By its own figures, released today, Phorm would appear to have a year left to either convince a major ISP to roll out its controversial personalised advertising service or re-invent itself as a content recommendation service for publishers.
Figures for the first half of 2009 show the company lost $15m and now has just over $30m [...]

Researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) have been able to infiltrate and hijack the Torpig botnet for ten days before they were locked out – and just published a paper on their findings. During their time in control the infamous botnet (also known as Sinowal) managed to steal 70 gigabytes of data [...]

ISPs have reacted with guarded optimism to Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, pulling back on controversial plans to store all details of a subscriber’s web and email traffic on a single, unified database.
The ISPs are still legally obliged to record details of a person’s web viewing habits – including what IPTV they have consumed, which sites [...]

The European Commission has said it is going to take the UK to court over its failure to enforce european privacy and data protection laws — and it’s all because of Phorm. Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding has for the past few months been conversing with the Information Commissioner’s Office about the online advertiser’s controversial methods [...]

Controversial targeted advertising company Phorm has announced a deal with Korean Internet service provider KT. This will see the company’s behavioural targeting advertising system replicated in Korea after successful trials in the UK. However, there are fears that the Phorm system infringes privacy laws and it has attracted a number of legal challenges.
In simple terms [...]

Privacy campaigners have ushered in the new year with warnings that new EU rules compelling ISPs to keep a record of email communications for a year are an infringement of civil liberties.
However, Alex Brown, a partner at Simmons & Simmons’ and data privacy expert believes that the new law, which comes in to effect in [...]

OFCOM has added consumer guides on Slamming and Unsolicited calls to their website. These two areas generate over 1,000 calls per month to OFCOM from consumers.
The unsolicited calls guide includes silent calls made by automatic dialler systems where the recipient is connected to an operator but hears silence if no operator is available.
Slamming is the [...]

After months of hype, public demonstrations, threatened legal action, a government review and recurring BT promises of a service “in the next few weeks”; Phorm finally launches on BT today under the Webwise brand name.
The controversial technology tracks web surfing histories for ISP customers (who have opted-in) and so can serve more relevant advertising which [...]

NebuAd, one of two arch exponents of tracking user behaviour – via their ISP – to deliver more targeted adverts, has suffered a major blow with the departure of its CEO, Bob Dykes.
Using technology similar to Phorm, which is due to be trialled with BT “over the coming weeks”, NebuAd tracks user viewing habits so [...]