You may have heard of Phorm – they’re the scumbags that, with the complicity of your ISP, plan to hijack your personal data – i.e., everything you do via your browser, including bank and other sensitive information – and use it to foist unwanted but targeted advertising upon you.
A BT trial started today – they’ve run two already, bet they didn’t tell you, and it’ll likely gain wider distribution as time goes on. There’s a huge groundswell of opinion against Phorm, and am anti-Phorm petition at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ispphorm/ with, at the time of writing, over 18,000 signatures.
There’s software, called AntiPhorm, which as far as I can tell is far too clunky – I can’t make the bugger work, and every time I fix one problem, it throws up another. One way to fix Phorm is to block the website http://www.webwise.net in your browser, as that’s the website that delivers Phorm’s cookies. If it works, this seems like the simplest solution. For Firefox, the TrackMeNot add-on does an excellent job of misdirection – note that it doesn’t enable automatically on installation. Right-click the TMN icon, bottom right of the browser window, select Options and check Enable.
If Phorm is new to you, check this out http://chris-linfoot.net/d6plinks/CWLT-7CWN5X from where I filched the website fix, above.
Ron's Rants... 