Hello all, Although SWINOG is not political there are certain aspects in law- making that have clearly severe technological consequences to us and our businesses and do not have a direct question/motivation out of direct policy making by parties.
Obeying that I think the SWINOG group should send a response to the FMG revision targeting very specifially these points with clear technical background: - Art. 4, providing a telecommunications service requires prior registration with OFCOM The ordinance sais everyone below CHF 200'000 annual revenues is exempt from this. Still, what consitutes a telecoms service? Is it when you have a server at an ISP and you sell mail accounts? Or when you send lots of SMS? We should request/recommend a more narrow version. - Art. 13a+b, OFCOM might process and give any kind of personal data about telecommunication users to any other federal office as well as foreight authorities. It doesn't have to obey data protection rules. This makes no sense. OFCOM doesn't have any access to personal data about users/consumers in the first place so why this. This is clearly a backdoor through which complete access to the peoples communication will be made available to any national/foreign government agency. We shall request/recommend complete removal of this article. - Art. 45a, spam article Although good in intention it is technically unworkable and impossible to follow this article. Is sais ISPs/Telcos have to block adverts to customers who have not explicitly opted-in for it or when they are not in a prior business relationship with the sender of the ad. An ISP/Telco in by no means able to verify such a relationship and block accordingly. In Email/SMS we clearly have no way to technically perfect way to distinguish a legitimate from an illegit message. Things like RBL and word filters have a way too high positive failure (too many message you should get are blocked because false classification for spam) rate for general mandated deployment. In real world this would compare to the postman to pre-sort your letters and throw those away where he thinks it's a unsolicitied commercial mail. Clearly such a thing woudn't work at all and nobody really wants that. There is no technical better than 99% way of filtering such messages while at the same time blocking legitimate message in no more than 0.01% of the cases. Also why shift the legal (!) responseability from the sender (who is committing the wrongdoing) to the receiving ISP??? A customer then can hold you liable for letting spam through! And in the same sentence for blocking mail he wanted to get! We shall request/recommend complete removal of this article and suggest a better place (the UWG). I will prepare a letter to OFCOM containing these statements in the name of SWINOG and its members. Everybody who says yes will be included with his/her name as co-signatory. I will post the final letter (in german) here for review. October 15 is the last date the letter has to arrive at OFCOM to be considered. Please say so if you agree or if you do not agree with the letter in general or particular things in it. -- Andre ---------------------------------------------- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Maillist-Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/swinog%40swinog.ch/
