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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

#231

Post by maxerickson »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #195
maxerickson wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically it is a fringe issue and people have 18 months to forget about it before there is an election.

The GOP has survived, and thrived, on fringe issues for generations. In the poli-sci world such tactics are known as wedge issues. The Dems know they exist, but are very poor at the successful execution of them. At the end of the day, the federal government has very little daily impact on most people's lives. In order to get people's interest, one has to elevate fringe issues and create strawmen to get people interes…

The wedge issues they use have pretty big blocks of motivated voters.

I don't think privacy has that.

EFF has 25,000 members. NRA has 5 million. EFF has a budget of ~$16 million a year. NRA has a couple hundred million.

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

#232

Post by Gustomaximus »

If you want an idea to get mass movement against this;

Start some display campaigns injecting peoples names and other personal information into ads. Have this follow people around the web. Even if data is not taken from what has been allowed here, most people will find it creepy. Link ad to a website explaining whats going on and how to contact their local member.

I suspect with a fairly reasonable spend you could get some strong resistance and media attention.

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

#233

Post by AlexB138 »

waqf wrote: post #193
0xa wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"forcibly", not "forcefully": http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/forceful.html

People don't seem to like this comment, but that is a great link. Browsing around the site, I found this list of common English language errors: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html

Really interesting. Thanks for sharing.

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

#234

Post by misnome »

Analemma_ wrote: post #222
tbrownaw wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The only way to stop Kang from ruining everything is to vote for Kodos instead.

You can keep using clever witticisms like that if it makes you feel better, and meanwhile bills like this will keep passing along party lines.

So it's the fault of people who vote third party that you have a two-party state?

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

#235

Post by ComradeTaco »

noobermin wrote: post #230
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…

It's not only complacency, although it is a large part of it. Some of the main issues here is money in politics, gerrymandering, the gutting of the civil rights act. In fact, the most central issue here is probably money in politics.

I'd argue that it's not money in politics. The democrats and republicans get tons of money from tons of different interest groups and industries, yet the the only party that voted whatsoever for this bill were Republicans. The problem isn't the money, it's the ideology.

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

#236

Post by warlox »

_alias wrote: post #224
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…

This whole discussion is disheartening. When I first heard about this is came to HN to get the facts and try to actually form an opinion, because honestly I can't figure out what the bill is supposed to change and how. Instead I find people pontificating along party lines like every comments section across the internet. Where's the analysis and insight? Where's the objectivity? I've come to expect more from this site…

The bill allows ISPs to sell their customers' data, among other things. The article says enough about what the bill does.

Your complaints about "people pontificating along party lines" do nothing but reveal your own biases when the vote is so starkly along party lines. In a case like this, the objective analysis is clearly that the Republicans are wrong and the Democrats are right.

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

#237

Post by jadell »

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?

They did. And it resulted in the FCC regulations that just got rolled back.

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

#238

Post by nikkwong »

pnathan wrote: post #210
aanm1988 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is a consequence of the republicans being in power.

The Democrats also have policies that are... poor, particularly around the internet. This is a cross-party problem.

Care to elaborate?

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

#239

Post by cesarb »

openasocket wrote: post #225
mjevans wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Establish an enciphered, unauthenticated, connection to an IP. This is now a tunnel. Over that tunnel: * If you've connected before attempt to reuse the cached credentials to further establish a connection to the requested certificate. This validates prior authorization of being the target host. * If the above fails or if it's a new host, ask for the certificate, perform extensive validation including REQUIRING that…

How do you create an encrypted connection to an IP address? Just a regular Diffie-Hellman key exchange? That's pretty easy to MitM, and then the attacker can view the certificate the server passes, which will contain the domain name. A little more involved than sniffing SNI, because now you need to scale out MitM-ing instead of DPI, but pretty much the same problem.

Once the connection is MitM'd, the certificate validation would fail, since the MitM host cannot sign the "hash of everything that's been exchanged in this connection so far" with the correct server certificate. So the MitM would have to choose between either learning the domain name but failing the connection, or letting the connection pass but not learning the domain name.

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

#240

Post by gwu78 »

deathanatos wrote: post #208
gwu78 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not use SSL. Why spend time learning and fiddling with something that is so flawed? If I was serious about encrypting traffic I would use CurveCP. SSL is simply a nuisance I tolerate to read the www. Every minute I spend learning about it is wasted time... because I could be spending that time learning about something better, like CurveCP. The spread of SNI has just made SSL even more annoying.

Reading a bit about CurveCP isn't enlightening; it seems to be a UDP protocol that uses elliptic curve cryptography for encryption and authentication. But that, by itself , doesn't explain how it solves the problem that SNI solves better. Say a client is speaking CurveCP with another party; how do they authenticate the other end? What if the other end has limited resources (such as IPv4 addresses) and needs to serve…

I am not suggesting that anyone use something else besides SSL. Use whatever you want to use. I am suggesting that SSL users may want to consider the merits of the SNI extension. Website owners are unlikely to care let alone oppose it.

As a www user, I do not like SNI and that is only an opinion, as a user. Why? Because all existing software that has to be SSL compatible now has to be modified to handle SNI. As a user, I derive no benefit from SNI. That is why I dislike it, first and foremost.

But I believe there may be other reasons to dislike it. Perhaps privacy. Perhaps censorship. Maybe none of the above. I don't know. You decide.

In any event, it seems there are at least a few folks that agree with me that the merits of SNI are at least questionable which is both surprising and encouraging.

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