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

[Florence]

Originally Posted by OF1975

Slightly off topic here but have a read of this then imagine it 10 years down the line combined with a function-creep heavy phorm:

"Ofcom has outlined a wide range of advances and innovations for wireless devices over the next 10 to 20 years, including "in-body networks" to help doctors monitor patients."

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/22...es-vision-life

Just imagine these "in-body networks" combined with Phorm 10 or 15 years down the line. You are surfing the net one day and your blood pressure is high and the implants pick up on it and transmit it somehow to the phorm servers and up come adverts for blood pressure medication....

Tin foil hat? Yes quite possibly but it does open up the possibilities.

The thoughts of what Phorm/webwise can do once programmed to is almost like taking a shower on blackpool prom in the nude. Nothing is left to the imagination all the inner secrets are out no privacy, human rights nothing is left.

[BadPhormula]

Originally Posted by Florence

The thoughts of what Phorm/webwise can do once programmed to is almost like taking a shower on blackpool prom in the nude. Nothing is left to the imagination all the inner secrets are out no privacy, human rights nothing is left.

No dignity.

Privacy invasion means something different to each of us; it’s a
moving target. When you hear the term you may automatically think
of an invasion by a technology like wiretapping, while others may
think about having their identity stolen. To some it’s an advertising
annoyance, like junk mail, while to others it’s the exposure of private
information, which can be demeaning and undermine their dignity.



In my taxonomy, privacy violations can be viewed as seven sins:
intrusion, latency,deception, profiling, identity theft, outing, and
loss of dignity.



Sin of Lost Dignity

Outing is harmful because it affects a core value—someone’s identity.
A more common privacy harm inflicted by institutions on their
constituencies attacks another core value—self-respect. This is the
sin of lost dignity.

This last sin is the subtlest and the hardest to qualify; human
dignity is the most difficult possession to protect. Comprehensive
privacy legislation is impossible, but even if society tries to craft laws
that will close the most egregious loopholes, in some areas uncomfortable,
yet fully legal, activities could still happen. There will always be places
where technology outruns the law, leaving gaps in its wake. There will
also be cases where an offense is not bad enough to be deemed illegal
but still humiliates the victim. We can easily get worked up when falsified
information that ruins a person’s reputation is bandied about. But what
about cases where information is revealed that is true but is personal,
private, and nobody’s business but the person’s own? How would you
feel if your medical records were public, with every silly question that
you’d ever asked your doctor in plain view? How about a web site featuring
your school essays containing opinions that might be better left in a dusty
box in the attic? Information technology can easily dig up enough
minute but embarrassing information on any of us to leave us exposed
as if we were flapping around in a hospital gown.

Causing the loss of dignity has always been a favorite tactic for
breaking down a group’s spirit. Military boot camp is founded
on this principle. From the first second that new recruits step off
the bus, basic training is a deliberate attack on dignity, primarily
through loss of privacy. The military takes the doors off bathroom
stalls, sleeps everyone in open-bay-style rooms, and subjects recruits
to constant verbal abuses while pushing them past the point of
physical exhaustion.

The poor are historically subject to a similar kind of violation;
lack of privacy is a tool of social control as is its resultant humiliation.
A welfare recipient tolerating detailed and personal interview
questions or a child forced to use a special brightly colored pass to
get her subsidized school lunch is the subject of a public shredding
of privacy that is often a blow to dignity, imposed almost as a punishment
for being needy. The poor have no privacy. In some cases,
the courts perpetuate the idea that poor people don’t have the same
rights as their wealthier neighbors. In the case of Wyman v. James,
the Supreme Court used fraud prevention as the grounds for permitting
welfare investigators to enter a recipient’s home without a
search warrant.76

Technology is also providing new ways for authorities to keep
track of the poor and put them under surveillance. The government
already makes use of SSNs to track individuals receiving welfare,
and it wants to take the tracking to the next level by issuing benefit
cards to track all purchases.77 Plans are underway to create homeless
management information systems, which will continuously
track the homeless and keep extensive personal information in
databases to be shared regionally.78 The likely next step will be RFID
monitoring of the indigent, like tagging bears or game fish.
Even those who can afford to sue for privacy violations often
don’t because they choose to avoid embarrassment and ridicule.
Undertaking a public legal battle virtually guarantees that the
details will be talked up throughout the community

The Rhode Island American Civil Liberties Union sued a police officer
in 2002 on behalf of a woman who was arrested on suspicion of
drunk driving and was then stripped, searched, and left in a cameramonitored
jail cell with no clothes for five hours.

Another type of humiliation and invasion of privacy often
occurs when employees undergo urine testing for drugs. To prevent
tampering with samples, employees are expected to urinate in front
of attendants. Workplace monitoring, in general, significantly
degrades dignity and compromises the privacy of employees.

Dignity comes from self-control. Those who maintain their dignity
are said to hold their heads high and generally have an air of
self-assurance about them. It’s difficult to be self-assured when you
can’t govern what other people know about you and what they will
do with the information, and today technology makes it all to easy
to publish humiliating information, even pictures and video. Privacy
and dignity are twinned, the yin and yang of the human spirit.
It takes monumental perseverance to maintain dignity when privacy
is stripped away.

Charity, government-assistance, and refugee relief workers should
always take their clients’ dignity into consideration. Television coverage
of natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, shows the devastation
panoramically but lingers on the contorted faces of the victims,
stripped of their possessions, shorn of their pride. It was a
tragedy when Princess Diana was surrounded by paparazzi as she lay
dying on a Paris street. It was humiliating when a dying George
Harrison was coerced into signing autographs for his doctor’s children.
His family sued because they also saw it as an invasion of his
privacy and a slam against his dignity.

The best way to handle this sin against privacy is through cultural
awareness and reform. Societies need to police themselves by
treating egregious violations of the spirit as repugnant, legal or not.
Truly democratic societies should zealously defend the right of their
citizens, no matter how impoverished or needy, to wrap themselves
in their dignity. Such measures will protect each and every citizen’s
privacy and will lead to the recognition that privacy is as much a
human need as it is a community obligation.

Commandment: Don’t humiliate me with my private information.

taken from
Privacy Lost How Technology Is Endangering Your Privacy
David H. Holtzman





regards

Well it's nearly 5 weeks since my MP said she had written to the Rt Hon Stephen Timms MP, Minister of State for "Competitiveness" at the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (or "Department of Business and Enterprise" as she first termed it in her original letter - I think mistaking the name)

Still waiting to hear from them!

The Earl of Northesk only had one of his three questions answered so far:

The Earl of Northesk asked Her Majesty's Government:

Whether they are taking any action on the targeted advertising service offered by Phorm in the light of the questions about its legality under the Data Protection and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Acts. [HL2635]

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (Baroness Vadera): The Office of the Information Commissioner made a statement on 3 March 2008 that it was in discussion with one company about the nature of its service and the way it uses information about ISP customers. My department will consider the continued relevance of the current safeguards and legislation in the light of the outcome of those discussions.

And is still waiting for these answers:

HL3267 Earl of Northesk [CO] and HL3268 Earl of Northesk [HO]

Earl of Northesk to ask Her Majesty’s Government which law enforcement agency, Department or other statutory body has responsibility for investigating and prosecuting possible criminal breaches of (a) the Data Protection Act 1998, (b) the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, and (c) the Computer Misuse Act 1990. [CO] HL3267

Earl of Northesk to ask Her Majesty’s Government whether any official or Minister in the Home Office has offered written or oral advice to any executive of the company Phorm as to the legality of their targeted advertising software product; if so, what was the advice; in what circumstances was it given; and what was the justification for giving it. [HO] HL3268

Eagerly awaiting the answers....

Hank

[Chroma]

Originally Posted by OF1975

Slightly off topic here but have a read of this then imagine it 10 years down the line combined with a function-creep heavy phorm:

"Ofcom has outlined a wide range of advances and innovations for wireless devices over the next 10 to 20 years, including "in-body networks" to help doctors monitor patients."

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/22...es-vision-life

Just imagine these "in-body networks" combined with Phorm 10 or 15 years down the line. You are surfing the net one day and your blood pressure is high and the implants pick up on it and transmit it somehow to the phorm servers and up come adverts for blood pressure medication....

Tin foil hat? Yes quite possibly but it does open up the possibilities.

Take a look at the microsoft roadmap.
EVERYTHING is geared towards online use. Reverting back to a setup simmilar to the 70s where people connect to a mainframe via a dumb terminal.
Eventualy widows will be nothing more than a glorified browser.
You install that and all your programs are executed via the internet, like MS office, notepad, hell even solitaire.

The benifit of the system is you will need a miccrosoft account in order to do almost anything, making piracy seriously difficult.
Now think about Dr's, Employers, Employees, Teachers, Social Workers, Government officials, Insurance companies, basicly anyone with confidential data regarding you, your partner and children all working online and running through Phorm.

[Florence]

If there were no internet suppliers left to supply a connectioin without phorm I would quit and find other activities I certainly wouldnt pay to access the int ernet through anything as intrusive as phorm ever.

[BadPhormula]

Originally Posted by Florence

If there were no internet suppliers left to supply a connectioin without phorm I would quit and find other activities I certainly wouldnt pay to access the int ernet through anything as intrusive as phorm ever.

You don't have to do that Florence. Technology is available to us all, and that means we can build our own Internet without wiretap surveillance. It's just a network and that means we can build our own world wide interconnected network. All you need are a few determined people and some routing gear. The wires can be optical, RF wireless, fibre, copper, satellite... How do you think Africa is going to have widespread internet? through homebrew mesh networks.

Of course a simpler network that uses the existing system (while we build a new one) is the TOR network. We need more people willing to become 'exit nodes'.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28anonymity_network%29 [ LINK ]

http://www.torproject.org/ [ LINK ]

Originally Posted by BadPhormula

...we can build our own world wide interconnected network.

Can we do that? Can we circumvent all this Phorm and ISP cr@p? Massive undertaking... huge opportunity to ensure freedom and privacy perhaps. Would need to start a new "W3C" or RFC process perhaps etc. Lots involved but you make a very good point...

Hank

---------- Post added at 13:37 ---------- Previous post was at 13:30 ----------

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.

And when I clicked on the link today...

This survey is currently closed. Please contact the author of this survey for further assistance.

Shame. I've sent a note to the BT Forum Research Team where the request to complete it came from and asked if they have closed the survey deliberately or if there has been an error etc.

Hank

[Wildie]

Interception
from wiki
In September 2007, Dan Egerstad, a Swedish security consultant, revealed that he had intercepted usernames and passwords for a large number of email accounts, by operating and monitoring Tor exit nodes.[6] On November 15, 2007, he was arrested on charges stemming from discovering and publishing this information. As Tor does not, and by design cannot, encrypt the traffic between an exit node and the target server, any exit node is in a position to capture any traffic which is not encrypted at the application layer, e.g. by SSL. While this does not inherently violate the anonymity of the source, it affords added opportunities for data interception by self-selected third parties, greatly increasing the risk of exposure of sensitive data by users who are careless or who mistake Tor's anonymity for security.

sounds like phorm to me but me not a that bright.

[BadPhormula]

Originally Posted by Hank

Can we do that? Can we circumvent all this Phorm and ISP cr@p? Massive undertaking... huge opportunity to ensure freedom and privacy perhaps. Would need to start a new "W3C" or RFC process perhaps etc. Lots involved but you make a very good point...

Hank

It's quite easy really. Using existing PSTN phonelines, this is how the Internet started. A 56K modem is connected to the telephone line and a Linux server is setup with mgetty and pppd. IP over serial cable was what we used before broadband! To be an Internet provider all you need are a bank of telephone lines a number of servers and a thicker/faster cable to connect to the next upsteam Internet provider. And with the LLU (local loop unbundling) you to can become a communications provider.

[serial]

We can always go back to using bulletin board systems

[Florence]

Originally Posted by BadPhormula

It's quite easy really. Using existing PSTN phonelines, this is how the Internet started. A 56K modem is connected to the telephone line and a Linux server is setup with mgetty and pppd. IP over serial cable was what we used before broadband! To be an Internet provider all you need are a bank of telephone lines a number of servers and a thicker/faster cable to connect to the next upsteam Internet provider. And with the LLU (local loop unbundling) you to can become a communications provider.

Or join one that has high standard, morals and respect for their customers who cannot be bought like the greedy larger ISPs.

[BadPhormula]

Originally Posted by Wildie

Interception
from wiki
In September 2007, Dan Egerstad, a Swedish security consultant, revealed that he had intercepted usernames and passwords for a large number of email accounts, by operating and monitoring Tor exit nodes.[6] On November 15, 2007, he was arrested on charges stemming from discovering and publishing this information. As Tor does not, and by design cannot, encrypt the traffic between an exit node and the target server, any exit node is in a position to capture any traffic which is not encrypted at the application layer, e.g. by SSL. While this does not inherently violate the anonymity of the source, it affords added opportunities for data interception by self-selected third parties, greatly increasing the risk of exposure of sensitive data by users who are careless or who mistake Tor's anonymity for security.

sounds like phorm to me but me not a that bright.

Well at the exit point out comes your plaintext request (assuming you don't use a HTTPS service) to the destination server. This plaintext can be monitored for private details and so it would be the responsibility of the user not to put private details into the plaintext system in the first place.

However for general profiling usage (without a private detail) the snooper has no way of knowing who that person is as it cannot be traced back to an individuals IP address. Another more extreme system (I'm sure we will see more of these in the near future) is 'cloud surfing'. Only one trusted person needs to read an entire website e.g. 'The Register' and this individual would then become 'The Register' proxy, the next guy is responsible for surfing the entire 'Slashdot.org' and so on and so on. As far as 'The Register' and 'Slashdot' are concerned now they have just 1 (one) reader! Goodbye Advertising revenue! (I just used those sites as an example because they are popular and have thousands of readers, they could potentially exploit - not that they probably would But who knows these days???)... Also note this will probably run into copyright problems, as it is an Internet guerilla tactic. (but needs must when the devil drives )

---------- Post added at 14:19 ---------- Previous post was at 14:16 ----------

Originally Posted by serial

We can always go back to using bulletin board systems

retro

[Kursk]

Originally Posted by BadPhormula

.....but needs must when the devil drives...

"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name". You know the rest... (Rev. 13:16-18)

Gulp

[BadPhormula]

Originally Posted by Kursk

"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name". You know the rest... (Rev. 13:16-18)

Gulp

I'm sure there are less sinful ways of defeating 'the system' I was merely opening peoples minds to the possibility that solutions can be found to problems.

[Kursk]

Originally Posted by BadPhormula

I'm sure there are less sinful ways of defeating 'the system' I was merely opening peoples minds to the possibility that solutions can be found to problems.

Ah apologies, I was referring to the Phorm system with the biblical reference as a means to illustrate doomishly the potential for control and/or the possibility for abuse I wonder if the internet will ever become our only means to buy and sell...