcast BBC content at that time, since there was pretty much nothing good on. DVDs and downloaded content were all I needed.
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I'd never let one if their goons into my house. I'll write to them ONCE to say I don't want a TV licence, and if they require further confirmations periodically they can pay for them like everyone else.
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> I just came to say what everyone else already has - I use ethernet for streaming so fuck you BBC!
We already know.
Sincerely,
GCHQ
PS: Our friends in the BBC thank you for your confession.
How it works? Easy. (Score:4, Insightful)
The same way their detector vans did that detected whether you have TVs equipped for terrestrial reception, and the same way lie detectors work: They don't. They just scare you into thinking they work so you comply.
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Actually detecting an old CRT TV is pretty easy (the receiver generates a characteristic signal), never CRT TVs are much harder (more modern electronics). Lie detectors does work too, the problem is they aren't reliable - some never triggers them, some always triggers them, some have essentially random outcome. Lie detector operators are trained with pseduo-science and intimidation techniques.
Both are mostly used for scaring people, doesn't mean they don't work in some situations.
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Yeah, they always had technobabble to explain why TV detector vans work. But the reality is that there is not and never was such a thing. They mocked a few up - vans with interesting looking ariels on top for publicity photos. But there were never any real ones. Purely a scare tactic. These days they don't even bother - they just threaten everyone that hasn't bought a license that they'll come and inspect the property.
Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the UK has completely lost it's mind! Here's a novel idea that's so much simpler and how we approach it in Canada. Here we have the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp) which is pretty much the same thing as the BBC - aka publicly funded TV, Radio, and Media. It is funded by the Federal taxes of all Canadian tax payers. Regardless of whether you use the CBC or not, you're paying for it. No special taxes that people must specifically pay, no special enforcement (except for maybe geo-ip), and no white vans running around snooping wifi traffic (which, here would be illegal) thanks to our Charter of Rights and Freedoms (something the UK DESPERATELY NEEDS). The UK people really get the shaft with their government and it's constant big brother mantra and it's excessive need to invade the lives of its people.
Can someone from the UK please explain to me the reason a 'TV' license still exists? It's not the 1950's!
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You do know that the cable companies(Rogers, Shaw, etc) used to run around with signal sniffing vans to see whether or not people had decoders right? That was legal. The same way that you could and can still be served with "theft of a telecommunication service" if you have a US satellite dish here in Canada. Those are still illegal, even if you are legally paying for it. There are many parts of the charter that are flimsy as fuck, and S.1 is that giant gaping loophole that let's the courts turn around a
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because the BBC makes a big play of being free from government interference & claims to be impartial. You'll note the 2nd is complete and utter BS and the first isn't always true.
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> Can someone from the UK please explain to me the reason a 'TV' license still exists? It's not the 1950's!
$$$.
--
brain-dead, noun, examples include the CP/M File System [seasip.info] (v1.4) which wastes 2 bytes (S1, S2) instead of using them for the 8.3 filename.
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It's fairly simple - the moment a public broadcaster gets funded directly from taxes it also becomes vulnerable to politicians cutting their budgets.
While it's also possible to vote through a lower TV license, it becomes much harder to justify this as "neccessary to balance the budget" when the real goal is to punish the broadcaster for publishing something the politicians didn't like.
So, in a word, independence.
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It is funded by the Federal taxes of all Canadian tax payers. Regardless of whether you use the CBC or not, you're paying for it.
How about no? I don't want to guarantee a national broadcaster my fucking tax money so they can spew out government propaganda (which every single government-funded broadcaster is doing bigtime). At least with the licence fee, I can be legally licence-fee. However, I would still scrap it and replace it with... nothing. If the BBC is so great, they can do well commercially. If
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That should've said "legally licence-free".
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Even in the UK they are on very dodgy ground here. If the intercept packets from unencrypted WiFi networks, it would be a violation of the Data Protection Act and possibly illegal unauthorised access to a computer system. Google was already bollocked for this with their WiFi mapping Street View cars.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
Logging in for the first time in years to reply to this.
Why not paying from the taxes? Because the programs can then be politically influenced! That's why.
You'll hear complaints in the Murdoch owned media that the BBC is left wing and biased. Trust me, after the Netherlands did away with the license fee (because it was cumbersome and people didn't understand why they had to pay for it) and switched to a tax payer funding, the usual suspects (usually on the right side of the political spectrum) have since started influencing and outright adjusting the content.
In the Netherlands the long treasured pluriform system is now on the verge of collapsing under the weight of the ratings. I wouldn't go as far as saying the content is politically influenced, but the system is not completely without government influence either. The way the BBC is funded is actually very clever, its fee is set outside the political cycle. Here is some more info about this scheme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/9637e45d-c96c-36c6-9e3f-af141e81cab4 (Sorry, don't know how to make a hotlink on Slashdot)
Quite a few people inside and outside the UK truly understand the value of the BBC. It goes far beyond Top Gear, don't believe the Murdoch owned media lambasting the BBC.
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If the BBC gets money from a compulsory license fee or from taxes, either way it's getting monies at rates determined by the government. So, why would one be more able to be politically influenced?
Or rather, what's the difference between the political pressure of "I'm going to cut your funding" and "I'm going to cut the license fee"
(Aside, you can use html anchor tags to do a hotlink)
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Growing up with no cable, BBC was most of what I watched... here in N Florida. Via PBS. And hey, they take donations!
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And in Australia the government can and does screw with ABC funding all the time. There is some value in having a reputable media that does not have its purse strings held by the government.
Sure the BBC license fee could be collected through taxes, initially based on the same formula of average tv's per household. But how long would that last?
Re: Seriously? (Score:2)
IIRC it is so they have a revenue stream independent of government, and hence of control / censorship. (I don't know how well it works in practice?)
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Re: Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternatives involve stuffing programs with ads and programming intendee to chase advertising money. The TV license allows the BBC to things which are good to have, but hard to make commercially viable. As soon as you make it optional, the kind of behaviour beloved of Sky becomes necessary. Competition just means you cannot have a simple single subscription either. For me a license funded BBC is a good thing, and corporate greed and market economics devastate the possibilities of broadcast TV, reducing it to a game of chasing money. Since we already have plenty of commercial TV, making the BBC commercial will add nothing, but take away a lot.
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'...is funded with public money from taxes'
In which case you need to tax the public equivalent to what the license fee brings in. The only difference with TV licensing is that those who don't use a TV are except to this tax, whereas if the money comes from the exchequer (that is, the pool of all money received through conventional taxes), then those who don't use a TV still have to pay their share.
Personallly I would have a public tax-funded digital and information infrastructure corporation (or group of co
Hoax (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hoax (Score:4, Interesting)
The old TV detector vans [wikipedia.org] were a hoax to scare people into getting a TV licence. Enforcement was actually done by visiting addresses with no record of a licence. This is another con.
Exactly what I thought.
Hoax, at best a few empty vans driving round with TVLicensing.co.uk written on them. Maybe a HMRC logo to make it look official. A packet size is not going to convict anyone.
The biggest problem the BBC has is with non UK users using the iplayer.
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The biggest problem the BBC has is with non UK users using the iplayer.
The biggest problem they have is not directly offering non-UK users a subscription package. Otherwise, your only choice is to pay for an entire 2nd-tier cable package (BBC America) just for access to a small sample of their programming.
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The biggest problem the BBC has is with non UK users using the iplayer.
The biggest problem they have is not directly offering non-UK users a subscription package. Otherwise, your only choice is to pay for an entire 2nd-tier cable package (BBC America) just for access to a small sample of their programming.
The BBC in the UK is not permitted to do so.
They don't have a mandate to do it and they license out their programs to other countries, which always comes with a non-compete (as why would you watch Strictly Come Dancing with ads when you can stream it without ads).
I dont disagree with your point however, but having lived in the commonwealth we dont have these 2nd tier cable thingo's you're talking about and most good BBC programs end up on the ABC.
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The old TV detector vans [wikipedia.org] were a hoax to scare people into getting a TV licence. Enforcement was actually done by visiting addresses with no record of a licence. This is another con.
yup. My uncle worked for TV Licensing for about 6 months back in 1985/6 and he showed us the inside of the back of the van....... fuck all there. ... even if they come with the police... you can refuse them entry successfully... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] if guys as dense as these two can verbally fend off TV licensing with police armed with a warrant.
Also they cannot come in if you don't let them. Just tell them if they come to the door.. "I hereby remove your implied right of entry"
I haven't pai
It's the internet detector van! (Score:5, Funny)
Right, Viv - eat the WiFi!
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It's a toaster...
Why detection vans? (Score:2)
Easily thwartable.
Seriously.... for the WiFi... just modify the encryption protocol so the source cannot influence the size or precise timing of the encrypted payload.
Since BBC control the iPlayer.... why not just put access controls on their website?
Users will be prompted to enter their street address and Television License ID# to link their Browser and IP address, before they can start playing content.
Also, if they don't have one, prompt them to register on the website and pay online Ala Netflix.
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Wait, are you saying that the encryption protocol can just be trivially modified? Because, absent writing your own firmware and flashing thr router, that is not how things work. We're on like gen 3 of WiFi encryption now, and it takes like 5 years to fully roll out a new system (given mean replacement times.)
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Wait, are you saying that the encryption protocol can just be trivially modified?
Yes, you just need a wired proxy tunnelling device on your network that causes the actual payload sizes to change and generates additional payloads which will confuse anyone trying to listen.
Thought a licence only required for live streams (Score:4, Interesting)
Did this change recently? iPlayer to watch catch up programs never used to require a license.
Besides all this, the answer is fairly simple. If they want to enforce license status, iPlayer should just require a login with an account the BBC can use to very status.
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In a way, this is less snoopy than having a login to watch shows. At least this way, they're not tracking which shows you watch. A login would allow that.
Free Candy!! (Score:2)
The candy van from limey land has come for you.
Decorrelate bandwidth consumption and defeat this (Score:2)
In DPA, the dynamic power consumption is measured on a hardware device such as a smart card that performs crypto operations so that, when the challenge-response is begun, the card's regular crypto operations for asymmetric and symmetric encryption can be captured and analyzed using statistical correlation over many challenges and other means so that the correct keys for the device can be determined
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It's looking at packet size. Pretty trivial to alter a VPN client to always send max size MTU's via padding.
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Why would you waste bandwidth to pad it? You can slice up the packets and reassemble them to the max MTU size without decrypting the data.
That Orwellian Plot Twist (Score:2)
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Yet another American that doesn't realise that London is only one tiny part of the UK.
Costs more than it recovers (Score:3)
It's going to cost more to field these specially-equipped detector vans and the crews to operate them than they will EVER receive back in license fees.
Assume these costs:
the cost of the van ($30,000)
the cost of gas, oil, tires, and maintenance for the van per year ($3000)
the cost of the monitoring gear ($1000?)
the cost of the crew to operate the van ($20,000 per year per person?)
all associated upstream paperwork ($1000?)
the occasional accident(s) that the van will (statistically) be involved in over time ($$$$???)
So, probably a minimum of $50,000+ per year to operate...and how much will they get back? Nowhere near $50,000.
In other words, it costs more than it brings in, so it's another ridiculous sink hole for money.
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The cost to the IRS of tracking down and prosecuting some tax scofflaw may far exceed what they recover but the fear that prosecution produces in others can result in additional tax revenue that covers the cost.
They don't have to catch x people/yr to recover the cost, they need to put fear into enough people to recover the cost.
If its real - its theatre. (Score:2)
It's going to cost more to field these specially-equipped detector vans and the crews to operate them than they will EVER receive back in license fees.
You didn't get the memo: the point of the detector vans was always to make people believe that there are detector vans and that they'll get caught if they watch TV without a license. The real enforcement was always done by comparing the list of people who have bought TV receivers with the list of addresses of TV license holders, or knocking on doors or sending nasty letters and hoping they'd confess. Its widely suspected that the old detector vans were either fake or ineffective, but even if they were gen
This is a long recognized problem (Score:2)
A Tor Project article from 2011
https://blog.torproject.org/bl... [torproject.org]
Experimental Defense for Website Traffic Fingerprinting
Website fingerprinting is the act of recognizing web traffic through surveillance despite the use of encryption or anonymizing software. The general idea is to leverage the fact that many web sites have specific fixed request patterns and response byte counts that are known beforehand. This information can be used to recognize your web traffic despite attempts at encryption or tunneling. We
BBC freebie? (Score:2)
Can I just install the iPlayer chrome app or android app and watch from the US without a license?
It would be great to be able to see all those boring Ken Loach movies for free.
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Certainly, VPN to a location in the UK, make sure your DNS is set to a UK DNS server and enjoy.
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When I first tested this, all it needed was a UK based DNS server. The VPN wasn't necessary. Has this changed?
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It's got geo-IP checking to stop you using it outside the UK. Even though I am British when I go on holiday abroad I can't use iPlayer.
powers (Score:2)
So, granting powers to a TV station no less. What's next, outsourcing police work to OmniCorp?
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Granting them the authority to passively scan wireless traffic, identify the location of the WAP, and then providing that information to the police is fine with me. I mean, still stupid, but legally/morally fine.
So long as that's all they get to do. If they are allowed to be judge, jury and executioner as well instead of passing off evidence to the legal system, that's a big problem.
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"The BBC has been given such authority through the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act."
So, granting powers to a TV station no less. What's next, outsourcing police work to OmniCorp?
Guys driving around in vans listening to people talk in their homes like in the movie V for Vendetta. [wikipedia.org] Nothing creepy or bad happened in that film, so I'm sure it will be just fine. Come to think of it, that was set in the UK. Hmm...
For a more critical take... (Score:2)
For a slightly more critical take on this than the Torygraph, there's an article in The Register that actually digs in to the subject a bit [theregister.co.uk] and has dug out the actual government report (which is pretty silly but doesn't quite seem to involve fleets of detector vans randomly snooping on WiFi at random).
NB: This is all because of the "iPlayer loophole" - people have been able to watch catch-up TV on iPlayer without a license and, while technically you're meant to have a license to use the Live Streaming feat
They do not need detector vans (Score:3)
As iPlayer is a BBC product, why do they need detector vans to determine who is streaming it? It is coming from their servers, so the they know (or could know) the IP addresses to which iPlayer is streaming. In most cases this will be the router address of the ADSL, Cable or Fibre subscriber, from which the address could be determined. Even with a detector van, if someone is streaming via a WiFi hotspot, there will be no way they could tell if the users of the smartphones, tablets and laptops have licences at their home address (and the licence covers use outside the home by equipment powered by internal batteries). Similarly with anyone streaming via 3G/4G.
Ya, detect this. (Score:2)
They could also use directional antennae to ensure they are viewing the Wi-Fi operating within your property.
I live in the US, so whatever, but I have the transmission power on my AP (D-Link DAP-2660) set to just 25%. Wi-Fi works just fine everywhere inside my house but I can't detect any signal outside the house. Suck it BBC.
What have the BBC ever given to us! (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Wow, so when will the Brits start fighting back... (Score:3, Insightful)
That old urban legend ? (Score:2)
Terrorists (Score:2)
Yes! This is how you catch the terrorists. That's what this law was all about, right?
The Loony Detector Van, you mean (Score:2)
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To find me in SoCal.
I assume the TPP includes a provision allowing the BBC to hire a private mercenary force to seize your home on the suspicion of a violation.
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Will be next, to make sure you have a license for your cats......
Will be next, to make sure you have a license for your cats......
Will be next, to make sure you have a license for your cats......
I need a license for my fish named "Eric" , , , "Eric the fish".
In High School in the scenic USA, I attended optional driving courses to prepare for a "Driving License" test.
So in the UK, you apparently need a license to watch TV. What does the test to get a "TV License" look like?
When a commercial break comes on, go to the toilet and/or grab some grub out of the refrigerator.
There is always a CSI and or Law and Order episode running somewhere. Just zap around long enough to find it.
TV roulette is r
Do you support your PBS station? (Score:2)
What does the test to get a "TV License" look like?
It presumably looks like the form mailed to you when you respond to a PBS pledge drive. BBC is their counterpart to PBS, and it has made a deal with Ofcom (their counterpart to the FCC) to ban watching any broadcast TV (whether BBC or not) without a valid BBC subscription.
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FOILED! BBC! Mobile Device VPN.
https://www.vpnunlimitedapp.com/en [vpnunlimitedapp.com]
http://justanothergeeksite.com/2013/11/vpn-unlimited-ios-app-review/ [justanothergeeksite.com]
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there is a weakness in WIFI security: packet size should not be so determinable.
I don't think that wireless security should concern itself with ensuring every possible form of steganography is also somehow encrypted or obfuscated. The only people that can "read" that data are the ones who already know what it is.
So, in a way this is like the BBC coming over every day for a free (for them) meal of baked beans on bread. They are literally stealing the food from your mouths and tables
How do you figure that? The BBC costs money to operate. Watching the programming without a license is like stealing a free meal from their tables. You're not required to pay, just as you're not required to watch.
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Just one small thing. We're talking about the BBC. BBC != Government.