Originally published on Benscomputer.no-ip.org 14 June 2009
Now, it can hardly have escaped anyones attention that BT ran some very
questionable trials of Phorms system. It's been on BBC News, as well as
many other sources, including the Governments refusal to take action.
This has led to the EU intervening on our behalf, not that much has
happened from that so far.
But most of the media has focused on the RIPA element of it, that is to
say the Illegal Interception of the users traffic. Having read the
leaked test documentation (Have a look on WikiLeaks), I'd say that
there's another element to it that appears to have gone largely
unnoticed.
The original trial involved injecting Javascript into each and every
page the user visited (with some unfortunate results on forums), and
based on the test documentation, even users who were opted out (not
that they were given the opportunity in the trials) would find
JavaScript being run on every page.