Thursday 19 October 2017

Why we won't have a third referendum

Why we won't have a third referendum on the terms of leaving the EU

The 1975 referendum was on single market membership, not EU membership.

There is no authority for EU membership and the associated demonstrated loss of national sovereignty that subsequently occurred, the possibility of which was denied by Edward Heath.

A referendum would be needed to get that authority, and that authority was not obtained in either the 1975 referendum or the 2016 referendum.

Prime Minister Cameron, doing his best (we assume) was unable to find terms on which to get voters to accept membership.

As voters never accepted EU membership and associated loss of sovereignty, our EU membership is illegitimate, and so the default position is therefore to not be a member.

It becomes ludicrous then to seek for national agreement of the terms under which we won't be a member; it is membership that is illegitimate, the non-membership does not need legitimising in the least.

How could a possible rejection of the specific initial terms of leaving be construed as implicit legitimisation of EU membership, in the face of the explicit rejection of membership?

Should we remain by default simply because a few mardy ministers or civil servants will persistently to a bad job and refuse to facilitate a "good deal" in order to continually fail to get national approval?

No, we should assume the legitimate position of non-membership, and give them that to work from.

This is why we shan't have a third referendum on the terms of leaving.

We might have a third referendum on whether and on what terms to re-join the EU, in a few dozen years or so.

Monday 2 October 2017

Vodafone Broadband

Using your own VDSL router

Thanks to aquazi who reports that you can use your own broadband router if you add @broadband.vodafone.co.uk to the end of your PPOE username.

Others report that Vodafone will no longer give out the PPOE username and password to you, however I just had online support chat and was given the POE username and password complete with @broadband.vodafone.co.uk at the end!

Someone pointed that Vodafone currently supports Vodafone supplied hardware only, and doesn’t allow the use of third party routers or modems which is not something I was aware of and seems like a pretty severe limitation to my unlimited broadband.

Avoiding Content Control

Although content control may be disabled, many HTTPS MITM warnings are given for image sharing sites like imgur.

Thanks to its5am who reports that changing to not use Vodafones DNS solves the problem of Vodafones content control performing man-in-the-middle attacks on your HTTPS traffic. (And presumably also returning bogus DNS resolutions).