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BT Drops Phorm, Citing More Pressing Priorities
Tom DBA notes a story up at The Register that begins "BT has abandoned plans to roll out Phorm's controversial web monitoring and profiling system across its broadband network, claiming it needs to concentrate resources on network upgrades... BT's announcement comes a day before MPs and peers of the All Party Parliamentary Communications Group are due to begin an investigation of Internet privacy. Their intervention follows the EU's move to sue the UK government over its alleged failure... properly [to] implement European privacy laws with respect to the trials, drawing further bad publicity to the venture." We've discussed Phorm many times in the past.
That doesn't change the fact that I had no idea what BT was, and I still didn't know after reading the summary. 'Telecom' should've been in there somewhere.
BT by itself and the only thing my puny brain comes up with is, of course, BitTorrent.
I'm a little shaky on what the n2n people mean when they say "layer 2 VPN"-- I think this means that they run a tunneled virtual data link layer on top of UDP-- but they also mention the requirement of supernodes (ala Skype) to allow NAT traversal to happen. I'd have to know a little bit more about how the protocol works to know for sure, but I am a bit more skeptical about security when you allow that to happen. Perhaps they built it as a virtual layer 2 so that you could ensure that your upper-level end-to-end encryption happened despite your traffic being routed through upper-level intermediaries? Also-- what kind of protocol overhead are you getting when you have [physical]-[data link]-[network]-[transport (UDP)]-[application]-[data link]-[network]-[transport]-[application]? Seems like a neat app, so it would be nice if someone who knew a little more about it could answer my questions.