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[News] European Commission Could 'Crack Down' on Phorm-chummy UK Government, Police

  • Subject: [News] European Commission Could 'Crack Down' on Phorm-chummy UK Government, Police
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:36:30 +0000
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • User-agent: KNode/0.10.9
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Bad Phorm: UK Police give green light to Internet spying

,----[ Quote ]
| The email is quoted by El Reg and states that "it has been decided that no 
| Criminal Offence has been committed" and there was a "lack of Criminal Intent 
| on behalf of BT and Phorm Inc in relation to the tests."  
| 
| The best bit, though, is the revelation that BT customers would have given 
| implied consent to being spied upon without their knowledge because the aim 
| of the tests was to enhance product quality.  
`----

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/20759/1054/

Police drop BT-Phorm probe

,----[ Quote ]
| The European Commission is now the last authority that could move against BT 
| and Phorm, or punish UK authorities for their failure to enforce privacy 
| regulations. Responsibility for enforcing those rules belongs to the 
| Information Commissioner's Office. In letters to BT earlier this year, 
| obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, it agreed with the firm that 
| its customers were too stupid to understand what the tests were about, and 
| said it did not intend to pursue the matter.      
| 
| Commission lawyers are currently analysing the UK government's explanation of 
| why no action has been taken. Last week the Department for Business,  
| Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said it believes future Phorm deployments 
| can be legal, but refused to make public what it told Brussels about the 
| secret trials.   
`----

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/22/bt_phorm_police_drop/


Recent:

More on Number 10’s website fiasco

,----[ Quote ]
| The original stylesheet4 is 612 lines in length and is 9234 bytes in size
| (9KB).
|
| The modified stylesheet5 is 3826 lines long and weighs in at a frankly
| astonishing 63724 bytes (63KB)!
|
| [...]
|
| “If” the developers have modified the Wordpress engine, as is being suggested
| as a possibility here, and then sold it to the Government, in my humble
| understanding that means they have distributed their modifications. That
| means those modifications must also be licensed under the GPL. I had a quick
| look on New Media Maze’s web site and couldn’t find an area for software
| downloads or mention of the GPL. That doesn’t say anything to be honest and
| there might be nothing to this, but it would be interesting to find out a bit
| more… Is there a real Wordpress guru who can look at the “footprint” of the
| XHTML the site generates and tell if it is different? Or are there any other
| ways to tell if it has been modified?
|
| Anyway, what a wheez this all is for us bloggers: It just isn’t Gordon’s year
| is it…
`----

http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/08/18/more-on-number-10/


Timber! (More on Number 10’s website)

,----[ Quote ]
| So, out of 24 files in the original theme package, only three files have been
| removed. If you look here in the comments from my post of yesterday, you can
| read what Dave Smith of NMM said:
|
|     1. The only file that was drawn upon from Ant’s theme was the css file.
|
| Now clearly some of the files above will be pre-requisites for any Wordpress
| theme (like index.php for example) but 21 out of 24?.
|
| I’m sure I can smell something quite smelly around here.
`----

http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/08/22/timber-more-on-number-10/


British authorities lost memory stick containing information about dangerous
criminals

,----[ Quote ]
| This stick apparently contains unencrypted information on numerous
| incarcerated criminals in England and Wales.
`----

http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/114704


British Government Violates Copyright

,----[ Quote ]
| As much as I utterly despise the entire premise of Intellectual Monopoly,
| this is about violating the principles of a Free License, and if it's good
| enough for the British government to violate our civil rights in the name of
| Intellectual Monopoly, then it's good enough for the Free World to protect
| its "property" (in fact Freedom) too…
`----

http://slated.org/british_government_violates_copyright


K government stole website theme

,----[ Quote ]
| NUMBER 10, the UK Prime Minister's website, is apparently built using a
| design it nicked.
`----

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/08/18/uk-government-stole-website


Number 10 and the Creative Commons

,----[ Quote ]
| I can only assume that Number 10 have requested, and received, permission of
| the author to remove all traces of this license and attribution from their
| Wordpress site. I have left a “contact us message” at the author’s website to
| see if this is the case…
|
| [Update] Anthony Baggett, the theme’s author, has just confirmed that No 10
| have not requested that the attribution be removed. That’s not playing fair
| by my book.
`----

http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/08/18/number-10-and-the-creative-commons/


ISPs Will All Spy on Their Customers, Professor Warns

,----[ Quote ]
| If there's a candidate for the worst future violator of your privacy, look no
| further than the company you pay for broadband.
|
| So says University of Colorado law professor and former federal prosecutor
| Paul Ohm, who argues in a new article that ISPs have the means, motive and
| opportunity to kill your online privacy.
`----

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/isps-will-all-s.html


Police quiz BT on secret Phorm trials

,----[ Quote ]
| City of London police questioned BT earlier this week as part of a probe into
| the covert wiretapping and profiling of the internet use of tens of thousands
| of BT customers during tests of Phorm's adware system.
`----

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/05/bt_phorm_police_meeting/


Phorm secretly tracked Americans too

,----[ Quote ]
| of British Telecom customers as part of its grand scheme to target online ads
| from inside the world's ISPs, it was "operating a number of public commercial
| services" on various stateside networks.
`----

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/13/phorm_us_tests/


Spy fear over e-mail check plan

,----[ Quote ]
| Plans to give local councils and other public bodies the power to monitor
| e-mail and internet traffic have been branded a "snoopers' charter".
|
| The government wants to make it mandatory for phone and internet companies to
| store all information on personal web use for 12 months.
`----

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7557963.stm


Home Office questioned over Phorm

,----[ Quote ]
| Critics have asked why the Home Office has not intervened over secret Phorm
| trials BT conducted in 2006 and 2007.
`----

The EU has asked the UK government to clarify the situation.


Bad Phorm: EU demands UK Government response on intrusive web ad tracking
technology

,----[ Quote ]
| Controversial behavioral advertising targeting outfit Phorm, whose Webwise ad
| technology monitors user browsing habits to serve appropriate advertising
| messages, might have dragged the UK Government into a slugfest with the
| European Union over a possible breach of strict Euro data laws...
`----

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/19884/1054/


Controversial Ad Network Caught Editing Wikipedia

,----[ Quote ]
| Phorm has been beset by controversy for years over its business model and
| quietly-run trials on British Telecom's (BT) broadband service.
`----

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/04/08/controversial-ad-network-caught-editing-wikipedia
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