Help NoDPI Phorm item get slashdotted
p2pnet news view Advertising | P2P:- “We are trying to get this onto the /. front page Jon, and any assistance would be appreciated,” says Phorm nemesis Alex Hanff in an email.
No worries, Alex.
Here’s the Slashdot url – http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=4200429
Below is the NoDPI post which, not at all incidentally, is also on Wikileaks, together with links to the statement referred to »»»
NoDPI have sent a letter of complaint to the Financial Services Authority (FSA) regarding Phorm Inc.’s statements to the press and market news services regarding support of legal compliance from various UK Government Departments and Regulators.
Phorm claim that the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the Home Office and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR or BERR) have all cleared Phorm’s WebWise technology as being fully compliant under UK and EU Law.
This is contrary to action taken by the European Commission earlier this week, who have initiated legal proceedings against the UK Government specifically for failing to uphold and enforce EU Privacy Directives regarding Phorm’s covert trials with BT in 2006/2007.
Furthermore, NoDPI have produced statements from DBERR, ICO and the Home Office which contradict Phorm’s statements to the press and market news services this week.
NoDPI are calling for the FSA to investigate whether or not Phorm’s statements to the market can be seen as breaking the rules of trading as they are misleading and could even be interpretted as fraudulant.”
There’s also a copy of the ICO statement here.
Opting out of Phorm
Deep Privacy Invasion firm Phorm isn’t doing too well, lately.
As p2pnet posted yesterday, following complaints to the European Commission about how the privacy pirate tested its behavioural advertising ’service’ on BT users in the UK without their knowledge or permission, the EC has started legal action against Britain.
We went on »»»
The Open Rights Group wrote to Microsoft, Google/Youtube, Facebook, AOL/Bebo, Yahoo, Amazon and Ebay urging them to opt-out of Phorm and soon after, Amazon said it won’t allow the company to, “scan its web pages to produce targeted ads,” according to the BBC.
Will it be the first of many? – p2pnet wondered.
Now, “The Wikimedia Foundation requests that our web sites including Wikipedia.org and all related domains be excluded from scanning by the Phorm / BT Webwise system, as we consider the scanning and profiling of our visitors’ behavior by a third party to be an infringement on their privacy,” it says in a letter to Phorm.
Affected are 83 domains which should be excluded and, “please exclude any and all subdomains as well,” says the foundation.
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
April, 2009
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April 18th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
I hope BT gets investigated as well.
April 18th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
http://torrentfreak.com/isp-speeds-up-customers-bittorrent-downloads-090418/
The ISP transforms torrent files on the fly to serve local seeds to its customers.
But this should be done by the torrent client instead.
Torrent clients can count hops between various seeds served to them by the tracker and try those that have lower number of hops first. That way, the client is likely to try seeds from the same ISP.
To avoid traceroute of each seed (there may be thousands), the discovered topology information could be shared with other peers so that there is no need to do traceroute one more time. For example, the number of hops between 1.2.3.A and 4.5.6.B is likely to be the same as the number of hops between 1.2.3.C and 4.5.6.D – assuming the prefix /24 is the most common.
If the torrent client can guess network topology information by itself, there should be less needs for local trackers or technologies like P4P. The torrent crowd could map the Internet this way.
April 18th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
wtf is the post up there doing here