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Wikipedia Opts Out Of Phorm
ais523 writes "Wikipedia (and other websites run by Wikimedia) have requested to opt-out from Phorm; according to the email they sent, they 'consider the scanning and profiling of our visitors' behavior by a third party to be an infringement on their privacy.'"
Another reader points to this post on techblog.wikimedia.org which includes a confirmation from Phorm that those sites will be excluded.
It's the opposite of Artificial Intelligence: if you network enough marketers you get Sincere Stupidity.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Wikimedia Tech Blog post.
(This would have happened sooner, but Brion was snowed under.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
But first there is a need for people:
Read this thread down and comment on this one
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1199671&cid=27586613
If you are connected with BT please try some of these suggestions and see if it is possible to locate the IP addresses of Phorm. It is important that we stop this menace(or at least do what we can) before it spreads to other ISPs.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Detect IPs from ISPs who are part of Phorm and redirect them to a page about Phorm the first time they visit Wikipedia each day. Amazon probably couldn't afford to do this, but it's not like Wikipedia loses any revenue if they irritate their visitors a bit, and if they can direct that anger to the ISP then it could do a lot of good.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
For those of you, like me, that read TFA and the article linked from TFA and still don't know what Phorm is other than it's something that some UK ISPs are implementing and there appear to be privacy concerns, Wikipedia.
In short, it's system for doing targeted advertising by deep-packet inspection.
Would it be too much to ask for the summary to give some clue about what "Phorm" is, or why Wikipedia would need to or want to "opt out" of it?
aside from the whole invasion of privacy thing, people seem slightly less to pay attetion to the suggestion that intercepting and replacing the adverts on a page is tantamount to theft of advertising revenue, to the page owner for their share, to e.g google for their commision or however they work, and to the advertiser whom may otherwise have recieved an extra click through to their site
You're confusing the content and the information about the people accessing the content. If I publish a web-page, that is public (copyright me). Anyone can read it. However, what isn't public is the list of IP addresses that accessed that content. When reading a webpage, you don't get to know who else has read that webpage.
Phorm gets to know who else read that webpage. And any other HTTP-only webpage.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
The Open Rights Group is keeping a list of people it's asked to loudly and publicly tell Phorm to phuck off. Amazon opting out made lots of mainstream media a couple of days ago; looks like Wikimedia doing the same will get a bit of notice too.
The point is to publicise that Phorm (a) exists and (b) is a bad thing. Schemes like Phorm only get away with existing insofar as people aren't aware of them.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The way they're doing it is likely illegal in the EU. The EU is actually taking Britain to court for not having prosecuted Phorm and BT already.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
El Reg has been covering Phorm and its existing and planned abuses for some time:
http://search.theregister.co.uk/?q=phorm
unfortunately one of the Phorm directors is also in tight with the UK gov in an internet policy group
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/15/kip_meek_berr/
and they have been hard to dislodge over there, although Brussels (EU) has also taken notice
(see parent)
so far, they seem to have been treated with suspicion and hostility over here in the USA by everyone AFAICT, which is probably a good thing
I'm just sayin'
Any content that is distributed under any of the Creative Commons NC licenses (e.g. cc-sa-nc cannot legally used for advertising purposes. The very similar license under which the Grateful Dead allow redistribution of their old concert recordings explicitly lists advertising and "exploiting databases compiled from their traffic" as forbidden.
Schemes like Phorm only get away with existing insofar as people aren't aware of them.
Wrong.
Schemes like Phorm exist because they are opt-out.
Numerous studies have shown that people are lazy and won't even do things that are in their best interest if they have to exert even minimal effort. That's why opt-out is so successful.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Actually, "-ize" is absolutely not an Americanism - it is in fact correct spelling in either British or American English, whereas "-ise" is correct only in less formal British English.
It is sad that very few of us British seem to understand our language properly; almost no one here realizes that it is actually more conservative in British English to use -ize and not -ise. For example, go and look at an older copy of the Oxford English dictionary or the Times and you will see all those words spelled "-ize". I believe that even the newer editions of the OED, despite now listing the "-ise" forms, state that "-ize" is the preferred form.
To further complicate matters, the only words to which this rule can can apply are those which derive from Greek (and thus contain the Greek suffix "-ize" - this is the rationale for it being the more correct variant). So for example "enterprize" and "capsise" are always just wrong in either British or American English.
"Numerous studies have shown that people are lazy and won't even do things that are in their best interest if they have to exert even minimal effort. That's why opt-out is so successful."
Or because opt-out is a fraudulent scam. We've got ten thousand and one things to keep track of for real life, and I don't see why we should have to keep track of opt-out status for every pissant website.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
And if DNSSEC was properly implemented across the board then we wouldn't even NEED to be wary of self-signed certificates to begin with.
If you can trust that the DNS pointed you to the right site, then you are as safe as you are using SSL.
Numerous studies have shown that people are lazy
Numerous studies have shown that people attempt to rationally allocate their time and attention.
There are millions of businesses in this world. It is not humanly possible to opt-out of all their marketing drivel even when there a cost-benefit in doing so.
Marketers steal the time and attention of many people to make a sale to one person and then act all surprised when those people get pissed. Spam is just the extreme example of that, unfortunately becoming less extreme all the time.
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The USA is