Yes, they do pop up in odd places, and very quickly too, thanks to Google.

I’m hoping Phorm is dead in the water now, at least in it’s present ‘phorm’ where all your traffic is monitored, all the time.

Right, everyone reading this… Be aware that Kent Ertugrul (CEO of Phorm) is a plonker. Secondly, his Comms (cough… PR) Team are also not very clever people. They, the expert PR team, thought it would be ok to “edit out” true facts about Phorm on Wikipedia. This was spotted and changed back. The Phorm Comms (PR) Team admitted their very wrong act of trying to get rid of statements that were true about Phorm.

Now, of the 3 UK ISPs who Phorm claimed to have signed deals with, 1 quickly pulled out of the automatic “Opt In” which Phorm planned (that’s Talk Talk/Carphone Warehouse). Another, Virgin Media, has recently announced, in a clarifying press release, that they are under no obligation to implement Phorm (but don’t think that is the end of it with VM… we need to watch them).

The third ISP, BT, started a web forum for customers to ask questions. And they promised to give answers too. They did give answers, then they stopped giving answers! Then they closed the forum down. A new one was started. Naughty BT, they cannot silence the opposition to this.

Finally, and this is the juicy bit… BT ran a trial of Phorm technology in 2006, then another in 2007. Did they ask or tell their customers? No. They did it secretley.

What is Phorm? It’s a way of listening in, on everything you do, on the internet. It’s like the operator listening to every telephone call you make or receive. It’s like Royal Mail, opening every letter and jotting down key points about you before they deliver the letter.

Phorm, previously 121Media, have a history of spyware/adware and a nasty way of hiding their software using something called a rootkit. Not nice.

And they are not nice. Kent is a nasty piece of work (go back and watch him on the BBC Click TV programme 3rd May… The interviewer did not make a joke about the temeperature during the interview with Alexander Hoff for nothing)

Who is Alexander Hoff? Well, he wrote a paper about the legality (or maybe I should say “Illegality”) of Phorm implementation.

You can read much more (there’s A LOT) on the Cable Forum where this has been debated strongly. You’ll even see the wonderful Phorm Comms Team in action (although they have given up there due to losing every argument with people that understand technology and the law!)

Remember please that whilst they may like to say you can “switch webwise off” that does not stop them being there – between you and the internet. It’s like them intercepting your phone call but not listening whilst you’ve told them not to. Can you be sure they won’t listen? They’re their, in the middle – once they are there, you cannot actually get them out even if you tell them not to listen in (look up “Network Layer 7″ if you want to understand that more)

And finally, although I strongly believe this will be found to be illegal, we need your support:

Over 12,000 people have signed the Downing Street Prime Minister Petition. Please join them.

Write to your MP, tell them you think that Phorm is wrong.

And head over to the Cable Forum, there’s lots to learn about this. Please join us. We need to stop Phorm.

http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/12/33628733-virgin-media-phorm-webwise-adverts-updated.html

PS. Before anyone starts to argue with any of the above, I’ve heard all the arguments in favour of sitting back and doing nothing. None of them impress me. If you think Google is the same as Phorm for tracking your behaviour, for spying on you etc… Well, Google has it’s own issues, but it’s not a patch on the loss of privacy you get if Phorm gets going.

Ste.

It’s also good to see BT in the shit for doing what comes naturally (i.e: fucking it up good and proper).

Phorm and BT were happy to trial it without permission from webmasters and webusers.

Phorm are happy to promote the Ernst & Young report in the UK, when it was done in the USA and much is different between the two countries.

Phorm were happy to not give you an opt in/out until the storm, and expect a cookie – still requiring an intercept – to be tough enough, and the burden of effort on the user to re-set the cookie. Ha!

If these people are selling privacy, why did they and BT do a deal to use data without permission and in secret?

I’m out of BT after 7 years, switched phone too if they going into deals with this lot…

Privacy technology my arse..

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7299875.stm

I did it myself a while ago. Install squid, and enable port-forwarding tunnels in sshd. Set up a forwarded port in PuTTY and point your browser’s proxy setting at that, then all your borwsing gets pushed up the ssh tunnel.

time to install squid on my linux box for some of my private surfing