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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.
How do we know Phorm didn't use deep packet inspection/manipulation to show us this article while in fact it's not there.....
Now I still have to find an appropriate Matrix quote and my tin foil hat.
That's its name these days. Nobody, not even themselves, call it "British Telecom".
Has anyone used the n2n peer VPN?
It would be neat if such solutions were built into the popular distros; with all the monitoring creeping up around us it is about time that our PCs defaulted to encrypted traffic.
That's its name these days. Nobody, not even themselves, call it "British Telecom".
At one time people were jokingly calling them Bombay Telecom. At least until India changed the name of the city.
BT (British Telecom) was rebranded years ago and is most widely known as BT. This is because they are an International Company and did not want to be only associated with operating in the UK.
See:
http://paulrobertlloyd.com/articles/britain_rebranded/
"British companies now operate on a global scale and many had decided that any British associations were not good for business. A look at the number of privatised companies that have changed their names will tell you this. British Telecom was one of the first when it became BT in the early nineties - when many other national telecom companies - France Telecom and Deutche Telecom for example haven't felt the need. British Gas (now BG) and British Steel (now Corus) are two recent examples."
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
"[Our decision has] nothing to do with cost or privacy, it's about resources and priority,"
awwwwwwww go throw your toys out the pram
BT has been around since the 1980's and operates in over 170 countries....
I think that beats bit torrent...
guys, please stop calling it BP, for most of the world BP is Brooklyn Philharmonic
-errrr ... NOOOOO!
This "focusing revenues" sounds a lot like an equation which didn't work out well for Phorm.
On one had is the money they "could" make by introducing it by adverts, on the other is the potential number of existing customers who will jump to another ISP added to the number of potential customers not even looking at BT as an option when switching from their ISP. Their current subscribers direct debits are guaranteed income with most subscribers not bothering to look around. Not to mention dealing with Phorm gives you the badge of a pariah.
They could be right, in that it's more profitable to drop Phorm. That said, I'm not sure they dropped it permanently. They seem to have bought into the DPI advert injection model, so no doubt they will only put it into the "let's get back to that after the broohaha has calmed down" box before being reintroduced a couple of years from now under a different name with lessons learned about "how not to get caught". They may still face further legal / political fallout over what they've done to date with Phorm, so dropping Phorm may help mitigate any sanctions.
For those who are currently with BT and have reconsidered moving away after this announcement I say "watch this space, BT have proven themselves perfectly willing to fuck their customers over once, they will do it again". BT think they have done no wrong. They can't be trusted. They avoided police action in the UK, they may yet avoid other punishment, but consumers CAN punish them.
Moreover, BT the (global) telecommunications company has used this brand long before BitTorrent existed. Might I suggest he stops calling BitTorrent BT to avoid himself getting confussed?
Also, AT&T don't call themselves American Telephone & Telegraph Company in all their advertising literature and billing, do they? Perhaps for the hell of it he could stop referring to them as AT&T because he might also easily confuse their name with AT&T.
Alternatively, he could just use wikipedia's disambiguation before posting silly requests.
I often confuse AT&T with running my old modem in test mode
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4002-talktalk-follow-suit-on-phorm.html
I hope nobody owns Phorm shares...
wot no sig
Be is part of O2 not the other way around. And you can have a cancellation free contract with Be, you just pay a set up fee. You also get a free fixed IP address, free modem and up to 24 Mbit ADSL2. All for £17.50/month with no usage cap.