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

[OldBear]

Originally Posted by Dephormation

LMAO That's hilarious.

[Dephormation]

Oh heck, I'm about to split my sides.

Try this on Ask Emma;

[AlexanderHanff]

Just a quick hint for people who are interested in Phorm's previous rootkit activities, follow the road to CDT.

Alexander Hanff

[bluecar1]

Originally Posted by Dephormation

Oh heck, I'm about to split my sides.

Try this on Ask Emma;

"make your WEB BROWSING more relevant" ???

if thought it was only the adverts??

peter

Originally Posted by Tarquin L-Smythe

There you go now you are disagreeing over HW's posts, Just what we need.

If you are referring to mine and Peter's posts then there is no disagreement - just a minor correction of a fact relating to a defunct company.

We're certainly not disagreeing over someone else's post and I would expect Peter to correct me when I'm mistaken because I respect and welcome his input.

Please try to avoid posting comment like this because however well intended they can and will be taken and used out of context and, as you will already have noticed, your post has now required three attempts to try and reply to it.

If the "disagreement" you refer to is not between myself and Peter, it might save time if you clarified your comment to avoid any further confusion.

I'm sure that you meant well but your post comes across badly and rather suggests that the member here are too immature to discuss these issue and correct any misunderstandings without resorting to a fight. That is far from the truth and doesn't present a very good image. The reality is that this is a good natured discussion built around a large number of individuals who are more than capable of conducting a well reasoned and mature debate.

[Wildie]

Originally Posted by bluecar1

just seen this on iii BT page,

*******
This morning there was a report on Bloomberg that BT are going to expand their business in the Far East. They had a discussion with a senior BT manager from that part of the world and the whole outlook seemed very promising.

That is probably a major factor in today's price rise.
******

is this how phorm are going to expand around the world on the back of BT?

mind you i would not like to cross the law in some of those countries, seen on the web how they punish theives and adulteresses, let alone data pimps!!!!

what more call centres further away, hey if they go far enuff they may end up back where they started

[Dephormation]

Phorm have been moving the deck chairs on the Titanic, ready for the final deep plunge no doubt.

http://www.phorm.com/

"All rights reserved. Copyright © 2008 Phorm, Inc."

[bluecar1]

Originally Posted by Wildie

what more call centres further away, hey if they go far enuff they may end up back where they started

nah, do phink so, acording to BT the world is phlat, the moon made of phull phat cheese and UK / EU law phail to apply to BT

Peter

[NewsreadeR]

Originally Posted by Dephormation

Phorm have been moving the deck chairs on the Titanic, ready for the final deep plunge no doubt.

http://www.phorm.com/

"All rights reserved. Copyright © 2008 Phorm, Inc."

They need to sack their web designer. He cannot even spell phorm. (My bold)

Site Privacy Policy
Phorm's Site Privacy Policy covers the use of this corporate website, www.photm.com, detailing what data Phorm may collect from and about site visitors and how it will be used. It includes your choices about the personal information you may provide to Phorm, and how our corporate site may use online cookies and the choices available to users of our site.

This will be a good measure of if they read this thread, lets see how long it is before its corrected.

[bluecar1]

i see bt forum down for maint again, same time as last night so must be the backup slot

peter

Originally Posted by Wildie

what more call centres further away, hey if they go far enuff they may end up back where they started

Probably not. BT invested a lot of money in the Far East and opened a Research and Development division there last September as well as a Technology and Service Centre in Dalian. They've been recruiting from Beijing University and it seems that the bulk of the work done over there relates to software support and business customers.

It's easy to lose perspctive with BT especially as they present the warm and cosy image in theie TV adverts but they are a huge global company and BT Total Broadband is just a ****-ant little division that does even make that much money for them.

When you realise that they are clearly aiming to compete with the likes of AT&T and AOL then you begin to understand just how big a deal Webwise really is and how much money is involved in the long term.

They are the Daleks of the UKs ISPs and all we have is a sonic screwdriver but... you know the rest of the story.

[pseudonym]

Originally Posted by Phormic Acid

That certainly has potential. However, I think it would be very tricky to apply it as a general technique to all websites. Cookies can be set by JavaScript (and Java), so you can’t rely on the Set-Cookie headers from the server alone. If you were to look at the Cookie headers sent by the browser, you won’t have information on the path, domain or, most importantly, the expiry time.

If you’re not going to store raw information, but only one-way hash values, even using Set-Cookie headers has limitations.

• Cookies are assigned not just to a particular domain, but to a particular path within each domain. I don’t usually allow cookies to be set, but I’ve gone around trying to pick up a representative sample. They all had path=/. So, in practice, you might be able to recognise the same user accessing any page of a website, using the cookie hash for any other page.
• Cookies have an expiry time. If you wanted to recognise the same user using both the same browsing session and a different one, you would need to create two different hash values – one containing all cookies and one containing only long-lived cookies. The occasional cookie with an expiry time in the very near future could be treated the same as a session cookie.
• Cookies for a domain can be set by more than one website. For example, site1.example.com and site2.example.com can both set cookies for the same domain of .example.com. So, site1.example.com could return cookies set by site2.example.com, and vice versa.

You could try to hash the cookie header sent with the request for the final object within a page that’s stored within the same domain as the page itself. However, it might be better to teach the system which cookies are important. If an international user clicks on, say, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7470304.stm, you’ll see something like:

GET /adj/bbccom.live.site.news/news_africa_content;... HTTP/1.1
Host: ad.doubleclick.net
Referer: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7470304.stm
Cookie: id=80000282f0e0ca4

If the user got to that BBC page by clicking through one of your doctored search pages, even if DoubleClick aren’t one of your advertising networks, you can now link that user’s DoubleClick identifier to your own one for that user. You now get to track them across all websites that use DoubleClick, which I believe is a lot.

Now that's a deviously brilliant idea , I'd figured it would be better to manually pick out persistent cookie values on sites such as google, amazon, ebay, bbc etc, that you could use to uniquely identify the user, which with a lot of work you might eventually cover a fair number of the most popular sites, but completely overlooked all the tracking networks cookies!

Combine that lot together and fill in the blanks by using referrer, IP address + agent string and I think you'd have a very effective, transparent tracking system. You'd probably only need to occassionally tamper with the user's data stream to check for your opt-out cookie (in fact you might just as well only check for an opt-out cookie when their browser requests one of your adverts).

I guess it wouldn't be a bad idea to trick the user's browser into requesting various tracking sites by tampering with the traffic while they are visiting a site such as Google so you could link all the tracking cookies you're monitoring, plus their google/search engine login cookie and your own tracking cookie together more easily.

[AlexanderHanff]

Just a quick note, I posted a 25% discount code on the T-Shirts post on NoDPI.Org unfortunately I don't know if it actually works as I never got the notification from spreadshirts until after I had already placed my order. So if anyone uses it please let me know if it works, it should give a 25% discount and free shipping, but it is only valid for the next 24 hours.

OK I HAVE RECEIVED CONFIRMATION THAT CODE DOESN'T WORK.

Alexander Hanff

Please remember if anyone has a problem with a post they should use the report post option.

If anyone has a problem with a moderating decision they should pm a member of the moderating team not argue any decisions in a thread.

[Dephormation]

Phorm have gone cookie crazy. Every major page you visit on their site sets a new session cookie. Looks like a poor man web analytics.

How bizarre, every page has its own DNS sub domain.