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Spyware and Targeted Advertising
News from around the world
- Norman Lamont Emerges from Shadows to Join Board of Shadowy Internet Ad Spies Phorm - Norman Lamont, the former Tory chancellor so memorably characterised as a complete ignoramus on ITV’s Spitting Image, was yesterday announced as a non-executive director of the advertising technology firm Phorm, following a boardroom dispute that has seen three US-based directors ousted from the company.Lamont, who is presumably enjoying the current financial crisis on account of it making Black Wednesday - which happened on his watch - look like a gentil tea party, has been drafted in by Phorm to help slime the wheels of their ongoing campaign to persuade the government that their company’s working practise doesn’t actually constitute a Big Brother-style snooping service, where users' private web habits are recorded and monitored for the purposes of big business clients (which, funnily enough, is pretty much an exact description of what they do).
Source: BadIdea [3rd Dec 2008]
- Phorm's night of the long knives - They don't do things by halves at Phorm - they do it wholesale. In a move reminiscent of a purge of an east-European politburo circa 1952, the controversial ISP adware tracking technology company yesterday dumped four of its board members (including a chairman who held on to his seat for just three months). But then that's what you get for falling out with that nice Mr. Ertugrul.
Source: TelecomTV [2nd Dec 2008]
- BT Webwise Trial - From 30th September BT will be running a trial of 'Phorm' in which a small proportion of BT Total Broadband customers will be invited to try BT Webwise.Customers who have been selected on an anonymous basis will be invited to participate in the trial via a special web page that will appear when they open their web browser. We would advise people to decline taking part.
Source: BT [29th Sep 2008]
Phorm
- The Anti-Phorm League - An individual's fight against Phorm.
- Dephormation - Help protect yourself against Phorm.
- Bad Phorm - Good blog on No Deep Packet Inspection, with up-to-date anti-Phorm information.
- No DPI - Good blog on No Deep Packet Inspection, with up-to-date anti-Phorm information.
- Spyware tsar targets your home computer - Article in 'This is Money' about Kent Ertugrul, one of the founders of Phorm.
- BT advert trials were 'illegal' - Trials of an online ad system carried out by BT involving more than 30,000 of its customers were potentially illegal, says a leading digital rights lawyer. (BBC)
- Phorm 'illegal' says policy group - Online advert system Phorm is illegal in the UK, the Foundation for Information Policy Research (Fipr), has argued in an open letter (BBC)
- The Phorm files - A good starting point to find out about Phorm, compiled by The Register
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