British Telecom? Bad Phorm!

I am a BT broadband subscriber. At the end of my 12 month contract, I will no longer be a BT broadband subscriber. The reason is as follows:

British Telecom along with the two other largest Internet Service Providers in the UK have decided to sign a deal with a company called Phorm. Phorm is a company that was previously known as 121 Media and developed adware programs that installed themselves without user knowledge onto computers and then presented users with unwanted pop-up boxes every two minutes.

Phorm’s latest enterprise is profiling participating ISP’s customer web traffic and then displaying adverts based on your browsing habits. The idea is that if you Google “shoes in leicester” and then visit a Phorm enabled website, you will see adverts focused around your search terms i.e. shoe shops in Leicester. BT, Virgin Media and the Carphone Warehouse plan to deploy this system under the name Webwise

While I can see the potential in the system, the way it will be deployed and what it can see worries me. Phorm effectively see all web browsing traffic from your PC unless you turn the system off through the use of an opt-out cookie in your web-browser. The problem here is that if you delete this cookie by clearing your internet temporary folders, you are automagically opted back in – the system is “opt-out” rather than opt-in. Phorm will also have visibilty of any web forms you submit to the Internet. Lets say you use hotmail. Although the initial login takes place over HTTPS (an encrypted link that they can’t see), Hotmail switches back to normal HTTP once you are logged in so any email you send will be readable by the Phorm system.

There are many technical authorities in the UK that deem BT and Phorms actions as illegal because it constitutes the unlawful interception of data. This will undoubtably be a matter for debate over many months to come. I won’t be a BT customer long enough to find out what the final decision will be. I hope others follow suit.

There are many websites on the the Internet following BT and Phorms exploits including an online petition at Number 10:

• Online Petition to stop Phorm
• Bad Phorm: Great website for the latest news on Phorm
• Phorm Discussions on BT Forums

Wireless Jungle

I installed an application the other day which effectively turns a PC with a supported wireless card into a wireless packet sniffer and network detection tool. I simply couldn’t believe how many 802.11g wireless networks have sprung up in recent weeks around my neighbourhood. As I write this (when I really should be doing the washing up) I can see 15 wireless networks, most of which are competing to use the same channel numbers so most certainly likely to be interfering with one another – I’m just grateful I run on 802.11a!

I was also interested to see a connection attempt to my wireless access point from what appears to have been a “Wardriver” – these are the idiots that drive around in cars looking for unprotected access points to connect to and access the Internet, probably to hack or download illicit materials anonymously. I’m half tempted to set up a honeypot network just to see if they come back and try to hit it.

Firefox

This is probably a no-brainer for most of you out there but I’ve recently become a convert of the Firefox web browser. Like a lot of people, I used Microsoft Internet Explorer on the basis that it was just “there” and seemed to do a relatively decent job but a colleague recently pointed out that Firefox has the ability to support a number of excellent third-party plugins. Best of the bunch is Adblock Plus which filters out all of the really annoying flashing banner adverts and popups by blocking the connection the browser attempts to make to the advertising web-server. The result is pages that load quickly and look so much cleaner.

Head over to www.firefox.com to check it out!

Today my BT Vision V-Box is mainly dead

So the fan in the BT Vision V-Box decides to give up the ghost. It’s one of those typical things where the one of the bearings goes and it starts making a right old racket when it needs to cool down. I check the BT Website and it says call this number 24/7 for technical assistance so I do. My call gets routed to Bangalore or wherever the hell they are based and I get the robot on the end of line telling me to please be patient and my call is important. After 20 minutes listening to the robot, I finally get through to a helpdesk monkey that asks for all my personal details and then gets my name wrong (I’m starting to wonder if the Robot has more intelligence than the monkey at this point). She asks what the fault is and I explain that the fan in my Vbox is broken and I would like the unit repaired or replaced. She asks me if I have performed a factory reset. I politely explain that I haven’t done a factory reset because the fan is broken – nothing else. She asks if I have updated the firmware. (I find myself wishing I could talk to the robot again) I politely explain again that I haven’t done anything because its a hardware failure and the box requires repair or replacement. She hangs up.

I hate BT.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 (beta)

Download from directly from Microsoft here.