Political Considerations
The fight against intrusive Deep Packet Inspection spyware systems such as Phorm attracts several types of people. This site aims to cater to them all, but to use it best you'll need to decide roughly where you stand on the political issues.
User categories
Here a few of the categories of user who are expected to be able to get something out of this site:
- Concerned Commercial
- Owners of high traffic commercial sites may be rightly concerned about Phorm-like spyware stealing their copyrighted content, and using it without their consent to market their competitors more effectively to their visitors. These webmasters will likely not want to inconvenience any legitimate visitors, but will want to do as much as possible to ensure that their content can't be ripped off without their consent. Analysis of the documented behaviour of spyware companies such as Phorm indicates that they can't be trusted to take care of proper opt-out themselves.
- Educators
- Some webmasters feel that it's important for the public to fully understand the issues surrounding DPI spyware, and that the spyware companies and ISPs are deliberately trying to disguise what's really happening. They're of the view that although they don't want to unduly impact their visitors' experience of their site, the popularity of the site gives them an opportunity to alert their visitors to the danger. These webmasters may feel that it's appropriate to display prominent warning messages to their visitors who are in danger of being affected by spyware.
- Campaigners
- Some webmasters feel that the issues presented by DPI spyware are important enough that it doesn't matter if some visitors get a downgraded service from their website - or even no service at all. Moreover, they feel that it will take a highly-visible backlash to make the ISPs implementing such spyware change their minds. Their stance is that all users even remotely associated with spyware ISPs should be inconvenienced as much as possible, in order to massively and highly visibly damage the credibility and profitability of those ISPs.
So how does that affect how I use this site?
PhormCheck offers a database of IP address ranges that are associated with DPI spyware. Those ranges are divided up into the following types of address, known within the database as 'IspTypes':
- isp
- The address belongs to an ISP that is currently running, or plans to run, an implementation of a known DPI spyware product
- vendor
- The address belongs to a corporation that produces a known DPI spyware product.
- associated
- The address is believed to be indirectly associated with a spyware product. For example, spidering traffic may have been seen from this address range when requesting addition to a site blacklist.
- subsidiary
- The address belongs to an ISP that is a subsidiary of a spyware ISP, but where the subsidiary ISP has announced that it does not or will not be running the spyware. If you wish to punish the parent ISP, then you may wish to apply your countermeasures to subsidiaries, even if they are clean.
Depending upon which political camp you find yourself in, you may wish to limit which types of entry you want to use. 'Commercials' will probably only be interested in 'vendor' entries (also known as the 'conservative' version of the database, 'Educators' will also care about 'isp' entries (the 'educator' version, and 'Campaigners' will likely want them all (the 'full' version).
When querying or exporting copies of the database, you're able to specify which entry types you would like to exclude - see the database export and query pages for more information.