Quote:
Originally Posted by Pasanonic
Well done on attending and thanks for the update.
I don't doubt that Kent's backsliding and jinking was in evidence. He does after all hold a Bachelor's degree in Politics from Princeton University.
I pointed out similar in #3461 http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/34...-post3461.html
Are you able to elaborate on anything mentioned in the much curtailed q&a? |
The Q&A degenerated a bit compared to the first part of the session and a fair bit of the time was wasted by Kent waffling on to avoid actually answering the question. Key points as far as I remember.
Kent was asked two or possibly three times about the commercial implications of having to move to and opt in model. No straight answer was given. I think we can assume not good.
One audience member suggested that his previous experience in military spec comms lead him to think that implementing Phorm within BT comms structure materially weakened the security of the system. I didn't follow his point too well, I wasn't techie enough.
The tame Phorm techie said that it was philosphically ok for their system to forge the cookies of third party websites as 'the cookies are owned by the person doing the browsing' - I don't think he has studied a lot of philosophy.
On the subject of the Phorm system moving from 'basic advertising' to more intensive intrusion i.e. function creep - Kent said the ISPs would police phorm as they had the most to lose from abusing the position of trust. Alexander helpfully pointed out that BT had already lost all the trust people had in them.
One older gentlemen told Kent that his technology was the first step towards a Fahrenheit 451 society. Kudos to him.
Both kent and the Phorm techie made vague aspersions that Phorm was perfectly legal. However when asked specifically on the BT trials, they made absolutely no comment apart from trotting out the BT statement almost verbatim. I think they are worried.
Thats all that I can recollect from the Q&A session. One other thing from Richard Clayton's presentation.
He said that a website would be able to use a javascript thingie on a webpage to read all the details contained in a forged webwise cookie. One of the audience asked the probability of it occurring, to which the curt reply was that the probability was 1. Richard Clayton also seemed to indicate that this exploit had been demonstrated in a lab environment but he wasn't very clear on that.
Thats all folks.