Oh happy, happy day!
Ad slinger Phorm ceases trading
Controversial ad targeting firm Phorm has ceased trading. Phorm’s decision follows a failure to secure enough funding to run its business, as explained in a statement to the London Stock Exchange here. Phorm an advertising-technology company and first party data platform provider, announces that, further to its announcement …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 14th April 2016 12:54 GMT Vimes
Re: Regrettably?
I suspect all the people on the coal face left a long time ago.
Only those such as BT executive Ian Livingston really seemed to managed to avoid ending up being severely tarnished as a result of this, at least where subsequent employment was concerned.
His reward was being a place in the House of Lords by Dave 'It's a Private Matter' Cameron - and not that long either after Cameron decided it would be a really good decision to hire Andy Coulson and make him part of the team.
And as for Kent 'neo-luddite' Ertugrul is concerned, how much money did he manage to extract from the company over the past 10 years? He might mourn the passing of his company but I suspect he won't be one of the ones suffering.
The less said about the involvement of Norman Lamont & Patricia Hewitt in this whole escapade the better.
The only good thing about this is that the company never really got anywhere significant outside of their BT trials, so there probably aren't many people on the 'coal face' to suffer in the first place.
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Thursday 14th April 2016 13:08 GMT Camilla Smythe
Re: Regrettably?
hope the major losses are confined to those not at the coal face
You appear to be missing an Icon. Probably the fault of El Reg.
The major losers, apparently $400 million worth, were 'investor idiots'... that's your pension money. The 'data miners', at the coal face, got paid a pretty penny for their efforts out of that $400 million.
Perhaps you might consider setting up a Phorm Shareholders Action Group.
Zero Fucks Given All Round.
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Thursday 14th April 2016 15:27 GMT Gordon 10
Re: Regrettably?
@Camillia
Not necessarily - there are no significant pension funds among Phorms major shareholders unless you are with Standard Life and even thats tiny. You probably lose more from your pension due to Market fluctuations across 1 day.
Phorm Major Shareholders (from Morningstar)
Capital Research and Management Company 6.87
VA CollegeAmerica Smcap World 529E 4.42
Hargreave Hale Limited 3.78
American Funds IS® Global Small Cap 2 2.45
Standard Life Assurance Company 1.27
Miton Asset Management Limited 0.31
Forbes J M & Co 0.02
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Thursday 14th April 2016 12:42 GMT Vimes
It looks like some of those involved have already moved on to other things...
https://nodpi.org/forum/index.php/topic,6935.0/topicseen.html
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Thursday 14th April 2016 13:14 GMT Vimes
"UK prosecutors ruled that prosecution of the firm for violation of data interception laws would not be in the public interest in 2011."
Note the role of Keir Starmer played at the time. And the role he's trying to play now where the IP Bill is concerned.
We are all really up a certain creek without a paddle if we have to rely on people like him...
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Thursday 14th April 2016 13:43 GMT Vimes
'Refusenik'? Seriously?
The value of Phorm shares were continually being diluted with new ones being issued to cover existing debts. Yet time after time they managed to raise their funds despite having little more than a shell of a company and a handful of sock puppet supporters on some stock trading forums (<waves in the direction of HamsterWheel>)
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Thursday 14th April 2016 13:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
prosecution... not be in the public interest
Peculiar that such statments always (?) appear to relate to mega-scandals, with BIG money changing hands and top gov officials involved. In plain English I read: "Yeah, guilty, but we can't prosecute ourselves, can we, so f... off!"
So who had a finger in the Phorm pie?
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Thursday 14th April 2016 13:50 GMT Vimes
Re: prosecution... not be in the public interest
...not to mention both the Labour party (Patricia Hewitt) and the conservatives (Norman Lamont). Then of course you have the CTO of BT moving to work as the CTO of Phorm, the former head of the CPS who has conveniently since been elected as a Labour MP and the former MD of BT who is now in the House of Lords.
I'm sure it's an enjoyable game of professional musical chairs, and one that has proven to be highly profitable for those directly involved in the scheme. It's just a pity about everybody else...
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Thursday 14th April 2016 14:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: prosecution... not be in the public interest
"the CTO of BT moving to work as the CTO of Phorm"
Only BT Retail, wasn't it, mind you, And moving to Phorm after he'd denied that any secret trials were happening at BT Retail, if I recall correctly.
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/stratis-scleparis-74024389
Any relation to this one:
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/officers/7WTAOYODoFfa8-4qgT_O6l6g9Dc/appointments
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Thursday 14th April 2016 13:52 GMT Vimes
Re: prosecution... not be in the public interest
https://www.dephormation.org.uk/?page=83
Pay particular attention to the last section titled 'Awkward Questions'...
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Thursday 14th April 2016 13:31 GMT Chris King
Don't crack open the champagne too soon...
The company may be gone, but that doesn't necessarily mean the tech is gone.
The brains that helped create it still exist, and they could re-create it in a new way elsewhere.
And you can also bet that somebody has copies of the source code safetly stashed away.
Phorm is not dead - the stupidity merely sleeps.
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Thursday 14th April 2016 16:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
"What exactly did they spend it all on and how do you get away with such things?"
Not that this excellent enterprise would ever have done such things, but here is a short list of the things that the founders of cash-losing enterprises have in the past wasted money on:
Hookers
Blow
Fast cars
Sports sponsorship
Lawyers
Political bribery
Inflated salaries
Investments that turned bad
Investments in the schemes of relatives of directors that turned bad
Just paying far too much for things bought from friends of the directors
Expensive and underutilised offices and/or IT assets
Big boats
More hookers.
As you can see, there are plenty of others beyond such boring ones as having a bad business plan, managerial incompetence, and having far too many staff with nothing to do.
Phorm obviously has done none of these so they must have found a new money disposal system, which shows true business originality.
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Thursday 14th April 2016 16:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "What exactly did they spend it all on and how do you get away with such things?"
I was dragooned into working with them some years back at the time of the infamous "BT trials".
I would add two items to the list:
1: Stupidly expensive office space on Regent St (next door to Liberty)
2: Army of Russian coders who kept re-inventing the entire system from scratch and *never* delivered one that worked
When a vendor turns up to a demo with half a dozen developers who sit in a corner typing furiously you just know the demo ain't going to work.
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Thursday 14th April 2016 21:27 GMT dephormation.org.uk
Re: "What exactly did they spend it all on and how do you get away with such things?"
Phorm was an industrial espionage scam... designed to extract economic intelligence from private/confidential communications.
It really was genuine spyware, GCHQ should have killed it with fire, and the people responsible for installing it should have been tried for treason.
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Thursday 14th April 2016 15:27 GMT Nym O'Nonymous
They were never prosecuted because the law doesn't clearly say that mere interception by a computer without disclosing it to a human is a crime and Phorm therefore had a good chance of getting away with it. That's the difficulty of trying to apply a law made for wiretapping to the Internet.
As for the surrounding "campaign", what a magnificent victory for privacy, eh? Yes, we can certainly sleep safer in our beds knowing that there's not massive instrusive profiling of Internet users going on can't we? Pah, waste of time driven by self-serving idiots.
But the cookie faking that Phorm proposed? Nasty, all kinds of potential nastiness in that...
Overall good riddance.
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Thursday 14th April 2016 15:37 GMT Vimes
the law doesn't clearly say that mere interception by a computer without disclosing it to a human is a crime
RIPA mentions *interception*. Whether it's disclosed or not is completely irrelevant to the discussion. Don't buy into the crap perpetuated by the likes of Google.
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Thursday 14th April 2016 15:52 GMT Vimes
As for the surrounding "campaign", what a magnificent victory for privacy, eh? Yes, we can certainly sleep safer in our beds knowing that there's not massive instrusive profiling of Internet users going on can't we? Pah, waste of time driven by self-serving idiots.
One problem at a time.
First Phorm, next the CJEU court case that could see the IP bill neutered before it can do any real damage. And unless you noticed even the new 'Privacy Shield' that was going to replace the now defunct 'Safe Harbour' scheme has run into issues, with the Article 29 Working Party basically coming out against it.
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Thursday 14th April 2016 16:13 GMT asdf
Google sucks but ...
>Yes, we can certainly sleep safer in our beds knowing that there's not massive instrusive profiling of Internet users going on can't we?
Granted I am no fan of Google but at least they have to give away some free or reduced cost shiny (ala trojan horse business model) to get people to hand over the data (flagship phone unlocked for 300 bucks, Chrome, Gmail etc). Phorm wanted to force it on all broadband customers with the dosh going only to them and the ISP shareholders.
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Friday 15th April 2016 10:08 GMT Sir Runcible Spoon
Considering all the timings of Phorm etc. I always wondered if it played any part in Snowden's subsequent actions.
This is the reason why whistleblowers are supposed to be protected by law, so that others are encouraged to do the same (no idea if Snowden was even aware of Phorm btw).
However, any action to suppress whistleblowers is, by default, authoritarian and totally insidious - it should be killed with fire - stamped on, and then consigned to the abyssal depths of the Atlantic.
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Friday 15th April 2016 07:59 GMT Vimes
Re: Happy Thursday
Not likely. One's a Labour MP now.
Personally I'm still waiting for somebody to highlight Keir Starmer's history of failure in protecting us from snooping given his current role in representing the Labour party where the IP Bill is concerned.
And the less said about Alison Saunders the better...
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Friday 15th April 2016 12:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Keir Starmer
Some highlights of his time as Director of Public Prosecutions (courtesy ft.com):
"Jimmy Savile: The CPS apologised for failing to follow up reports of child abuse by victims of the late, disgraced children’s TV presenter. It said three-quarters of the allegations could have been pursued but police and prosecutors treated victims too cautiously.
Kweku Adoboli: The CPS successfully prosecuted the former UBS trader in November. He was convicted of two counts of fraud, after his unauthorised trading led to losses of $2.3bn at the Swiss bank, the biggest banking fraud in British history. He received a seven-year prison sentence.
Phone hacking: Mr Starmer said in 2009 that there was no new evidence to warrant an investigation after the original inquiry in 2006, which had led to people being charged. But a political storm blew up in July 2011, after a report in The Guardian newspaper that suggested the mobile phone of Milly Dowler, a murdered schoolgirl, had been hacked. Scores have been arrested since, with one senior police officer convicted this month of misconduct in public office.
Ian Tomlinson: The CPS’s initial stance was that, because of disagreements between pathologists, no charges would be brought in the case of Mr Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor who died after being pushed to the ground during the 2009 G20 protests in London. That position was overturned in 2011, when Simon Harwood, the police officer who struck Mr Tomlinson, was charged with manslaughter after a new inquest. He was acquitted by a jury in 2012."
[The FT doesn't mention that one of the two disagreeing pathologists, the one supporting the Met, was later struck off:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19355106]
It would obviously be unfair to summarise Starmer's time at the CPS as "establishment insiders are safe, the rest, not so safe".
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Thursday 14th April 2016 22:39 GMT BT Customer
Delighted that after 8 years of lies, abuse, personally targeted criminal attempts to access my computer (unsuccessfully) via keylogger software originating myteriously and anonymously from Singapore-based mailservers, harassment by trolls, lies, cowardly libels, the scandal of ill-informed and inaccurate smear sites such as uninphormed.com and stopphoulplay.com, mysterious probes of my charity websites by Phorm, Police, Home Office, MOD, and a whole host of others, plus regular assaults on my privacy and reputation (including some of the worst coming ironically from a self-proclaimed "privacy advocate" who now has an offshore company registered in Belize), this particular part of the battle is over - but there is a lot more to be done to try and prevent further invasions of our privacy and interception of our communications by ISPs, ad-tech, multi-national corporations, ad-trackers, and mass unwarranted state surveillance. Sadly DPI interception of web communications by companies like BlueCoat Systems, and ISP surveillance such as TalkTalk Homesafe along with routine email surveillance by Gmail and Yahoo! have just become part of life, irrespective of what legislation says about bilateral consent. That has to change.
I've got to know some great friends in the campaign to rid the world of Ertugrul's Russian DPI poison - well done you people! I'll b cracking open some bubbly from a "Kent" vineyard this weekend to celebrate!
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Friday 15th April 2016 07:52 GMT raving angry loony
One down.
One down, 643,992 to go. Sadly.
As for them taking the money and running, perhaps they took enough money from idiots to stop those same idiots from spending money on other ad scammers? Nah, who am I kidding, there's always idiots out there thinking they're better scammers than the ad companies. It's why there's so many ad companies.