Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

Theme Switcher:

Are Brother's Insecure Printers Illegal in the UK?

· 4 comments · 1,050 words · Viewed ~814 times


A padlock engraved into a circuit board.

Another day, another security disaster! This time, multiple printers from Brother have an unfixable security flaw. That's bad, obviously, but is it illegally bad? Let's take a look at details of the vulnerability: An unauthenticated attacker who knows the target device's serial number, can generate the default administrator password for the device. Recently, the UK brought in some laws aimed…

Is enhancement the same as manipulation?

· 4 comments · 850 words · Viewed ~518 times


Screenshot of a BBC news article. Jurors shown video 'of felling of Sycamore Gap tree'

How far can you enhance an image or video before you cross the line into manipulation? The UK is currently prosecuting two men accused of a crime. Part of the prosecution's evidence is a video. In showing it to the jury, the prosecution have said: the two minute and 41 second-long video is "extremely dark" but the "unmistakeable" noise of a chainsaw can be heard followed by the sound of a tree…

A small text rendering bug in legal judgements

· 12 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~263 times


Screenshot of text. Highlighted are a couple of instances of a question mark followed by the letters "o", "u", "r".

OK, first off, you have to read this amazing judgement about whether Walker's Sensations Poppadoms count as a potato-based snack for VAT purposes. Like most judgements, it is written in fairly plain and accessible language. The arguments are easy to follow and it even manages to throw in a little humour. But if you read closely, you'll see there are a few instances where an errant question-mark …

Fruit Of The Poisonous LLaMA?

· 2 comments · 650 words · Viewed ~3,039 times


A confused little cardboard robot is lost amongst the daisies

A group of authors are suing various vendors of Large Language Model AIs. The authors claim that the AIs are trained on material which infringes their copyright. Is that likely? Well, let's take a quick look at the evidence presented. First up, Meta's LLaMA Paper. It describes how the LLM was trained: We include two book corpora in our training dataset: the Gutenberg Project, which contains…

Book Review - Future law : emerging technology, regulation and ethics

· 450 words


Book cover featuring a cyborg holding the scales of justice.

How will law, regulation and ethics govern a future of fast-changing technologies? Focuses on the practical difficulties of applying law, policy and ethical structures to emergent technologies both now and in the future. Covers crucial current issues such as big data ethics, ubiquitous surveillance and the Internet of Things, and disruptive technologies such as autonomous vehicles, DIY…

Is it stealing to read by the light of your neighbour's candle? Or, should companies pay for employees' broadband?

· 9 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~385 times


A speed test result.

Back when I worked for an ISP, my employer paid for me to have broadband. I was expected to work from home a few days a month and they needed their workers to have high-bandwidth connectivity. Because it was a business expense, we all received BIG SCARY WARNINGS that the broadband was only to be used for work. Absolutely no domestic use allowed. *nudge nudge wink wink* Of course, everyone…

What Is "Internet Use"?

· 3 comments · 800 words · Viewed ~443 times


A router with lots of fibre optic and ethernet cables plugged in.

A former advisor to the Prime Minister was recently convicted on charges of downloading indecent images of underage girls. I don't want to go into detail about whether or not his punishment is adequate, but I would like to talk about this curious remark made by the Judge during his sentencing: beginning today and lasting for two years, you are prohibited from using any device capable of…

Talking about SMS Spam with Radio 4

· 250 words


Earlier this week I appeared on BBC Radio 4's "You And Yours" to talk about the scourge of SMS Spam. You can listen to it on their website - or, if it has expired, I've grabbed an audio clip for your listening pleasure. 🔊 💾 Download this audio file. I've asked the Direct Marketing Associate to create a "Do Not Text" list - so that people can opt-out of spam SMS. They already opera…

The Danger Of Auto Displaying Pictures On Twitter

· 4 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~441 times


The UK has the notion of a "strict liability" law. If you are caught with a picture of child abuse - you're guilty of a crime. It doesn't matter if it was sent to you unsolicited, or misaddressed. Possession is the crime and there are no mitigating circumstances. On that cheery note, let's consider Twitter's new image embedding functionality. If your friends post a photo onto Twitter, you…

YQL and The Pirate Bay

· 3 comments · 750 words · Viewed ~6,926 times


Logo of The Pirate Bay. A pirate ship.

For reasons best known to themselves, certain sections of the entertainment industries seem to believe that bolting the stable door shutting down The Pirate Bay will stop all piracy. It's as though they think that people won't be able to use a proxy, circumvent the Cleanfeed block, or simply use a search engine to find another torrent site. Build Your Own Pirate Bay? Proxying is a very simple…

Data Protection and Twitter

· 150 words · Viewed ~238 times


The Twitter logo.

As Twitter now have a UK office, I thought I would see what data they hold about me. Thanks to the UK's Data Protection act, it's really simple to request the information. I wasn't expecting a whole CD's worth of information - like Facebook provides users - but what I did get surprised me. Twitter UK has no control or responsibility over the user information in the Twitter service and cannot…

Sky News Infringed My Copyright

· 22 comments · 1,050 words · Viewed ~7,576 times


Still from a video - a blurry shot of a mobile phone.

UPDATE! I have reached a settlement with Sky. Update: 16 March, 2011. They have finally paid up! tl;dr Sky News stole my copyrighted work and distributed it without credit or payment. I asked them to pay £1,500. They refused. Full Story During the recent O2 brouhaha I recorded a video showing how the issue could affect people. I deliberately gave it the standard YouTube licence rather …