Slashdot Mirror
Amazon To Block Phorm Scans
clickclickdrone writes "The BBC are reporting that Amazon has said it will not allow online advertising system Phorm to scan its web pages to produce targeted ads. For most people this is a welcome step, especially after the European Commission said it was starting legal action against the UK earlier this week over its data protection laws in relation to Phorm's technology. Anyone who values their privacy should applaud this move by Amazon."
What the hell is going on with all my dinner napkins? When I bought them they were nice and square - now after a few washes they've turned into parallelograms or some kind of fucked up trapezoid. How am I supposed to fold these so the corners line up nicely?
Let's see here. On the left hand, we have the people at Amazon claiming to make a secure site, and putting escrow into the encryption such that data can be seamlessly copied from the operating system to an unknown location. We witness Amazon as an incredibly corrupt entity, in nearly every possible way - from locking in hardware manufacturers to throwing lawsuits at everybody who even vaguely seems to threaten them. On the right hand, we have the code of Linux, FreeBSD, etc. available for the entire world to review, figures of authority are not chosen based on how much of a jackal they are, but how much their experience is worth. OpenBSD and FreeBSD have things like in-kernel crypto, chroot jails, are actually POSIX compliant, and seem to suffer from very little bloat due to the trend to make specific utilities as discrete as possible, and hence nearly as flawless as possible.
So let's just agree to disagree. Or I can just call you a fluckin' idiot. I'm fine with either, fella.