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ISP Spying

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Re: ISP Spying

#21

Post by Tijdreiziger »

jstanley wrote: post #9
moviuro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just paying some extra third-party that handles all your traffic now. What's to prevent them from doing the same? You're moving trust to another actor.

It's easy to move your VPN to an arbitrary VPS anywhere in the world, but there's only a handful of residential ISPs available in any given area, and they are almost univerally scummy.

> and they are almost univerally scummy

Source? I do not think most of the ISPs in my area are particularly scummy. They provide reliable plain internet service with no data caps (and also TV/phone service if you so desire) for a reasonable monthly fee, and in my experience, most of them hire enough customer service workers on their support phone. All of them also resisted internet filtering until the legal system forced them to do so. What more is there to ask of an ISP?

Re: ISP Spying

#22

Post by K0nserv »

prima-facie wrote: post #15
mirimir wrote: post #4

I always assume that they might be. So I always use my own perimeter router/firewall running pfSense. Plus I use VPN services. And so my ISps don't end up seeing anything except encrypted streams. And have no visibility into my vLANs.

Commercial VPN services are not a good idea in the first place https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

As discussed in the thread[0] on this from the other day it's largely FUD.

Fundamentally a VPN service allows you greater control over who you trust with your traffic. You always have to trust someone[1]. For example I trust F-Secure and the Finnish court system much more than I trust Virgin Media, GHCQ and the British court system which is why I run Freedome and route my traffic through Finland. As pointed out in another subthread here UK ISP are required to collect a bunch of data by the Snooper's Charter, the same is not true in Finland.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16371030

1: The default for many people is their local ISP which might or might not be a good entity to trust based on where you are. In many place you also have very few choice when it comes to your ISP.

Re: ISP Spying

#23

Post by wowamit »

Every now and then, we are reminded that our router remains the prominent data collector for our online presence. And ISP, the prominent data aggregator. And neither are really too keen to protect our data online.

Re: ISP Spying

#24

Post by icc97 »

mysterypie wrote: post #16
rishabhd wrote: post #3

well, who isn't? Even at the most basic level, my local ISP is injecting ads into browsers.

The original title before the admins changed it was "Your ISP is Probably Spying On You", and you wrote: > well, who isn't? I can understand that we all get weary from the constant news of yet another privacy intrusion, surveillance method being discovered, or new government law eroding privacy. But why be dismissive? When Snowden revealed what he knew, it confirmed what I had already suspected. But I didn't go and s…

As far as I can tell we should just be safety first. This does indeed mean getting as much information about how to browse privately.

If we all use tor, it will help the tor project because then it's harder to spot individuals using it.

Tor is slightly slower, but it's pretty much a perfect browser replacement. The only reason I don't use it all the time is that I like my browser history. Plus I've got a self built VPN which is about as good as I can hope for.

Re: ISP Spying

#25

Post by microtonal »

icc97 wrote: post #20

Who didn't think they were being spied on? This is why you used https to hide the full URL, VPN to push the problem to a 3rd party who might care a bit more about privacy and then Tor on top of it all. Here's the good old EFF explanation [0] [0]: https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https

This is why you used https to hide the full URL, VPN to push the problem to a 3rd party who might care a bit more about privacy and then Tor on top of it all.

Did you read the article? The ISP-provided modem/router automatically sends an overview of devices actively connected to the router (with their MAC address, name, and whether they are currently connected) to the ISP.

This is a different issue than private browsing and using a VPN/HTTPS/Tor is not going to solve this particular problem. The solution to this problem is replacing the router or putting another router between the ISP router and your internal network to hide your internal network from the ISP-provided router.

Re: ISP Spying

#26

Post by slhck »

I recently learned about this when I reported Internet speed issues to my home ISP (upload was basically impossible, while download was at 100 MBit/s).

They said they'd look into it, but they couldn't process my claim unless they could prove something was connected via Ethernet to their router. (They apparently never trust customer WiFi speed test results, probably because WiFi on their crappy routers can be notoriously unreliable.)

I ultimately had to connect something to the router's Ethernet port, so I grabbed another WiFi router, configured it as an access point, plugged it in, and voilà, they could verify that a device was connected and processed my complaint.

Obviously customer service reps can easily get access to a list of what is connected to the router.

Re: ISP Spying

#27

Post by javajosh »

Is it just me or does this look like a huge opportunity? Last I checked we still have control over our devices, and if they are stupid enough to trust the data they collect, then we should feel free to poison the well. I'm talking about opening random connections to endpoints (either random or those we want to protect), to inject noise into the system. I call the idea "data flak". It could be something as simple as a daemon running in the background, or a browser plugin. You want to spy on my traffic? Fine, good luck picking out my real behavior from the gigabytes of utter crap I'm shoving into your sensors. This works not just at the ISP level, but at every intermediate host, too.

The only counter is for an adversary to own your box, which is far more expensive.

Re: ISP Spying

#28

Post by icc97 »

microtonal wrote: post #25
icc97 wrote: post #20

Who didn't think they were being spied on? This is why you used https to hide the full URL, VPN to push the problem to a 3rd party who might care a bit more about privacy and then Tor on top of it all. Here's the good old EFF explanation [0] [0]: https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https

This is why you used https to hide the full URL, VPN to push the problem to a 3rd party who might care a bit more about privacy and then Tor on top of it all. Did you read the article? The ISP-provided modem/router automatically sends an overview of devices actively connected to the router (with their MAC address, name, and whether they are currently connected) to the ISP. This is a different issue than private brows…

Good point, my bad, I'd skimmed it and not read the bit after the XML text. The title was somewhat misleading, and the HN admins have changed it now.

I'd still be more concerned about my unencrypted HTTP traffic though.

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