[Rchivist]

It's getting harder to contact those BT managers

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<emma sanderson's email address>:
62.239.224.89 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 550 5.7.1 Message rejected as spam by Content Filtering.

I've sent the same email again via a different account and sending address so we'll see if that gets through.

I can't see what they didn't like about my email - quoted below:

<<Greetings.
Are you yet in a position to tell us what Phorm looks for in robots.txt to
decide whether a site can be snooped on?
If you are relying (wrongly) on this argument to claim that webmasters have
the ability to opt-out, then you cannot withold the information, especially
as we are now within 14 days of your latest published not-later-than date
for the start of the trials.

Does Phorm use a phorm specific user agent that a webmaster can selectively
block?
Does Phorm look for a robots.txt directives affecting ALL spiders?
Does Phorm rely on robots.txt directives aimed at Google?

If the latter - have Google been consulted?

Perhaps there is a need for a tutorial on the difference between Google and
Phorm from a webmaster's point of view.

Google spiders a site (and can be selectively blocked by the webmaster while
other search engines are allowed) - and then sends traffic to that site, for
the site's benefit.
Phorm makes illegal page copies of a sites intellectual content, snoops on
the entire (yes- ENTIRE) data exchange between a site visitor and the site,
and then profiles some of that data exchange (relatively imprecisely
according to Kent Ertugrul, and insecurely according to Clayton) and then
profits from that profiling, and cannot be selectively blocked by a
webmaster without shutting out search engines entirely. Choice for
webmaster? No choice. Informed choice? No information given to webmaster in
advance. Explicit informed choice of webmaster - NONE.

Final question for tonight in addition to the ones above (and this is the
crunch question if you really mean it about webmasters having choice

How does a webmaster ALLOW search engines, and BLOCK Phorm, using robots.txt
?
Easy to answer if you are sincere about offering choice.
Probably result in a fudge answer if you are NOT sincere about offering
choice to webmasters.

NB - offering to black list websites is NOT an answer I will accept. It's
not practical to run that system for the whole internet unless you are
contacting every website on the planet to warn them about Phorm, and
repeating that regularly for as long as Phorm is in existence.

I have a LOT more questions about website profiling issues from a
webmaster's point of view so I hope someone at BT has been thinking about
it. It's the next phase of the campaign.

Best wishes.
Not getting tired yet.>>