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Comment by collsni | Hacker News Reader

So essentially they're collecting net flow data on every citizen. It may be kind of fun to overload their storage by creating a ton of short connections, probably wouldn't be feasible.

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Rest sure things like masscan and file sharing will be singled out and excluded from long term storage. If I recall correctly there is a process called massive volume reduction by which you filter out “uninteresting stuff”.

It’s not a bad idea, but you’ll need something more sophisticated.

>If I recall correctly there is a process called massive volume reduction by which you filter out “uninteresting stuff”.

So all you have to do to avoid surveillance is to make a bunch of connections so the system gets overwhelmed and ignores you?

No. It drops the junk and tags you as an person of interest.

Then criminals should focus on what that non interesting stuff is likely to be and exploit that.

Terrorists (as well as a CIA director) have for years used a simple trick to communicate without leaving suspicious looking metadata: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12...

I find this type of legislation works like DVD copy protection: the innocent and non tech savvy will be disproportionately affected and it won't do anything to deter those with sufficient knowledge.

A python script to visit random scraped form directory websites or just having it request invaild pages if you want the logging to be least compressable.

Do want ISPs to charge by the minute again? Because that's how we get there.

If ISPs tried than the public would pressure the government to drop the law.

I calculate with 50% reduction from compression (After the required back-ups to comply with the law the number will be much worse for the ISP). That somone on VM 500Mbits using less than 10% of their connection for this could increase their log size by 200GB per day or 73TB over the 12 months.

Then you get throttled by your ISP

Then people move to Germany for the good internet.

As a side effect, then those people will be living in a country that already has laws against this kind of thing...

You know, because of the... unpleasantness.

But no worries, you go ahead with what you're doing, UK. Good job. Maybe IBM can offer some technical experience in this area.

I'm not sure if this is referring to the privacy laws or the internet itself, but the internet connectivity in Germany is dreadful in my experience. Capacity is at its limits, to the point that some flats don't have access to the internet.

> the public would pressure the government to drop the law

And the government would just ignore them because of lobbying

I created a tool awhile back that pretty much does this https://github.com/eth0izzle/Needl - it’s gone stale so looking for new contributors

This system likely will be paid by the state, so the more traffic flows internet users will generate, the more taxpayers will pay.

Your the first comment and I had exactly the same idea. What do you want to bet we've all had the same thinking. As a community we sure like to bend things for sure.

I mean if they could get the act to pass I am sure they get storage funding too.

So what you're saying is if some people banded together, they could manipulate the storage tech market with the force of a nation state behind them?

But for how long will they manage to hang on to it? Here's a laugh if you want https://www.silicon.co.uk/data-storage/database/police-delet...

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