Your rights

[Andy Champ]

What's new is the ISPs will have to keep it for the guv'mint. I forget how long for.

Andy

[Frank Erskine]

Until they lose it somewhere?

[Andy Champ]

Well IMHO the guv'mint have already lost it... the plot that is...

Andy

[John Rumm]

Yes you are right that prolonged transmission would drain the battery. However if I understand correctly, that is not the usual MO in that it is not typically used for long term monitoring. It is at its most useful used alongside covert surveillance, and can be enabled when "interesting" things look like they might be about to happen. (I presume that the devices behave as a base station, and hence local proximity would cause the phone to modulate its RF output power right down as well)

I worked with a bloke who went off to be lead software engineer for a firm that makes this kit. As far as I am aware they are still going.

[tim.....]

Did I really make all those typos?

tim

[The Medway Handyman]

Should have qualified that by saying 'London Ambulance'. The ambulance/FRU has a screen with details of the call & sat nav. The controller (who stays on the phone with Cat A calls) can see where the ambulance is and its expected arrival time.

[John Rumm]

One of the advantages of dyslexia is that I read it and did not notice until you pointed it out ;-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

To be honest even when I was running an ISP, a few years ago, we did keep them for about a year.

Simply because customers would phone up and want to know if e-mail XXX was actually sent to firm YYY who denied all knowledge of it etc etc.

Now we wouldn't normally have released them to anyone without the senders permission, but if a government agency HAD asked with a court order, we would have.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not really, no.

Most log files are compressed and archived on the mail relay. And would normally be deleted after some preset time interval.

Bcesue of what a mail relay is, its generally a machine with a fair amount of disk space, and RAIDED to the hilt, so its pretty secure against a disk crash.

Any competent ISP would be able to archive onto a second machine. There would be no resin to go beyond that though. Tapes, DVDS and memory sticks and portable media or laptops are simply not what you do with trashy logs. You use those to inspect data you want to analyse elsewhere. No one really wants to analyse logs.. unless you have an urgent problem like a mail storm or some sort of denial of service attack.

[John Rumm]

I think the suggestion was that its the government that will loose it, not the ISP (based on previous performance of Gov IT)

[Huge]

We've done that now. We had several long and worrying conversations with the Fire and Ambulance services. We've lived here 18 years, and they haven't known where it is all that time? Good thing we never needed them. I've also been in correspondence with the council for the last 3 years over putting a road name sign at the junction with the main road. It's getting to the point where I'm tempted to put one up myself. Anyone know where you can get standard road name signs made up?

[Tim S]

Huge coughed up some electrons that declared:

Similar problems with councils round here...

Reckon a signwriters would do it. But a carefully hand painted plank of wood is still quite readable.

Cheers

Tim

[nightjar]

Any signwriting company, although, from experience, some are better than others. The one we have on our industrial estate is very unimaginative and seems unable to produce anything beyond a few simple styles The ones I had signwrite our van are excellent and can make anything you can produce as a computer image file. Plain white background will be cheaper than retroflective, but the latter will be more visible at night.

Colin Bignell

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "tim....." saying something like:

No. It was the intercept device having a moment.

[tim.....]

Phew!

tim

[geoff]

reading the contributions from drivel and NP, most of us are well immune to typos by now

[Dave Liquorice]

Or if the road name isn't to long made up as a number plate or two. Nicely reflective and cheap. Several of those around here but not for road names as the roads don't have names.

[PeterC]

Site it carefully - if some one trips over it or knocks against it you could be sued. ISTR an unofficial sign being hit by a vehicle that was swerving off the road and the 'driver' trying it on!

Apart from the obvious authorities, only AA, RAC and CTC have a 'right' to erect road signs (and I suspect that doesn't include 'public'-type ones).

[Jason]

That, I believe, is all down to centralisation. Once upon a time, emergency calls were handled by operators in the local exchange, but now they could be 200 miles away and have absolutely no local knowledge that they can use to pass on to the service on the street.

I've had the same experience in the same vein when calling for an ambulance.

-- JJ

[Man at B&Q]

There's a difference between logging the fact of a communication and "intercepting" it.

MBQ