On IM's and data snooping

Lee noticed I haven't been "on-line" for ages. What actually has happened is that I stopped using my various Yahoo IM accounts as they kept getting spammed every time I logged on. My MSN/Hotmail account seems to have died a while ago and the password I used to use no longer works. The webmail account with which it was associated died even longer ago so there isn't any practical way to resurrect it. So if you have a desire to get hold of me in an instant way (aside from good old SMS) I suggest you try either Google Talk or LJ Talk (which are both nice Jabber based IM networks).

As a brief aside the latest green paper from the government brings up the old favourite of ISP's monitoring traffic. I'm sure the ISP's want the responsibility of tracking the petabytes of traffic across their networks like a hole in the head. They have been forced into shaping to a degree by their creaking networks. However shaping a heavily utilised broadband connection and snooping inside the traffic to see what it is are two very different tasks. As soon as something is encrypted it's game over for the snooper.