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swhx7
Premium
join:2006-07-23
Elbonia
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| The other evil
The selling of customers' browsing data (or access to it) is widely recognized as offensive and objectionable to the customers. The other evil in this situation is less recognized, but ultimately even worse: ISPs could gain a licence to falsify data on its way from one person to another.
This pdf is notes of a presentation that Phorm marketers gave for prospective customers. It has lots of technical detail beyond what has been known to most "netizens" so far.
And among other things, the phorm system installed at an ISP redirects requests (there's a request when you click a link or bookmark, or type in a URL) invisibly to a user, and "impersonates" the destination site long enough to contaminate the request/response with Phorm code.
If this somehow becomes accepted as legitimate, it will become hard to trust anything received over the wires, or to be sure that what one transmits is received unaltered at the other end, unless it's encrypted. Once given this power, ISPs or companies they contract with will sooner or later escalate to "filtering" pages deemed undesirable, and eventually rewriting content.
We shouldn't have to accept this any tampering at all in order to obtain internet access.
If you feel the same, please write to your Congress-people and demand laws that require *Separate* consent for data-interception (so they can't require you to consent in order to get internet service). | |
openbox9
join:2004-01-26
Alexandria, VA
 ·AT&T Southeast
| said by swhx7  :And among other things, the phorm system installed at an ISP redirects requests (there's a request when you click a link or bookmark, or type in a URL) invisibly to a user, and "impersonates" the destination site long enough to contaminate the request/response with Phorm code. You mean like a proxy server? | |
MarkH
reserved for later use
Premium
join:2002-12-19
| »www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/080518-phorm.pdf
That link is a report done on the system phorm want to employ, it was authored by Dr Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge.
Phorm have not disputed any of the claims made in Dr Clayton's report, as you will see, it is far more reaching than any simple proxy.
The system actually forges cookies, even for sites that don't use them, it employs multiple redirects to achieve their forgery, and is generally very intrusive.
»www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/about/ Dr Clayton has also made several postings to that blog with regard to the phorm situation. | |
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