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

[Digbert]

Sorry if this has been mentioned already but thiis is an interesting blog re web site owners from the British Computer Society http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConBlogEntry.425

[icsys]

Originally Posted by murfitUK

.
Without advertisers, Phorm will not exist.

The only way we can really stop this is to make it clear to potential advertisers that we will campaign to boycott their products. Not just their web-based selling sites but high street stores as well. Can we find out which companies have expressed an interest in Phorm? If so, it is those companies we need to put pressure on.

Remember, the Guardian withdrew - they said it didn't phit (sorry, fit) into the ethos of the newspaper, but I bet they got phrightened (sorry, frightened) when they saw the strength of feeling of the public. I myself have taken the Guardian for 25 years and wrote to the editor to say I would stop if they signed up. I like to think that, however small, my protest helped them come to their senses.

Let's set up a boycott site and target the retailers - without the retailers and their adverts, Phorm will not exist.

After visiting the phorm (phah) website to look for OIX partners, I cannot find any listed anywhere.

Could this be because there aren't any? Or are they simply witholding the information (at the partners' request?).

As suggested by 'murfitUK', contacting such partners/retailers to inphorm them that you would not buy from/use their services if they were to commit to the OIX project may be another avenue to pursue.

This thread is now re-open. Thread clean up taken place of all the baiting and off-topic content.

Polite reminder of our sites terms of use - particularly where it states:-

You agree that you will not:-

1. Provoke others or cause trouble. If you wish to argue with people then go to instant messenger or email.

2. Make personal attacks on anyone during your use of the forum.

Failure to abide with our sites terms of use will result in warnings being issued and or suspension of posting rights.

This thread has been going on for months - is over 6000 posts long and has been one of the most best debated subjects of all time. I will not have someone coming along who appears to have got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning and causing a flame war with other posters.

We all have our views, we all have our own thoughts, I will not have people trying to force their views on to someone else by belittling them or making personal remarks. Sometimes you have to agree to disagree.

Now this thread will get back to its original state, a subject and debate about Phorm. I do not want to see any more flaming.

Thank you.

[warescouse]

Originally Posted by R Jones

Life can be so ironic! Just had this email from BT

Dear BT Forum user,
BT is conducting a survey to help us improve the usefulness of our Support Forums.
We'd be grateful if you could spend two minutes of your time to complete our 10 question survey on your experience with our Support Forums.
To complete the survey, please follow the link below:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/etc *****
Please be advised that this is an official BT survey conducted in line with the BT.com privacy policy. Your responses will be treated as strictly confidential. For more information on the BT privacy policy, please click here:
http://www2.bt.com/btPortal/applicat...privacy_policy
Thank you for your time,
BT Forum Research Team

I really enjoyed completing that one, especially the freeform comment box at the bottom.

Is it possible that BT realise they are going to struggle to get 10,000 positives to their Phorm/Webwise trial so they are weeding out the negatives before they do any invites?

[Florence]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

quote romoved

I have been reading this and unsure as to your motive if you have joined purley to discredit Alexander then you need to think twice. If I was give a poll today of who I would trust my privacy protection to Kent or alexander then I would select Alexander.

What happened in the past is not part of this and has no relevance to this discussion. Alexander didn't hide the fact he had been sacked for talking in a news recording.

Now if you have nothing to help the fight of Phorm but trying to discredit the ones trying to save our internet from spyware,adware and privacy invasion.

Technically I am safe since I moved from VM on the 5th of this month to a phorm phree ISP. I will not desert the ones left since many have been posting on her for as many years as me..

To allow this topic to stay focused, on track and feeding information that is, can be, possibly of use to members who are on ISPs that are courting Phorm. Lets not turn posts into personal ones or derogartory remarks have no place here. All through this thread we have had no troll's to call anyone a troll who has posted so much information in this thread given guidance and free information to members also spent houirs reading up to help.

Given time freely to continue the fight for our rights let that stay the main focus and not forgetting phorm.

Now back to the VM and phorm phenominum, this courting phorm could change the VM churn rates back up since they are posting they are dropping due to packages they are offering to keep customers.

If/when phorm is released would it come under unfair trading if they set it up to flag a customer who visits a site like ISPreview which is a site where members of the internet community can post about their ISPs faults errors or even great feats. Would this flag as if the customer was thinking of leaving the ISP. Making them release the offer adverts on the customer...

Now to know this customer was looking at ISPs reviews wouldnt the cookie have to hold a little more information than just the random number. As without how will the ISP know what packages to offer a reduction on, which customer was thinking of leaving etc...

enough said for one night... time to reflect and think..

There is room for everyones opinions but noone should try to undermine another forum member or person in this thread ever, each and everyone has qualities that put together will help to win this.. If one tries to break us apart then we will be on shakey ground each to their own personal opinions and lets all stay focused..

Apologise Mick been working on this and helping someone on ISPreview so been so long you had closed the thread then reopened it..

[oblonsky]

In fighting against Phorm I feel (personal opinion) it is important to focus on a few issues of significance rather than spread the discontent over as many issues you can think of.

A case in point is the issue of copyright infringement, as Struan Robertson wrote about in out-law.com:

http://out-law.com/default.aspx?page=9090
"Arguably Google breaks copyright laws when it indexes the web; Arguably Microsoft breaks anti-spam laws when it attaches tiny ads to the foot of Hotmail emails. But nobody cares about such minor transgressions. After all, where's the harm?

Legal risks and new technology are inextricably linked. Typically, upon being identified, some risks will be avoided, some will be mitigated and some will be ignored. Phorm has to look at all the legal risks and decide which ones to address, which ones to mitigate and which ones it can afford to ignore."

No my visit to this thread, as a veteran of the anti-Phorm debate on Badphorm, was to impart the opinion, my personal opinion, that it would be better for the campaign to focus on the less contentious legal issues, such as RIPA is very likely to be breached if email is scanned, rather than digress into issues such as but not restricted to copyright infringement.

The key issues as I see them are:
1.) RIPA s2, but only focussing on private email, protected content etc.
2.) DPA s11, the right to opt-out of direct marketing, because it is very hard to comply to this with a cookie opt-out model, and once a real network opt-out is implemented it is very hard for the ISPs to get those who have opted out to reconsider, furthermore in the event that Phorm blockers are deployed, this could cause many more people to ask for the opt-out (so long as the blockers allowed truly opted-out people to access).
3.) Privacy in Electronic Communications Regulations, because this *could* force an opt-in model, although I'm reliably informed due to a technicality with the ICOs v1.3 statement the commissioner could have misunderstood what actually constitutes header information.

Many other avenues, whilst perfectly valid forumfodder, and in my opinion, are markedly weaker and the ISPs have reasonably strong defence.

For the record I didn't get out of bed the wrong side this morning, but I will rigorously defend my arguments on the few times I choose to post. It doesn't matter that I am not here all the time.

Good night all.

Originally Posted by oblonsky

For the record I didn't get out of bed the wrong side this morning, but I will rigorously defend my arguments on the few times I choose to post. It doesn't matter that I am not here all the time.

Good night all.

There is defending and then becoming personal. The latter of course which will not be tolerated on this forum. Please take this on board in future.

Now can we get back the Phorm debate without all the nastiness. Thank you.

[James_Firth]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

A case in point is the issue of copyright infringement, as Struan Robertson wrote about in out-law.com:

I'm not such a fan of that article because I felt the author was creating an analogy between the Google situation w.r.t. copyright and Phorm situation under RIPA.

Not taking anything away from your most recent post, to my mind the two are very separate and diverse issues, copyright having a history of hundreds, if not thousands of years whilst intercept and privacy & communications concepts being relatively modern. The latter being defined if you like because of the internet era and the former being a concept struggling to catch up in the digital era.

But granted both concepts are undergoing rapid redefinition as communications and digital media technology exploded in the last 20 years. And I have to agree with the sentiment of what you say because I feel privacy in communications is actually the most important issue at stake here and I would be happy for the depate with MPs and public bodies to focus on these issues alone. Not least because I don't see how the copyright model will survive in its present form without draconian measures that I don't want to see implemented (Eircom v IRMA).

Phew what a read today's action was. I know it's been a bit of a scortcher for early May, hope you guys have cooled down a bit LOL

Anyway... As the Money Saving Expert site has merged the threads, I've asked a bit of an off topic question about Phorm Webwise and BT shares/investments in them.

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/....html?t=903715

Hank

[phormwatch]

Originally Posted by icsys

After visiting the phorm (phah) website to look for OIX partners, I cannot find any listed anywhere.

Could this be because there aren't any? Or are they simply witholding the information (at the partners' request?).

As suggested by 'murfitUK', contacting such partners/retailers to inphorm them that you would not buy from/use their services if they were to commit to the OIX project may be another avenue to pursue.

Hello everyone. I've been lurking on this thread for a while. I just registered.

I run the phormwatch website:

http://phormwatch.blogspot.com/

So far, we have a small list of participating websites who intend to use OIX spyware. We don't have a list, yet, of any advertisers. I suspect we won't find any until the trial goes live.

If anyone knows of any advertisers, please email me at: phormwatch at fastmail dot net

I will add the advertisers to the list.

[Wild Oscar]

I just stumbled into this via another web-site ... https://www.relakks.com/ ..

Relakks provides services to help individuals to assure the security and integrity of their information. Relakks' responsibility stems from the strong Swedish tradition of protecting the integrity of private life and all forms of communication between individuals.
Relakks - broadband Swedish style!

How it works:
You'll exchange the IP-number you get from your ISP to an anonymous IP-number .
You get a safe/encrypted connection between your computer and the Internet.

Only EUR 5.00 per month or EUR 50.00 for 12 months

Service Description - RELAKKS Safe Surf
The Service consists of an encrypted VPN tunnel between your computer and RELAKKS. The IP-number you receive from your existing ISP is only used to connect your computer to RELAKKS,from there on RELAKKS substitute your existing IP-number with a new IP-number from RELAKKS. This gives you a number of advantages:

· Your existing ISP will not be able to intercept and track your applications or communication
· Your existing ISP can not limit what you can do nor limit what information you can access
· Other organizations or individuals can’t intercept or track your applications or communication.

Similar services have been available on the Internet for some time, but this is the first time you can get all the advantages without any drawback.

Bandwidth
RELAKKS is fast and you get exactly the same bandwidth as you get from your ISP today (i.e. if you have a 100 Mbps connection from your existing ISP we will do our best do deliver the same bandwidth to you when using RELAKKS). Important notice: you will not be able to get more bandwidth from RELAKKS than you have from your existing ISP today. Encryption will make your CPU work harder but it will not inflict any degradation of you bandwidth.

Notice, that in order to use RELAKKS Safe Surf you need an existing broadband connection – if you can’t access Internet you can’t use RELAKKS in its present form.

Encryption Technology
The VPN tunnel use 128-bits encryption (satisfying for most commercial applications like on-line banking).

For security reasons RELAKKS do not use any American software neither for encryption nor for any other part (we anticipate that most users will in spite of that use an American OS), but there is noting stopping an advanced user from accessing RELAKKS with a more secure operating system or use a specific VPN-client. Not that this is not at the moment supported by RELAKKS customer care.

Legal
RELAKKS is a company incorporated in Sweden. The service is basically a Swedish broadband subscription offered over the Internet. This means that the legal framework mainly consists of the The Electronic Communications Act 2003 389. What will this mean if:

· Swedish authorities or,
· Other organization or individuals demands access to information protected by RELAKKS?

RELAKKS Safe Surf enjoys the strongest legal protection possible under Swedish Law because of the service type (pre-paid flat-rate service). This means that RELAKKS do not have to keep an ordinary customer database (to be able handle transactions etc.). This is of importance if forced to hand over information.

If Swedish authorities can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they have a case for demanding subscription information from RELAKKS (they have to be of the opinion that if convicted the user will be imprisoned – fined not enough). .

RELAKKS then have to hand over the subscription information entered by you (but that’s all). RELAKKS do not store any subscribtion information about you except what you entered yourself when signing up for the RELAKKS Safe Surf service.

For Swedish authorities to force RELAKKS to hand over “traffic data” including your RELAKKS IP at a specific point in time, they will have to prove a case with the minimum sentence of two years imprisonment.

Regarding inquires from other parties than Swedish authorities RELAKKS will never hand over any kind of information.

The combination Swedish high-tech encryption and the strongest legal protection give you true access to Internet, safer and speedier then ever before.

For more information about Swedish Telecom Law:
The Electronic Communications Act 2003:389

[popper]

Originally Posted by oblonsky

As I've said numerous times, please re-read my original messages. The RIPA argument relies on consent. It is reasonable to assume that the ISPs will present a powerful case for the implied consent argument in relation to web-published content.

I am actually trying to strengthen the anti-Phorm argument by challenging some of what I see as the weaker points being used in letters to MPs to hopefully focus people's minds on what I see as the stronger points.

My view, my opinion, your choice.

good.

you are aware that there are more people on this very thread, that have had, and have, direct contact with simon watkins in this RIPA regard, far more responses than the single reference in the original news posts....

several searchs have seen several quotes for instance

#4017
Dephormation
Pete
"More reasons to love the web

Protecting privacy and protecting the public

[Simon Watkins]All data should be protected by their service providers. The law requires all disclosure and investigation of communications data to be strictly necessary and appropriate in the specific circumstances – never more than is necessary and never inappropriate, arbitrary or discriminatory."


"#3415 15-04-2008

Florence said:
I have had a reply to my email sent to Simon Watkin, he was informed this would be posted here, so here goes.


Quote:
Florence,

Simon Watkin said:
Firstly, I should explain that the Home Office was approached by a number of
parties, both technology providers and ISPs, seeking a view about issues relating to the provision of targeted online advertising services, particularly their relation to Part 1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA). In response to those requests we prepared an informal guidance note.

That note [1] (which you've read) clearly states it should not be taken as a definitive statement or interpretation of the law, which only the courts can give.

Equally it wasn't, and didn't purport to be, based upon a detailed technical examination of any particular technology.

There are many variations on how the technology can be deployed: for example whether the end user is asked to opt-in or opt-out, whether or not the record of a user's interests can be linked to an identifiable individual, and whether or not the technology immediately discards the reason why a user is considered to be interested in a category of advertising.

As much as we were saying was, that in relation to RIPA, we considered it **may** be possible for such services to be offered lawfully - but it all depends on how they are offered and how they work.

> > To me this is unlawful interception of my surfing habits on the second
> > point I already block all advertisements online never see them so why
> > would I want this company to snoop on my clicks to target me with
> > adverts from only companies signed upto their packages.

You will have read that we emphasised that targeted online advertising services should be provided with the explicit consent of ISPs' users or by the acceptance of the ISP terms and conditions, and undertaken with the highest regard to the respect for the privacy of ISPs' users and the protection of their personal data.

Explicit consent should be informed consent, informed by a clear explanation about what the advertising service
does and doesn't do.

> > .... you are opening a whole Pandora's box with this ruling which might
> > come back later on and bite you back.

It's not a ruling. It's not advice. It's not a legal opinion. It's a view
and - repeating myself - all it says is it **may** be possible for such services to be offered lawfully.

> > I hope that you will review this and take a look at the illegal trials
> > undertaken by BT and Phorm in 2006/2007 where thousands of people where
> > intercepted without their consent.

My understanding is that BT made a public statement that "a small scale technical test of a prototype advertising platform took place for two weeks during September - October 2006 [and that] no personally identifiable
information was processed, stored or disclosed during this test".

Simon Watkin
HOME OFFICE

[1]
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pi...ch/083561.html

"

[Florence]

popper you are wasting your time he has some reason I don't know what.

I bow out with just one warning if unsure then move to an ISP that is phorm phree evewn if it means slower speeds your privacy is more important than speed on the internet which will slow donw with the interception.

---------- Post added at 20:54 ---------- Previous post was at 20:50 ----------

stay cool guys and focused I am around if needed just pm me but as for posting public

[oblonsky]

Originally Posted by popper

you are aware that there are more people on this very thread, that have had, and have, direct contact with simon watkins in this RIPA regard, far more responses the single reference in the original news posts...

Please, everyone, take a minute to consider what I posted before replying:

"It is reasonable to assume that the ISPs will present a powerful case for the implied consent argument in relation to web-published content."

the ISPs...

I don't care if you don't agree with my statement but please don't misrepresent me.

We can simply and effectively avoid the strongest part of the ISPs defence by steering the debate away from the areas covered by implied consent (published material) and focussing instead on the private messaging services and webmail.

[Kursk]

I have to admit that I enjoyed that exchange. It is good when views, even when opposing, make you think. And the Oblonsky/Alexander chat did that for me. There is a less palatable side to the Phorm discussion but as long as it is kept civil, my experience of this thread is that everyone can express and discuss their views and, one way or another, we all learn something from it. The overriding aim though must be to keep our guns pointing in the right direction and that means we need the intellect of everyone concentrated against Webwise. As Mick says, agree to disagree, and get back on the clock. Please.

Interspersed in the heat have been several interesting posts that got burned up in an ongoing flame war; we really can't afford that.

On a more positive note, we are getting more contributors everyday; many of whom are self-confessed lurkers who have been inspired by the dedication of this forum's membership. That dedication has a common purpose and we all need to remember that. And before anyone says "pot kettle black" fair enough, you got me. But I have moved on; sometimes you just need to take a deep breath and get over yourself