BBC will use surveillance powers to sniff Britons' wifi and find license-cheats

boing
41

They are publicly owned.

Which may seem a slim difference, but consider what it would mean for you to own a cinema if you had no power to set the programme, hire or fire the staff, sell it, or derive any income.

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42

That must have been pretty early in the 70s, the radio license was abolished in February 1971.

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I use these because I can’t drill through the walls in a rented house

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And they banned fox hunting, so god knows what that fox will do!! What if he cancels Doctor Who? Or Sherlock!!!

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Are they going to make Michael Grade Director-General?

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Hence the proposal to incorporate the licence fee as a component of council tax:

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Auntie knows best.

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Luckily the Fox is in charge of foreign trade, not the beeb.

Be better if he wasn’t in charge of anything, mind.

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49

"simply by assigning logins and passwords to license payers, the BBC can get almost all the same benefits"
I don’t think they can. it would, of course, be obvious, honest, easy and sensible to simply issue an iplayer log-in code to every license payer. however, I think the bbc know that a lot of people, faced with an iplayer log-in screen, will simply decide that they’re not going to bother watching bbc content anymore.
by reverting back to their old tactics of threatening the public with their mythical detector vans, the officious little thugs in their licensing department can simply carry on doing what they do: picking a household with no tv license and harassing them.
they know a lot of people will be frightened into coughing up for a license, including people who don’t even watch iplayer but have been misled into believing that they need a license to own a computer, something a lot of people already think is the case.

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album name?

Germany used this method - if one owned an Internet-ready device the fee for public media had to be paid. the system was changed a few years ago: now every household has to pay, even persons without TV/radio/computer etc.

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And there I was, thinking “only three homes?”

@bric
It’s a shame that clip only happened because Paxman was told to keep the interview going as there were technical problems with the next part of the show

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In that case drinks are on me :beers:

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The Torygraph is institutionally inclined to lie about the BBC.

That it made this up is hardly surprising. That it makes no real sense fits in with their aggressively anti-science agenda.

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54

So they don’t have a licence? So what? Maybe they aren’t watching tv…

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55

iPlayer is a proprietary program, and since it implements Digital Restrictions Management it is also malware.

It is a very bad idea to run such a program.
See http://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html and http://gnu.org/proprietary/.

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Making people log in and identify themselves to watch something from the BBC would be a far bigger injustice than what they are now proposing.

Unless I misunderstand, BBC’s iplayer is a nonfree program that implements DRM (See DefectiveByDesign.org). That makes two unacceptable injustices at once, and either one is too high a price to pay to watch entertainment.

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