Quote:
Originally Posted by madslug
I think that this is one of the most profound of all statements from the point of view of this whole debate.
Tracking someone from their phormed residential internet connection puts e-commerce at risk. So many people interact with businesses which they are connected to from a residential connection. Having a DPI system sitting on that data stream - in your worst nightmare no business sys-admin would think about homeworkers having everything they do intercepted by DPI.
There are so many small website owners that I have had contact with over the last few years. The majority use their HTML editor to upload pages to their server. The rest use an editor supplied by their web host. Most hosting is done through cPanel or Plesk without any https to protect emails and file uploads. All done on port 80 and not ftp.
Children interact with the school intranet - not https.
It must be the exception rather than the rule for a business site not to interact with the owner/webmaster on port 80 and have everything now being offered to pass through the DPI system. All those personal details stored away in a database and looked at from time to time, via port 80.
BT really do have to answer the question of how non port 80 traffic avoids being intercepted by the DPI system.
And ... The ISPs really are leaving themselves open to all sorts of problems if they don't warn their customers about the risks of using port 80 for any web traffic.
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Just to help your theory along a bit madslug...
I run two charity websites, one is a church site, one an inter-church social action charity site.
One is with BT Domains, and I use their sitebuilder plus FTP Explorer to maintain it - from my home via my residential BT broadband line.
The other is with an independent site host, maintained partly via their web based interface, but mostly by FTP explorer - again from home.
I had extensive discussions with BT (following the Webwise revelations) about our online forums, our forums included ones for children which were closed, invitation only to establish whether those would be profiled and they said they wouldn't go behind a password screen (but I don't trust them or their system not to expose that). since changing hosts I lost the forums and haven't actually re-established them.
I also ran a calendar system that got hacked so I dumped most interactive content - I couldn't afford to purchase the more secure commercial solutions and was using open source ones.
May main current beef with BT is their total failure to engage on copright and intellectual property issues. They simply say they can infer consent because its on the web and I allow Google.
I think there are a number of current issues and legal cases being decided around Europe, involving commercial spats over website copyright and intellectual property, where copyright has specifically been cited in the cases and write-ups afterwards, that will have a direct impact on the Webwise/Phorm website copyright issue. I've decided to chase at least one of them up directly to ask the firm concerned if their concern for their site copyright might extend to the Webwise project.
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Further to the above paragraph, I've just composed a letter to a company currently making a fuss about the copyright of their website, to tell them about Webwise and Phorm, and the impact it could have on their site's revenue earning potential, and wondered if we needed a flyer/information leaflet that particularly focusses on that topic but is easily understood by a non-techie, non-legal person like a PA who would be deciding whether to bin it or pass it on for further consideration. I'm sending them the Phorm flyer, but it doesn't say much about websites, and it is website copyright that this letter is about, specifically where commercial interests are paramount.
If nothing else, if this company got involved it would generate headlines. Their CEO is a bit of a pit-bull when it comes to such issues.
Anyone interested in doing a Website copyright version of the Phorm flyer?