Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

Post by yreg » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #123

> All in all, a very Apple approach: They deny themselves any knowledge of a customer's DNS queries and Web traffic, so if served with a subpoena they have very little to respond with. Maybe I am missing something but I view this is a rather genius move. They have plausible deniability + actually introduce some protection for their users. Not sure how to read the original post though. Is it praising Apple? Is it mock…

Post by ska » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

fnord77 wrote: post #92

danpalmer wrote: post #9

Props to Apple for the design of this service. It doesn't hit all the privacy targets that long-time personal VPN users might be looking for, and it doesn't get into the game of trying to circumvent region locked content*, but otherwise it's likely to be a solid privacy improvement for almost all users in a careful and deliberate way. I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly) but I'll probably tu…

I wish I could pay for bbc iPlayer service outside old blighty. But they don't allow it.

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

krageon wrote: post #15

danpalmer wrote: post #9

Props to Apple for the design of this service. It doesn't hit all the privacy targets that long-time personal VPN users might be looking for, and it doesn't get into the game of trying to circumvent region locked content*, but otherwise it's likely to be a solid privacy improvement for almost all users in a careful and deliberate way. I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly) but I'll probably tu…

> but UK residents do typically pay for the content whereas those outside the UK are unable to. In essence, what you're saying boils down to "it's already paid for, but nobody else can have it anyway". It's unreasonable and there is no need to make excuses for this behaviour.

Post by robotresearcher » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 3:55 PM UTC

kergonath wrote: post #137

danpalmer wrote: post #9

Props to Apple for the design of this service. It doesn't hit all the privacy targets that long-time personal VPN users might be looking for, and it doesn't get into the game of trying to circumvent region locked content*, but otherwise it's likely to be a solid privacy improvement for almost all users in a careful and deliberate way. I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly) but I'll probably tu…

> It would be nice if the BBC didn't block like this, but UK residents do typically pay for the content whereas those outside the UK are unable to. As an exiled Londoner, I would love to be able to pay to access BBC programmes. Unfortunately I can’t, so a VPN is often the only solution (well, I guess torrenting would be another one, but it’s not really better).

Post by ska » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

opheliate wrote: post #185

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, here’s the catch. Even if logs were kept, the 2nd party as far as we know does not have a unique identifier passed onto it. This means that Apple’s logs would say this user authenticated and passed some encrypted stuff to Fastly, and Fastly would say that it received requests from Apple, without an identifier to match it up against the first request. Once this scales and Apple has millions of requests incoming,…

Surely some "unique" identifier is required for each TCP session between Apple and the exit node so that Apple knows where to send the data it gets back, even if it's just the port on which Apple connect to the exit node as with standard TCP session management.