Virgin Media Phorm Webwise Adverts [Updated: See Post No. 1, 77, 102 & 797]

[manxminx]

Originally Posted by Ravenheart

Hi Florence,
This is a great idea, by the the time I got to the list all the books remaining were out of my price range. I'd love to give towards one of the other books for Alexander if this could be set up.

Same here, me too.

Welcome to all our new members

[mark777]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff

Another point worth revisiting is the 32M GBP they are expecting to raise in share deals with Morgan Stanley. The deal was I think 1.6M shares at 32M with Canaccord Adams Ltd. and Morgan Stanley with shares placed at 20GBP per share. At the moment the market price is about £12.80 per share.

I wonder how these two new investors are feeling given they entered a deal which has devalued by 40% before it has even been finalised. Do we still think these 2 investors are going to go through with it? Given that the money raised is earmarked for actually setting up the system in the UK, it could prove disastrous for Phorm if they back out at the last hurdle.

Alexander Hanff

I'm certainly not a finance bod, but I think all these issues are underwritten by a merchant bank. i.e. if these shares don't sell, the bank buys them. It's part of the costs of placing the shares. This time the bank lost! I don't think they can pull out.

They probably started arranging all this months ago, and finalised it when the price was high.

[Tharrick]

Can it be right that I exclude details on a social networking site from being viewed by anyone but my accepted friends and that this leads to my ISP assuming "implied consent of
website owners such as Bebo etc"??

Of course there's consent implied - after all, you're on the internet and we all know that that's all the consent they need :P

[onetimepost]

<dodgy phorm link>

password not needed, just press esc a few times.

interesting that they have a hidden section, talking of proxy and phishing examples.... they would know all about that.

Admin edit Rob: The link has been deleted. Spam, of other sites is not permitted, especially using links that resolve to different addresses than implied by the given link.

Originally Posted by Tharrick

Of course there's consent implied - after all, you're on the internet and we all know that that's all the consent they need :P

Really? I'm not saying I don't understand the impact of being 'on the internet', no what I mean is, I grant permission on a social network site to specific individuals to see my data. I don't grant it to their ISP. Why does the ISP think they can assume consent? They did not request permission to be my firend, I did not authorise them to view the content. To me that seems a reasonable argument (in law I hope: my privacy, my data, for my friends given access to see it by me, no consent given to their ISP, no consent for Phorm either - where's the implied consent I gave?)

I understand what you are saying (I think) it was intended as flippant - right? (Rather than a factual answer to the question?)

Welcome to the forum, I'm quite new here also. Don't misunderstand my reply, I'm genuinely interested in how this might work, versus the opinion of the ISP.

Hank

[Tharrick]

Originally Posted by Hank

Really? I'm not saying I don't understand the impact of being 'on the internet', no what I mean is, I grant permission on a social network site to specific individuals to see my data. I don't grant it to their ISP. Why does the ISP think they can assume consent? They did not request permission to be my firend, I did not authorise them to view the content. To me that seems a reasonable argument (in law, my privacy, my data, for my friends, not them, not for Phorm)

I understand what you are saying (I think) it was intended as flippant - right? (Rather than a factual answer to the question?)

Welcome to the forum, I'm quite new here also. Don't misunderstand my reply, I'm genuinely interested in how this might work, versus the opinion of the ISP.

Hank

It was mostly intended as flippant, but also partly in reference to the emailed response I recall being mentioned on El Reg (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04...horm_shambles/) from the Home Office which proclaims that under section 3 of RIPA, private companies are allowed to do certain things which the government are not. Section 3 of RIPA, as far as I can tell, deals with the issue of consent, stating that it's OK to intercept data providing that a) the person who is sending it consents to the interception and b) the person receiving it consents to it being sent in the first place. That'd suggest that simply by being on the internet, consent is implied.

What worries me more is this:

Originally Posted by The Government

(3) Conduct consisting in the interception of a communication is authorised by this section if�

(a) it is conduct by or on behalf of a person who provides a postal service or a telecommunications service; and

(b) it takes place for purposes connected with the provision or operation of that service or with the enforcement, in relation to that service, of any enactment relating to the use of postal services or telecommunications services.

Which would suggest that in fact the ISPs are allowed to spy on you as much as they want to. Of course, odds are I'm completely wrong on this one - I'm a microbiology student, not a lawyer, and I don't pretend to understand part (b) there. I can explain the molecular mechanisms behind how plague kills you, but not an awful lot of the law regarding wiretapping.

[roadrunner69]

Originally Posted by Ravenheart

Hi Florence,

This is a great idea, by the the time I got to the list all the books remaining were out of my price range. I'd love to give towards one of the other books for Alexander if this could be set up.

Ditto

[Pasanonic]

Originally Posted by onetimepost

<dodgy phorm link>

Can someone suggest what the reason for this post was? It is obviously meant to appear once and we will not see the poster again. It is also linked to a phorm page that behaved quite odd ( asking me for a password numerous times. Are phorm now placing links on forums in a hope of harvesting whatever information our browsers will tell them when we visit this particular page or am I being silly.

I just don't see the point of this link and I don't suggest people click it.

Edit:/ thanks for removing the link Rob. I guess I was not being silly.

[mark777]

Originally Posted by onetimepost

<dodgy phorm link>

Don't fall for it !



---------- Post added at 00:59 ---------- Previous post was at 00:55 ----------

Originally Posted by Pasanonic

Can someone suggest what the reason for this post was? It is obviously meant to appear once and we will not see the poster again. It is also linked to a phorm page that behaved quite odd ( asking me for a password numerous times. Are phorm now placing links on forums in a hope of harvesting whatever information our browsers will tell them when we visit this particular page or am I being silly.

I just don't see the point of this link and I don't suggest people click it.

They want people to put in user names and passwords so they can show the value of anti-phishing software. I doubt it's Phorm themselves, they can't be that stupid!

If you just cancel a few times, you get the e-mail adresses above. I think this a Phorm demo that's been around a while, and someone else has decided to post it here. (I don't thinks it's Phorm PRTeam)

LOL @ Tharrick

Originally Posted by Tharrick

I can explain the molecular mechanisms behind how plague kills you, but not an awful lot of the law regarding wiretapping.

And you can probably explain the biology and some of the physiology around the laughter this end right now

Thanks for the references. I think you're right ...it is a concern. All this needs working through by the legal eagles...

Hank

[fidbod]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff

Another point worth revisiting is the 32M GBP they are expecting to raise in share deals with Morgan Stanley. The deal was I think 1.6M shares at 32M with Canaccord Adams Ltd. and Morgan Stanley with shares placed at 20GBP per share. At the moment the market price is about £12.80 per share.

I wonder how these two new investors are feeling given they entered a deal which has devalued by 40% before it has even been finalised. Do we still think these 2 investors are going to go through with it? Given that the money raised is earmarked for actually setting up the system in the UK, it could prove disastrous for Phorm if they back out at the last hurdle.

Alexander Hanff

Unfortunately the placing has closed people. Don't you just feel awful for the the people who paid £ 20 a share for a stake in Phorm.

On to pressing business. There was a very good point made earlier in the thread that the battle has been won but the war has not.

So with that in mind.

Alex: any research I can help with in preparation for the interview you are doing next week post it up or PM.

Private discussion area. It might be worth setting up a non public access thread somewhere if possible.

Judicial review - a quick skim of the info suggests it might be possible. What are everyone elses thoughts?

[TheBruce1]

About one percent of the Web pages being delivered on the Internet are being changed in transit, sometimes in a harmful way, according to researchers at the University of Washington.

In a paper, set to be delivered Wednesday, the researchers document some troubling practices. In July and August they tested data sent to about 50,000 computers and discovered that a small number of Internet service providers (ISPs) were injecting ads into Web pages on their networks. They also found that some Web browsing and ad-blocking software was actually making Web surfing more dangerous by introducing security vulnerabilities into pages.

"The Web is a lot more wild than we originally expected," said Charles Reis , a PhD student at the University of Washington who co-authored the paper.

The paper, which was co-written by a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, will be delivered at the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in San Francisco.

To get their data, the team wrote software that would test whether or not someone visiting a test page on the University of Washington's Web site was viewing HTML that had been altered in transit.

In 16 instances ads were injected into the Web page by the visitor's Internet Service provider. "We're confirming some rumors that had been in the news last summer, that ISPs had been injecting these ads."

It seems that ISP are turning into more than just providers, the article goes on to say:

In June 2007 the TechCrunch blog reported RedMoon, a small Texas wireless provider, was using a system built by a Redwood City, California, company called NebuAd to insert advertising into the HTML code of Web pages.

Critics blasted the ISP for meddling with its customers' traffic and worried that this kind of ad injection undermined the integrity of Web sites, which had no control over the ads being displayed.

NebuAd has now discontinued its ad-injection product line and now delivers only the standard type of advertising that it buys from Web publishers, a company spokesman said Tuesday.

The data also shows that pages were sometimes changed by popup blockers within products such as CheckPoint's ZoneAlarm or CA's Personal Firewall, but also that some products actually inserted security vulnerabilities into the pages they processed.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...udy_finds.html

So instead of offering protection, they are making users more vulnerable to infections, well phorm is offering us spyware after all. I bet the malware writers are licking their lips with the thought of phorm being implemented.

Did they know something?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5j30b0yuXk

Keep up the good work.

[somekind]

sorry,
I did not mean to come across as a spammer,
I came across that link and thought it was interesting,
I realize now it looked like a scam, but its quite ironic that a company basing itself on privacy and to some extent security, cannot secure a webpage/apache server properly. Also it does contain some good information regarding their plans to show off their so called protection. also interesting that one of the names mentioned also worked at BT (among others) and specializes in unix platforms+networks.

the page was uploaded/made 02/19/08. just after the public statement. but the copyright is stated 2007... probably nothing important,

So again, very sorry to come across as a spammer etc.

[wigro]

Originally Posted by JackSon

I think an important thing is to establish, right at the beginning that what both concerns the laws (that you have already explored in great depth) and the customers, is what happens to traffic/data prior to anonymisation. That will hopefully render any further speeches from Kent along the "we don't collect or store personal data" themes null and void; as of course, when the time comes for anonymising the data arrives, it is already too late for non consented data to be harvested. It really needs to be hammered home that his argument is in fact completely academic, irrelevant, useless etc. and he ought to move on.

Good post , i agree.

[Florence]

Originally Posted by somekind

sorry,
I did not mean to come across as a spammer,
I came across that link and thought it was interesting,
I realize now it looked like a scam, but its quite ironic that a company basing itself on privacy and to some extent security, cannot secure a webpage/apache server properly. Also it does contain some good information regarding their plans to show off their so called protection. also interesting that one of the names mentioned also worked at BT (among others) and specializes in unix platforms+networks.

the page was uploaded/made 02/19/08. just after the public statement. but the copyright is stated 2007... probably nothing important,

So again, very sorry to come across as a spammer etc.

Can you PM me the link please so I can see.