Posts by ilago

This is idiotology

When was an idealogical commitment to free speech a bad thing? Free speech is the underpinning of western democracies. China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Maynmar, North Korea are the only comparable systems of censorship. The system proposed is not trivial and is certainly not suitable for a democracy.

There is no substantial body of indpendent, peer reviewed academic work to support the proposition that ".. people viewing pornography" suffer harm, let alone long term harm. If any such thing existed, the proponents of these schemes would be trumpeting wouldn't they?

Child abuse and child pornography is already illegal and is a law enforcement issue. The children harmed in the production and distribution of child pornography are not going to helped at all, ever, by censorship. I have no issue with parents controlling the internet access of their children. That is their decision as responsible parents.

It is the opinion of a small group of people that find the idea of pornography offensive that all adults should unable to view this material and decide for themselves. If you don't want to view pornography, make an adult decision and stop looking. It's a small step from a narrow view of pornography to political information becoming offensive and not suitable for adults.

Australia is not very impressed

Australia has had a procession of luddites as Minister for All Things Digital for years and years. At least the last one wasn't dumb enough to try and pull this off. It appears that there is no MP or Senator with a significant grasp of technology to even understand the objections. First they think it will work. Second they seem to be bowing to pressure from very small but vocal pressure groups. The last government provided a net filter free to anyone that wanted it. Around 100,000 were downloaded. Apparently nobody wanted it, so they decide to do this instead.

The "blacklist" is secret. There is no public or Parliamentary scrutiny of the "blacklist". The "blacklist" is exempt from Freedom of Information.

The working group putting this together has no member of any civil liberties or consumer group on it. It's entirely composed of organisations that already agree, public servants and industry groups. The general public don't have a seat, but Microsoft and Google get one each WTF???

The wider implications of the government having sufficient resources to carry out wholesale censorship just like China, Iran and North Korea seem to have escaped their attention.

@ Kanhef

"Alternative operating system that they'd have to make sure that Linux would install and run properly on every computer system."

What an irresponsible attitude. They should have been making sure that Windows was equally well tested.

Regardless of the operating system selected, shouldn't this have been part of their testing and compliance procedures? Any risk assessment for a computer system should have included that Windows is subject to malware infections at a rate exponentially higher than any other operating system. It's not as though it's a state secret or anything.

There is no such thing as completely anonymous data

The Netflix de-anonymiser technology demonstrates this perfectly. The algorithms can be applied to any set of "anonymous" data, small datasets and quite large datasets.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html

The promises of NebuAd, Phorm and their spyware related associates are not just empty they are deceitful. Liars, liars, pants on fire!!!!!

Isn't it great...

That Microsoft don't make household whitegoods......yet

ComScore is listed in Add/Remove

Ben Edelman is one of the most respected spyware researchers in the USA.

It is spyware. I regard it as being as bad as the likes of Gator in that they store personally identified data. Not quite as bad as the range of malware that the big malware removal forums deal with. They are not usually particularly sneaky and someone has probably deliberately installed it even if they weren't aware of all the ramifications.

Details of the installation and removal are here http://www.spywaredb.com/remove-marketscore-internet-accelerator/

No you don't get your data and privacy back.

He wasn't selling them

He was asking for donations to support the hours of work he had put into Creative over, what seems to be, many years. He had been modifying their drivers with their knowledge for some time if you read the thread (don't bother)

It would appear that his drivers were enabling features that Creative had deliberately crippled. There is no excuse for this sort of behaviour from any hardware supplier.

There's also something seriously dodgy about this where Creative appear to be charging for Vista software other than drivers for many cards.

http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1726

The Creative forum thread is now over 2200 posts and 227 pages.

Phorm's interception works at hardware level

...at the first hop so users cannot avoid it by using the normal tools at their disposal. Neat!!

"We've built the system from the ground up with privacy in mind. We don't know who you are or where you have been - that's something other targeted ad providers would struggle to claim."

The history of the company does not support a new-found enthusiasm for the rights of users. Phorm (aka 121Media) has massive expertise on forced and unwanted advertising. Many volunteer malware removers spent 1000s of hours removing PeopleonPage, ContextPlus and the Apropos rootkit from the machines of users that didn't want it, or need it, but could NOT remove without assistance.

Any interception of the communications between the ISP and their customer is Private and Confidential information that should not be in the hands of a known commecial rootkit developer.