ralpress.org

theregister.co.uk has provided details of BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse’s plans to hand supposedly “anonymized” customer web usage data over to Phorm, a third party advertising broker.

If you use one of these providers, you really need to have a read of this article. It’s generating a large number of concerned comments as I write this.

What’s more, it’s looking increasingly likely that BT (at least) has already handed over data to Phorm without consulting its customers!

As I asked rhetorically in a comment left (currently in moderation) on the above page, what’s the difference between handing over “anonymized” HTTP data and handing over “anonymized” voice data? If the former comes to pass, how long before the latter?

EDIT: The more I read about this, the worse it gets:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/25/phorm_isp_advertising/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/29/phorm_broadband_isp_targets/

EDIT 2:
Looks like my post title wasn’t as original as I thought:
http://www.badphorm.co.uk/

EDIT 3:
A recent comment titled “Internal BT worries” left by an anonymous source on the theregister.co.uk may shed some light on BT’s current internal position on this:

I wouldn’t normally do the Anonymous Coward thing but …..

Looking around on the BT Intranet this article has come up a few times and there is definitely some internal worry about the publicity elements. BT Security have also (but not formally) hinted at concerns about the offshoring of this data.

The standard internal answer is currently:

“People have wildly different feelings about this

Actually, if used properly it can be a huge advantage for the customer

Others like you feel different

We will monitor this carefully and see what the experience in practice will be and evluate seriously”

It’s down as a priority delivery for Q4 2008.

For the Wholesale query above this is definitely a BT Retail initiative.

I’d just like to add my voice to those supporting the actions and aims of Greenpeace and Plane Stupid with regard to the expansion plans at Heathrow. It is environmental (with both a small and a large “e”) insanity and completely unneccessary. This is all about the determination of BAA and the government to ensure that the south of England hosts the aviation transport hubs of choice for Europe.

(more…)

Oops! Our bad. When we wrote that stuff in our Universal Declaration of Human Rights about ‘Freedom of Expression’, we omitted a qualifying clause along the lines of ‘provided the content of your expression doesn’t offend anyone, particularly those whose ethical frameworks derive their ultimate authority from superstitious belief’.

You see, a theist’s right to be protected from the offensive opinions and actions of non-theists, outweighs the right of non-theists to be protected from the offensive opinions and actions of theists. Quite why this should be so no one is really sure, but regardless, someone should add this inviolable rule to the Declaration for it’s so often invoked that it could really do with some codification.

This is yet another poignant illustration of why the Declaration document should be a user-editable wiki rather than an inflexible, static HTML page. The latter is so Ethics 1.0.

Stephen Fry’s blog is one of the brighter nodes on the Web. The knowledge and insight accrued over many years as a geek, gadget lover and general technology enthusiast ooze from every pore of his wonderfully written and deeply thoughtful posts.

Some of his writing clearly targets the intelligent, technology-interested, non-specialist (particularly those posts which are co-published on the Guardian), but his many years as a passionate consumer of technology and his mastery of the craft of written English combine to ensure that there really is something here for everyone — although fans of Microsoft software may get a bit hot-under-the-collar reading his less than flattering opinions of that company and its products.

His easy writing style belies a sharp eye for detail and accuracy. He recently wrote of the Asus EEE:

“The Asus EEE PC perched on my knee combines GNU software with a Linux kernel”

An innocuous enough sentence. However, I’ve now read dozens of reviews of the EEE written by professional and semi-professional technology journalists and I think this is the first piece in which the distinction has been made between the GNU operating system and its kernel, Linux. You may not care much about the distinction, but evidently, Stephen does. This type of attention to detail typifies his accessible and insight-packed writing style.

Definitely one for the feed reader’s subscription list!

Dominic Connor writes on The RegDeveloper about the battle for hearts and minds in higher education computing departments:

“University computer science departments are rapidly becoming Microsoft-free zones, as Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) combine with Java to become the de-facto standard environment for students of programming.

Microsoft knows from history that this will be fatal in the long term, hence its decision to extend free availability of core development tools to students. Most of my generation of computer science students quite literally never touched any IBM kit, even though - back then - it had a bigger share of the IT market than today is enjoyed by Microsoft, Dell and Hewlett-Packard put together.

We did C and Unix, and as we spread like plague rats out into employers, infecting them with the new wave …”

Dominic makes a particularly interesting point about the scope of Microsoft’s efforts in his concluding paragraph, but I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t read it. The full article is here.

Engaging in something as ‘popular and timely as blogging’ is one way.

How to get fired from CNN.

Neither myself nor Melissa would ever prohibit Jake (our two years and seven months old son) from playing with toy guns, toy soldiers or other military toys, but neither are we in any rush to introduce such things to his world. At the moment he is perfectly happy playing with fire engines, helicopters, Brio trains, Lego bricks, jigsaw puzzles, finger and brush paint, and all the other things that materially privileged young children play with. He’s fascinated with soldiers, but mainly because (in his world) they play bugles, wear identical clothes, and march up and down in synchronized fashion.

Last weekend we took him to the birthday party of a (just turned) three year old friend of his where he found a toy gun made of transluscent plastic. He thought it was a space rocket and spent a blissful ten minutes or so doing 5,4,3,2,1 countdowns before blasting it into orbit.

Today we were at St Katherine’s Dock on the Thames. At the entrance to the dock is a 36 (38?) pounder canon from an early 18th Century French warship. Somewhat bizzarely, Jake thought it was a camera (he declared as much) and greatly amused his mum, dad and grandma by looking along the length of the gun while saying “cheese!” (He has no idea that there is a camera manufacturer called Canon, I can assure you).

I may not be a plant-munching pacifist, but indoctrinating children into fantasizing about death and destruction does not sit comfortably with me. Jake will learn about guns and war soon enough, and such knowledge will probably come from television, the movies or even Disney.

Sigh.

WebFusion (a Pipex Communications UK company) is offering Ubuntu Server (v.6.06) as the default configuration with its Linux VPS accounts.

It’s good to see Ubuntu being adopted by commercial hosting providers, and also good to see some alternative to the RedHat hegemony.