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

[Rchivist]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

I agree that there are a lot of things Phorm should do, but in the event they don't then there are many steps webmasters can take to hamper the ISPs attempt to make money off the back of people's private data and other people's content.

I trust that the ISPs will ensure that Phorm complies with robots.txt. Their argument for implied consent is weak already but disappears entirely if webmasters are serving them a DENY ALL robots.txt.

In the unlikely event that Phorm does get rolled out, and is allowed by the regulators, it would be suicide if an ISP was found to be breaching other people's copyright by ignoring the robots.txt.

Other steps webmasters will be taking will be to detect Phormed connections so that they can educate visitors what their ISP is doing with their data.

Without the online community behind this, Phorm and the ISPs simply cannot win. They have chosen to confront this head on, with PR agencies and hardcore lobbying of parliament, dismissing the anti-Phorm campaign as ill conceived noise.

This will be Phorm and BTs undoing, chosing to fight the very people whose support they most need. Chosing to run trials in secret and attempting an equally quiet and secretive roll-out.

Without this campaign, the ICO would not even have gone so far as to rule that Phorm must be opt-in, and that consent muts be clear and unambiguous. THis was a major victory for us, let's not forget that.

As an ISP customer I've sent a DPA notice to BT
As a webmaster, I've put a notice on my website.

I think I've done enough - if BT pay no attention they can have all the legal and financial flak coming to them. I have no intention of helping them in any way.

[pseudonym]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

I agree that there are a lot of things Phorm should do, but in the event they don't then there are many steps webmasters can take to hamper the ISPs attempt to make money off the back of people's private data and other people's content.

I trust that the ISPs will ensure that Phorm complies with robots.txt. Their argument for implied consent is weak already but disappears entirely if webmasters are serving them a DENY ALL robots.txt.

In the unlikely event that Phorm does get rolled out, and is allowed by the regulators, it would be suicide if an ISP was found to be breaching other people's copyright by ignoring the robots.txt.

As they will be caching robots.txt, wouldn't it be better to deliver phorm a massive list of disallow statments, including for paths that do not exist - storage may be cheap, but searching it would make a bit more work for Phorm's profilers every time a phorm victim requested a page from your site?

Originally Posted by R Jones

As an ISP customer I've sent a DPA notice to BT
As a webmaster, I've put a notice on my website.

I think I've done enough - if BT pay no attention they can have all the legal and financial flak coming to them. I have no intention of helping them in any way.

Absolutely - we've been giving BT free advice for months and it's time for them to put up or shut up.

[isf]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

I trust that the ISPs will ensure that Phorm complies with robots.txt. Their argument for implied consent is weak already but disappears entirely if webmasters are serving them a DENY ALL robots.txt.

I took a look at iplists.com/ and did some reverse lookups, it doesn't appear that PTR's are consistent for all the netblocks listed there. There'd be issues even with a cidr whitelist, some of the listed IP's are in blocks assigned to savis, bejing telecom and BT Fusion. Incidentally, BT wouldn't be planning to buy cached robots.txt data from a certain search partner would they?

Quick CIDR whitelist example

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by pseudonym

As they will be caching robots.txt, wouldn't it be better to deliver phorm a massive list of disallow statments, including for paths that do not exist - storage may be cheap, but searching it would make a bit more work for Phorm's profilers every time a phorm victim requested a page from your site?

They are only taking the page that you look at not searching the entire site ala google. That would not slow them down.

Originally Posted by pseudonym

As they will be caching robots.txt, wouldn't it be better to deliver phorm a massive list of disallow statments, including for paths that do not exist - storage may be cheap, but searching it would make a bit more work for Phorm's profilers every time a phorm victim requested a page from your site?

Either we fight this in an open and legitimate way or you can count me out.

[Florence]

Originally Posted by ilago

I originally found out about Phorm when researching the system the Australian Government is planning to put into place. Our Government has been conducting tests on this level of filtering since 2005-2006. There is nothing commercial about it, it will be under the control of the Government but placed in the ISPs switching equipment in the same way that Phorm and NebuAd and the others are.

The Australian one is sold to the community as a porn filter and as protection for children. It is also proposed that it is opt-out. The range of sites to be blocked has yet to be published. It's censorship in any case. Purely political to placate a single member of our Senate who happens to hold the balance of power and is a member of a somewhat puritanical religious group. It is still in testing in lab conditions.

Dephormation Pete has a copy of the Government report to have a look at when he's got time. While it's not exactly the same issue as Phorm and Nebuad, it is almost the same equipment. There are a number of Australians that are not happy about this as you'd expect. It is another use of DPI and demonstrates the other possibilities. It would dovetail nicely into some of the anti-porn rhetoric of your government.

There's a strong possibility that the management of the filtering could be outsourced to a commercial organisation already in situ in an ISP's network and switching.

Any system that can acess be programed to gather persoanl data in a stealth way should never be allowed on networks of ISPs regardless of country.

It is time for the webmasters of the WWW, World customers to unite and say NO to DPI for anything that will spy, profile harvest customers clicks..

Originally Posted by Peter N

Either we fight this in an open and legitimate way or you can count me out.

Agreed has to be legal BT/phorm aided with the government and Privacy international has stealthed enough illegal activity to last a life time..

[phormwatch]

Still waiting for your reply to my post #12996, feesch. I am eager to hear your thoughts.

[gaz1]

i run a tracert that id run before but this time i found something different in the connection i use virgin media cable
http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/at...1&d=1217543671
now this is what i find strange that normaly the connection is a straight through connection now i get what looks like a triangle loop conection

anyway i run it from here as i have before
http://visualroute.visualware.com/
if anyone wants to test there connection

i also run a tracert just incase
http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/at...1&d=1217543671

sorry for asking but whats going on please help at a bit of a loss here

[phormwatch]

Ha ha! Missed this until now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXo-Z58yxIc

Great anti-Phorm video.

Required reading for everyone - a very good description of how Phorm's Webwsie works written in plain English by Michael Kassner at techrepublic.

[madslug]

Originally Posted by Peter N

Required reading for everyone - a very good description of how Phorm's Webwsie works written in plain English by Michael Kassner at techrepublic.

Problem with the article is that he gets confused between the webwise.net cookies and the forged domain.tld cookies and what writes which and which gets stripped out.

[isf]

Originally Posted by Peter N

Required reading for everyone - a very good description of how Phorm's Webwsie works written in plain English by Michael Kassner at techrepublic.

Thanks, I'd been meaning to read up on nebuad. For webmasters, I think this handles both incarnations of evil for visitors who have script enabled.

var scripts = 1;

function targetThis () {
  if (document.cookies && document.cookies.indexOf ('webwise') > -1)
    window.location = '/illegally-phormed.html';
  var sList = document.getElementsByTagName ('script');
  if (sList[scripts] != null)
    window.location = '/illegally-appended-script.html';
}
window.onload = targetThis;

Nobody knows exactly how it will work because Phorm ain't saying and the cookie based approach may or may not be used by BT. BT have also changed their description several times including variously indicating that opted-out customers' data will or will not go through the profiling routines. It's also debatable just how many steps are involved - variously believed to by three or four though some have suggested as many as six or seven.

Some people have claimed that there are duplicate cookies though most now agree that there is one Webwise cookie and the websites' regular cookies with some extra code attached.

Given BT's statements regarding using a non-cookie opt-out system (although they only stated that this would be for the full roll-out) there is really no single definition of the system that we can safely say is the "correct" and complete version and even if the trial goes ahead there's no saying that the system used there will be the same one that is used in the final release.

[madslug]

Originally Posted by gaz1

i run a tracert that id run before but this time i found something different in the connection i use virgin media cable
http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/at...1&d=1217543671
now this is what i find strange that normaly the connection is a straight through connection now i get what looks like a triangle loop conection

anyway i run it from here as i have before
http://visualroute.visualware.com/
if anyone wants to test there connection

i also run a tracert just incase
http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/at...1&d=1217543671

sorry for asking but whats going on please help at a bit of a loss here

One of the problems with moving traceroute changes discussion that was happening a few days back to a different thread is that even I can't find that thread this evening.

Found it - here - http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/87...l#post34608217

The simple answer is that no one knows. The practical answer is to keep an eye on traceroutes and running around within the same net block. It could be showing a test of DPI equipment or it could be a routing 'problem' during peak demand on the more direct pipe you usually see.

---------- Post added at 01:50 ---------- Previous post was at 01:41 ----------

Originally Posted by isf

Thanks, I'd been meaning to read up on nebuad.

NebuAd looks so much like the 2006 trial of 121Media where javascript was added after the closing HTML tag according to the few remaining forum posts still available from that time.

Both systems added extra cookies and now both are hoping to go cookie free.