Quote:
Originally Posted by oblonsky
I have it on very good authority that on the absense of any cookies on your machine, and the absense of an account-level opt-out, users will ALWAYS be presented with Phorm's interstitial request for consent. That is, the default user state will be C.).
This could seriously break a whole range of application which use HTTP to do something other than browsing, yet use IE as a browser identifier
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The page will also end up in lots of strange places. Many Windows applications that embed Internet Explorer to fetch and render HTML content will end up showing the interstitial page. This will happen with Windows Media Player. It could even happen during an attempt to acquire DRM rights. The following are the relevant headers from a sequence of such HTTP requests. Long argument lists have been replaced with an asterisk.
GET /15478/live/reflector:48642.asx?bkup=48685 HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Windows-Media-Player/11.0.5721.5145
Host: mfile.akamai.com
This is ok. It's a different user agent.
POST /services/WMLicense?* HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Windows-Media-DRM/11.0.5721.5145
Host: man.channel4.com
This is ok. It's both a different user agent and a POST.
POST /services/WMLicense?* HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Host: man.channel4.com
This is ok. It's a POST.
GET /player/console/drmConsole.html?* HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Host: geo.channel4.com
This request might be replaced by the interstitial notice page. While Phorm could code their layer-seven switches to avoid certain instances of this and the sort of problem suggested by oblonsky, there is no general solution. It’s as intractable as avoiding all web-based email.
As well as the interstitial page having the potential to cause problems, the redirection process needed to copy a Webwise UID cookie into other websites’ domains causes a fundamental change in the nature of web browsing. The website that a person is actively trying to reach should be a first-party website, with first-party cookies. After the redirections, it becomes a third-party website, with third-party cookies that may get blocked.
I won’t argue that, on many occasions, Webwise’s trickery will pass off without hitch. However, even with a 99.9% success rate, every one million page redirections would equal one thousand problems.