Apr 092008
 

Either something is in the tap-water-from-a-spring PR drones in the UK are drinking, or an intrinsically abject failure of intelligence is coming to the fore, but they seem to be losing their “magic” touch of late.

“We were adware, not spyware, honest” Phorm was caught with its hand in the cookie jar (no pun intended) recently, making some rather intriguing “clarifications” of the Wikipedia entry about the company.

Having read the differences between the two versions (pre and post PR drone assault), I can understand why Phorm might want to “clarify” their entry.  Parts of the entry they “clarified” include

Mar 292008
 

In recent months, there has been growing discussion online regarding the proposed deal between major ISPs in the UK, such as BT, Virgin Media, and Carphone Warehouse, and a company called Phorm.

The basic premise goes something like this1:

  1. A customer of an ISP signed up for the system types in a URL.
  2. The page request is routed through the ISP to Phorm’s servers.
  3. Phorm’s servers modify a cookie on the user’s computer.
  4. Phorm’s servers forward the request for a URL to the website being requested.
  5. The website being requested sends back all the relevant page data to Phorm’s servers.

Bad Behavior has blocked 367 access attempts in the last 7 days.