Originally Posted by dav (Post 34503190)

One thing I was reading on ElReg was the interview with Phorm where they claim that using this piece of tosh will actually reduce online advertising in the future.

OK...hard to believe, but there you go.

Later on, the statement is made that people who don't use this piece of tosh will still be bombarded with ads. How can these two statements correlate?

If websites are going to realise that targeted ads mean that they can design their pages to incluse fewer ad banners, surely they won't go to the trouble of designing two versions of the same page; one targeted with 4 or 5 ads and one untargeted with 20 ads?

Originally Posted by none (Post 34502900)

AND YET AGAIN YOU HAVE NOT ANSWERED THE ACTUAL QUESTION!!!

Ive already stated that the software on the profiler is phorms, so why respond with the same cut n paste reply thats been appearing elsewhere.

The question was:
Who audits any future software upgrades or amendments to the profilier?

its a simple question no?

Originally Posted by PhormUKtechteam (Post 34503197)

<snip> one ad that is twice as likely to be picked up on by the recipient is worth twice as much to the advertiser.

Originally Posted by Traduk (Post 34502909)

PhormUktechteam,

It doesn't matter one iota who owns the profiler or who writes the software because one fact is virtually certain and that is if Phorm did not exist, neither would the profiler.

I am sorry but your answer does nothing to alleviate any fears and if anything you appear to be shifting the responsibility back to the ISP's which I doubt will please them.

There is a question that you can answer (maybe). Can you assure me\us that an opt-out ensures that no data of any kind passes through or is mirrored to the profiler?.

Originally Posted by popper (Post 34503002)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012101340.html
"IP Addresses Are Personal Data, E.U. Regulator Says

By Aoife White
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 22, 2008; Page D01

BRUSSELS -- IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany's data-protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the E.U. group, which is preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others comply with E.U. privacy law.

Scharr told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address, "then it has to be regarded as personal data."

His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is.

That is true but does not take into consideration that many people regularly use the same computer and IP address.

Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in Internet cafes or offices are used by several people.

These exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of "whois" Internet sites, which allow users to type in an IP address and will then generate a name for the person or company linked to it.

Treating IP addresses as personal information would have implications for how search engines record data.
...
"

Originally Posted by Phormic Acid (Post 34503156)

I also think Phorm’s claim that no information gets written to disc is probably rather misleading. When people look at their computer at home and think “where am I going to store 500GB of data?”, the answer will be “on a hard disc.” If you’re a business, this isn’t necessarily so. You could get something like the Gear6 CACHEfx.

Gear6 satiates hungry apps with 500GB RAM monster

I’m not suggesting Phorm will be using that. They’ve probably built their own storage system using standard parts.

Phorm have only got to store textual pages. So, not memory-hogging images and videos. Let’s assume the average HTML page is 100KB in size. You could get around 5 million pages into 500GB, allowing for storage overheads.

Many big pages contain a lot of junk. They’re generated on request, using things like PHP. They’ll contain the same code snippets over and over again, lots of white space or even large numbers of HTML comments. That could all be stripped out prior to caching. It could be as simple as stopping passing on the stream when a ‘<’ is reached and starting again on the next ‘>’. You might want to collect the alternative text for images. That would add a bit of complexity, but there’s no reason why it can’t be done in real-time within the stream, saying using some FPGAs.

If you strip out all the crud, you might get down to an average of 25KB per page. Then, you’d get around 20 million pages into 500GB of RAM.

Originally Posted by PhormUKtechteam (Post 34503197)

If you opt out of Phorm and are not using ad blocking software then yes you will still be bombarded with ads, just as people are today. Phorm is all about cutting down that stream and increasing the value of each ad that is left - I know it sounds counterintuitive but it actually holds a lot of water - one ad that is twice as likely to be picked up on by the recipient is worth twice as much to the advertiser.

Originally Posted by Phormic Acid (Post 34502985)

Consider the following scenario:

1. Person A starts a web browser.
2. Person A attempts to start browsing.
3. The first page person A requests is hijacked and replaced by the Webwise page asking them whether they consent to Phorm monitoring their web browsing.
4. Person A decides to allow Phorm to monitor their web browsing.
5. A non-persistent (session) cookie is sent to the web browser showing that person A has consented.
6. The presence of this session cookie means that future web pages are not replaced by the Webwise consent page.*
7. Person A walks away from the computer without locking it, logging out or switching accounts and without closing their browsing session by closing all the browser windows.
8. Person B comes to the computer.
9. Person B starts browsing the web using the open web browser windows.
10. Person B is not presented with a Webwise consent page.
11. Phorm monitors person B’s web browsing without obtaining their consent.
12. Under RIPA, a criminal offence has now been committed.

I would like to know which, if any, of those statements is in error and why.

I don’t see how Phorm can rely on users behaving in the way they’d like. I think the assumption that one browsing session will be used by only one person is unreasonable and will not be supportable in law. The Internet is an ‘always on’ packet-based network. It’s not like the telephone, where, once you finish your communication with a specific second party, you put the receiver down and completely sever the connection.

*I know there have been comments that cookies are restricted to the domain from which they’ve come. I’m expecting some fairly dirty trick to get around that. As it has been stated that Webwise does not work with Safari, I conclude that Phorm haven’t got this trick working with that browser.

Originally Posted by dav (Post 34503208)

I understand the reasoning that, in theory, more targeted ads means that there will be less square yardage of ad-space on any given website.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, what will actually transpire is that there will be the same square yardage of ad-space, filled with targeted ads this time, with companies such as Phorm making out like bandits and ISP's creaming off extra revenue by using their customers in a morally corrupt way.
So, the claim that Phorm will lead to us NOT being bombarded with ads is completely false.

Originally Posted by lucevans (Post 34503211)

Well, it looks like the covert "keep one step ahead of the disgruntled customers" game has started, even before the Phorm system goes live on the VM network.
Anyone following this story from the beginning will have read quite early-on that you could at least partially block the functionality (if not the spying part) of the system by blocking a specific domain. 7 days ago, this domain was clearly identified on the www.webwise.com FAQs as "OIX.net" and so I diligently added it to the blocked domains list of my router.
Guess what? I checked back with the same page this morning, and the same FAQ no longer lists "OIX.net" as the domain to block; it now lists "www.webwise.net".
As I pointed out in a (much) earlier post, it will be SO easy for Phorm to change the name of the server in their system, thus bypassing everyone's block. On this occasion, they've buried this change in their FAQs, but in the future, they may well not even do that.
It is becoming clear that if we want to even hinder their system on our connections, we're going to have to constantly check what they're up to and what connections are being made by our browsers - a full time job in itself.

And this Company expects us to trust them.

Originally Posted by Cobbydaler (Post 34503236)

Both oix.net & webwise.com resolve to 88.208.248.102

Originally Posted by Woodgar (Post 34503232)

Exactly.

If a web page has five ads then either I'll see five targeted ads or I'll see five random ads, but I'll still see five ads.

Originally Posted by PhormUKtechteam (Post 34503254)

What Phorm offers is that those five ads are relevant to you - lets say you are a fisherman who drives a Maserati and loves country and western music. Would you rather ads on Italian cars, new fishing rods and the new Dolly Parton album, or ads on bakery books, ju-jitsu training and cardigans. Obviously the former - because it has more relvance and value to you as a person.

Originally Posted by PhormUKPRteam (Post 34503254)

What Phorm offers is that those five ads are relevant to you - lets say you are a fisherman who drives a Maserati and loves country and western music. Would you rather ads on Italian cars, new fishing rods and the new Dolly Parton album, or ads on bakery books, ju-jitsu training and cardigans. Obviously the former - because it has more relvance and value to you as a person.