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The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#211

Post by openasocket »

gwu78 wrote: post #169
Aaron1011 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not to mention tamper with Modifying the SNI hostname in transit is pointless - the client still knows what hostname they sent. Changing the SNI hostname would only cause the server to send back a different certificate, which would immediately be noticed by the client.

And break the connection. Mission accomplished.

The ISP owns the transit of traffic between the client and the server. If they want to block people from accessing certain places they can just block it at the ip layer with packet filtering. Why would they go through all this rigmarole with mangling SNI data?

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#213

Post by pnathan »

Futurebot wrote: post #197
pnathan wrote: post #19

This, right here, is the consequence of the withdrawal from politics many geeks advocated very strongly in an earlier time. "Everything is corrupt, it doesn't matter"... turns out to only be a viable philosophy when things mostly work well enough . What we have in protections and freedoms were purchased through a ton of hard work by prior generations: the liberty to slack and think that it just works ok is a nice sid…

"Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." - RMS

I have consistently found rms to be the most prescient tech voice. A lone prophet, if you will. He always bears careful thought in his vision of where tech and politics will play out - even if you disagree with him.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#214

Post by mayneack »

0xa wrote: post #187
ComradeTaco wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The votes in both the house and the senate were almost entirely along party lines. Every republican in the senate that voted, voted for this act and every democrat in the senate that voted, voted against this act.

The reality is more nuanced--the time to stop this legislation was by preventing it coming to vote in the senate. Typically the senate needs 60 votes to forcefully end debate[0], then merely majority to pass it. Once can disguise support for a bill by approving to end debate, then voting "Nay" given it will get the necessary 50 to be approved. For JS 34 [1] Mitch McConnell (R, KY) limited debate to 10 minutes--I'm un…

I don't quite agree with "typically". The numbers of filibusters (and cloture votes) has radically increased in recent history, but I'm not sure if you can really call it the default behavior yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_State...

https://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/cloture_motions/...

Also, it's not even applied to 50% of resolutions:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#215

Post by deelowe »

tomohawk wrote: post #114

Before getting all spun up, I'd dig a little deeper on the issue than what the WaPo does in this piece. These regulations were only voted on late in 2016 and never went into effect. To do the regulations, the FCC reclassified the internet as basically ye olde telephone system, which then made it subject to their purview based on laws created in the 1930s. This is classic overreach. Congress never gave this authority…

The FTC recently lost their ability to regulate ISPs. That's why it was done this way. If the FTC had not been stripped of it's powers, then there would have been no need.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#216

Post by burkaman »

masonic wrote: post #165
callcallcall wrote: post #26

Please do not complain into the echo chamber of comments here. Please take a moment to support the EFF, call your representatives, and speak to friends and family. EFF: https://www.eff.org/ Find your reps: https://tryvoices.com/

support the EFF Not to say that most of what EFF does isn't valuable, but this privacy exposure has been going on for over a year and a half already . Why didn't the EFF call attention to it until now?

What do you mean? They talk about this stuff all the time.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/fcc-votes-net-neutrali...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/network-neutrality-201...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/congress-contemplating...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/verizon-and-turn-break...

etc.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#217

Post by pnathan »

tomohawk wrote: post #114

Before getting all spun up, I'd dig a little deeper on the issue than what the WaPo does in this piece. These regulations were only voted on late in 2016 and never went into effect. To do the regulations, the FCC reclassified the internet as basically ye olde telephone system, which then made it subject to their purview based on laws created in the 1930s. This is classic overreach. Congress never gave this authority…

nit: The previous president could certainly have done this, but chose not to. obscures the reality that the opposition party - and its grassroots supporters was ruthless in opposing all that Obama did, often for no apparent reason. For instance, the SCOTUS nominee. It was poor behavior, giving us "legislative debt", as it fostered executive action over legislative action.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#218

Post by deathanatos »

pcmaffey wrote: post #54

Welp, now there's a real market opportunity for 'open' ISP's. I would gladly pay more to a smaller ISP with slightly higher latency for guaranteed privacy. SpaceX's planned satellite internet will hopefully fill this void for the world... until Elon dies and it's taken over by the evil, ignoramuses of corporate greed.

Given the obvious barriers to entry for an ISP, realistically, how is there a "real market opportunity for 'open' ISP's" when new ISPs themselves can't even get a foothold? For example, Google's recent attempt with Fiber: as much as I wish it were to succeed, they seem to have run into a lot of red tape.

For broadband Internet, my understanding is that most have exactly one choice; in my experience, usually one of Comcast or TWC. (Currently, where I live in the Bay Area, Comcast is my only choice. And it shows: Google Fiber would offer a speed 500% higher, for the same price, if it could only materialize.)

If you allow for non-broadband options, okay, yes, I have choices. That gets me AT&T — who sells their users data — and mobile cell carriers (the latency is unacceptable).

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#219

Post by drdeadringer »

pnathan wrote: post #19

This, right here, is the consequence of the withdrawal from politics many geeks advocated very strongly in an earlier time. "Everything is corrupt, it doesn't matter"... turns out to only be a viable philosophy when things mostly work well enough . What we have in protections and freedoms were purchased through a ton of hard work by prior generations: the liberty to slack and think that it just works ok is a nice sid…

When was this earlier time?

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#220

Post by openasocket »

gwu78 wrote: post #56

This thread may grow long and maybe turn to the topic of HTTPS. SSL with SNI exposes plaintext hostnames/domainnames on the wire for anyone to read, aggregate and sell, not to mention tamper with. It should be an optional extension. For many users it adds no benefit. For some users, it breaks their software and adds needless complexity. Now the privacy advocates have a reason to dislike it too. Just say no to SNI.

The IP layer already exposes the IP addresses they are contacting, and you can use reverse DNS or passive DNS to get the domain name. SNI doesn't even make things easier, because extracting that from traffic requires DPI and TCP sessionization.
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