[Phormic Acid]

Originally Posted by pangpang

I actually think that you can trust Relakks. I'm from Sweden and the man how started up Relakks is wellknown here in Sweden for his view to people secracy.

Another threat to Phorm’s business model?

In this week’s PC Pro podcast, there’s an interesting report on the Infosec show. It starts at 39:35 and covers the idea of hosted security, also referred to as ‘security in the cloud’, for the home user.

Phorm’s selling point for Webwise is that it has the potential to provide some protection from phishing websites. This is one specific, limited example of the more general concept of hosted security services. Someone with a little technical knowledge can tunnel their web traffic through their ISP’s network to a trusted gateway beyond, so completely bypassing Phorm’s equipment. However, with hosted security, this tunnelling out could be taken up by your average home user. Rather than having a heavyweight security application on their computer, a small client would securely marshal all web traffic to and from the security company, who would take on the burden of analysing and cleaning that traffic. VPNs for the masses?

Of course, what, if any, hosted security and who will provide that should be a free choice. It shouldn’t be foisted upon the user by integrating it into an ISP’s network.