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

[Dephormation]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

So it seems the only way content owners can fight against intra-ISP spyware/profiling is under copyright legislation and that is doomed to certain failure because Phorm insist that they will respect robots.txt, an established mechanism granting a machine the rights to scan and classify the content.
IANAL (but I know a few very good ones).

Robots.txt doesn't allow (check the spec), it disallows.

Its a denial mechanism.

What's required is a mechanism of consent, where no consent (ie, explicit consent is not present) means no consent.

Pete.

[Rchivist]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

In your opinion. Don't let all the TV interviews and requests for comment go to your head.

This sort of personal stuff is uncalled for.

[OldBear]

Originally Posted by R Jones

This sort of personal stuff is uncalled for.

Seconded. There was absolutelty no need for that.

@Alexander

Thanks for that; I agree about Martin Lewis, and think maybe CAG may be a better bet.

[NTLVictim]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

Do you think the Home Office advice was drawn up by a dimwitted low-grade civil servant?

...You know another kind?

[oblonsky]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff

You think personal attacks and insults are going to make people more aligned with your position?

They were not personal attacks. I was merely highlighting your authoritative tone on the issue, when in fact several individuals have been fighting since day one on this, some of us due to personal circumstances have been forced to take a back seat but that doesn't make your views any more valid than anyone elses.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff

How is it irrelevant?

Because you were talking about the difference between public and private communications. I was talking about the difference between published and freely available content versus private communications.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff

You claimed that because the communications are over a public network they don't fall under RIPA

I did no such thing. See above.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff

I am sticking to the facts, I am correctly referencing the relevant laws on the issue and as such have a great deal of support and credibility. I have actually read all the laws as well, which appears to be something you haven't done.

Nice assumption but I have done more than just read the relevant legislation. I was in a position to comment on it at inception.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff

Really? You mean according to you surely?

?? that we both agree on one angle ??

Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff

I have found very few lawyers who are agreeing with the implied consent argument

Is this because spend a lot of time on this forum canvassing opinion?!

Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff

I suspect the reason for that is because the law clearly states informed consent.

For interception of communications. You take such a black and white view and I'm afraid that Struan over at out-law.com was actually making a lot of sense when he talked about technical breaches and the fluidity of the legal system. It is just up to us to prove that the breaches were indeed more than technical because they have important consequence.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff

Still, thanks for the chat, I need some sleep now though so I won't be able to respond to your inevitable response until this evening. Have a pleasant day.

Get some sleep and think things over. Don't take things so personally just because someone happened to disagree with you. Approaching my 50's I don't need as much sleep as I did when I was your age.

[dav]

Has there been any contact/comment/feedback from the ASA?
I would be interested to hear their view on the targetted advertising aimed at a parent being served up and viewed by the children of the house.

[Rchivist]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

snip
Phorm insist that they will respect robots.txt, an established mechanism granting a machine the rights to scan and classify the content.
snip

If you could reference that, I'd be interested.
I've just done Google site searches on "robots.txt" on the mirrored copy of BT Webwise FAQ, the webwise.bt.com copy of the same FAQ and also on phorm.com - got zero hits each time.

Granted there are various contradictory and confusing and vague public statements out there, about robots.txt, but I have so far found nothing that clearly states the Phorm/Webwise position on robots.txt beyond their statement that if you admit google, you admit them.

I also have private communications from BT managers about robots.txt, in response to my questions, but it is always a challenge to match up what Kent Ertugrul says in public with what the BT management are prepared to put in writing. What I have from them on this is "We are also taking steps to ensure that those websites that do not want search engines to 'crawl' them (by the use of robots.txt) will also be excluded from the Webwise service." which is not exactly clear.

It is still unclear how Webwise/Phorm intend to establish the informed consent of websites to having the unique personal data exchange with their site visitors profiled for profit by a 3rd party who is neither the identified site visitor nor the website itself, as part of a process where cookies are forged including the registered domain name of the site and falsely represent themselves as coming from the site.

It is also unclear how Phorm/Webwise intent to take note of clear "body text" prohibition notices placed by site owners on their sites which specifically bar them from visiting.

Again - if you can quote chapter and verse that would be appreciated. One of the things we appreciate about Alex is that his comments are always backed by clear attributions and references. If you are going to engage in debate here you need to do the same - please quote your sources and your legal authorities so we can make an informed judgement on what you say.

[oblonsky]

Originally Posted by R Jones

If your address is an alphanumeric combination it can easily be created on a purely random basis by software designed to churn out all possible combinations of digits and letters for popular domains like hotmail, btinternet.com etc.

Like you quote your sources and provide proof. Another poster with an authoritative tone yet clearly some holes in their understanding of IT systems.

---------- Post added at 13:10 ---------- Previous post was at 13:08 ----------

Originally Posted by R Jones

If you could reference that, I'd be interested.
I've just done Google site searches on "robots.txt" on the mirrored copy of BT Webwise FAQ, the webwise.bt.com copy of the same FAQ and also on phorm.com - got zero hits each time.

Clayton, par39
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/080404phorm.pdf

---------- Post added at 13:12 ---------- Previous post was at 13:10 ----------

[QUOTE=OldBear;34547088]Seconded. There was absolutelty no need for that.
[QUOTE]

Well if you want the forum to be filled without a voice to question the technical details of what was posted then so be it. Questioning view is not a personal attack.

[AlexanderHanff]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

Get some sleep and think things over. Don't take things so personally just because someone happened to disagree with you. Approaching my 50's I don't need as much sleep as I did when I was your age.

I sleep 3-4 times a week for approximately 16-20 hours in total, I don't need a lot of sleep I just happen to have been up for over 2 days.

I am not going to get into an argument with you, I do not agree with anything you have said and you haven't responded with anything which makes your position any more tenable, just hearsay and unfounded, baseless statements.

You are of course welcome to your opinion as is everyone else, but resorting to personal attacks (whether you intended it or not) is not a good way to hold a debate. I have been writing about this issue since the news first broke and I have put literally thousands of hours into it, so I am not speaking from an uneducated or uninformed standpoint. i have taken great care and effort to read everything I can on the issue and sought advice from leading academics and experts with regards to my evaluation of the situation, with very positive feedback, so please don't assume that my points are reactionary they are very heavily researched.

As for the comment which seems to hint I garnish all my information from this forum, clearly that is not the case, you will find comments from me littered all over the web on this issue and I have spoken at length to legal experts, economic and investment experts, highly reputable privacy advocates and several politicians. So I find it a little but offensive that you suggest I live on CF. Any way, in the words of Pooh: "TTFN".

Alexander Hanff

Oblonsky cease this ridiculous type of obnoxious and rude posting or you will not be posting at all. I will not put up with members making personal remarks on this forum against anyone.

[tdadyslexia]

Originally Posted by jelv

If (unlikely as it is) they do obey the robots.txt rules we need a robots.txt file putting together which includes all the known valid agents and barring *

Well this is my robots.txt file:

### BEGIN FILE ###
#
# robots.txt
#
# 01/05/2008
#
#
# Allow Specified Only
#
#
# The use of robots or other automated means to access the site
# without the express permission of the web master is strictly 
# prohibited.  Notwithstanding the foregoing, the web master may 
# permit automated access to access certain pages but soley for the
# limited purpose of including content in publicly available search 
# engines.  Any other use of robots or failure to obey the robots
# exclusion standards set forth at:
# http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html is strictly prohibited.
#
# v1
#
User-agent: Google
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://www.dhea.org.uk/sitemap.xml
user-agent: FreeFind
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://www.dhea.org.uk/sitemap.xml
user-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://www.dhea.org.uk/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
### END FILE ###

Comments on it!

[rryles]

Originally Posted by Dephormation

Robots.txt doesn't allow (check the spec), it disallows.

Its a denial mechanism.

What's required is a mechanism of consent, where no consent (ie, explicit consent is not present) means no consent.

Pete.

The original RFC spec only does disallow. However the benchmark they have set is Google and Google's bots support an allow extension. Google's bots also check for meta tags in the documents. Checking those would require interception first though.

Interestingly, if they do obey robots.txt (at all) then they won't be able to use searches done on Google! What a shame http://www.google.com/robots.txt disallows all the actual search pages for all user agents.

[OldBear]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

<snip>Questioning view is not a personal attack.

Agreed, but like it or not, a comment like that below is a personal attack.

Don't let all the TV interviews and requests for comment go to your head.

There was simply no need for that.

OB

Edit: Apologies, Mick, seems we both had the reply box open at the same time.

[Rchivist]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

Clayton, par39
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/080404phorm.pdf

Thank you for quoting your source. I've pasted below the text from that source which is Clayton's technical report which I have already read and which does not give any details on how Phorm will be using robots.txt and in fact records their refusal to give further details, even to Clayton, and further, makes the clear statement that their use of robots.txt is simply to assume that if search engines have permission, then Phorm have permission - it does not clarify how they will do that. We might think it is obvious, but nothing is obvious when we are dealing with Phorm.

The quote from Phorm in section 44 below is not a blanket statement of respect for robots.txt - it is a conditional statement, without explanatory detail that "if the site has disallowed spidering and indexing by search engines, we respect those restrictions in robots.txt "

"39. When a website is first visited (by any ISP customer) the pages are not inspected. Instead, a request is queued to fetch the site’s “robots.txt” file; viz: a file maintained by the website owner which tells web crawlers and other automated systems which parts of the website should not be indexed or processed.
40. Once the robots.txt file (if any) has been fetched, it will be cached. The cache retention period will be value set by the website using standard HTTP cache-control mechanisms, or for one month if no period is specified. The minimum period that the file will be cached for is two hours.
41. The robots.txt file will be inspected and URLs that fall within forbidden areas of the website will not be processed by the Phorm system.
42. This mechanism, which will permit website owners to opt their pages out of the Phorm system, does not seem to have been previously described in any of Phorm’s documentation. They were unable to provide an explanation as to why this had not previously been disclosed.
43. In the meeting, Phorm were unable to tell us the User-Agent string they match against in the robots.txt file, knowledge of which would be required if a website owner wished to set particular rules for Phorm which differed from, for example, for the GoogleBot.
44. I asked for further clarifcation and was told “we work on the basis that if a site allows spidering of its contents by search engines, then its material is being openly published. Conversely, if the site has disallowed spidering and indexing by search engines, we respect those restrictions in robots.txt”.
45. It therefore still remains unclear to me what the Phorm system does if the robots.txt file does not use a User-Agent: * construction, and whether this will be in line with what the website owner intended."

On the question of dictionary attacks for email addresses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address_harvesting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_harvest_attack
http://www.sophos.com/security/spam-...yharvestattack
http://geek.focalcurve.com/archive/2...ary-attack%20/

Obviously I can't comment on what caused the particular spam in question in the original post and did not do so.
Best wishes.

[Florence]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHanff

OK Folks, time to start writing to Best Buy who just bought 50% of Carphone Warehouse (which I presume means Talk Talk too).

Alexander Hanff

From the new they only bought retail outlets not the internet service this has been don to raise funds to buy Tiscali. Soon Talktalk will be larger than VM and a bigger threat to BT than VM.

Also noticed on the news VM released their customer figures.

Virgin Media has reported its latest first quarter 2008 results today, which saw the operators broadband subscriber base inch forwards from 3,701,200 at the end of 2007 to 3,781,800 now.

The bulk of this increase came from Virgin's cable based broadband platform, while those on its Virgin.net ADSL side reduced from 287,300 at the end of 2007 to 279,500. This loss of 7,800 subscribers could perhaps be contributed to the horrendous service problems customers experienced on their ADSL platform late last year.

Taken from http://www.ispreview.co.uk/news/EkEpkFVkAyEWnUhVGU.html