Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd think not using the ISP's DNS server would be a good start. Either find one somewhere else or run your own.
Does this even help? Are DNS requests encrypted? I had thought that they were not.
They aren't.
The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections
271–280 of 534 posts
Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
The FTC previously proposed essentially this same rule and was shot down by the courts as not having authority.
That's interesting. But wouldn't it be better to pass a law to do this, rather than relying an executive agency's regulations, which may change at their will and be interpreted as they please each time the government changes hands?
It would be lovely for Congress to pass a statute ensuring data-privacy. Pity they just voted the other way around on party lines.
Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what happens when you vote Republicans. Republicans will do anything for profit. This is their core driving force. For them, money determines value for everything. "Who gives a shit about anything else? We should reinstate slavery because it would increase profits! Also, poor people are terrible people!" Democrats believe profits are nice and all, but isn't the final metric on value. There are a lot of other…
I realise this is a total straw man, but whenever I read Republicans vs Democrats I can't help but think about how utterly insane it is to have the opinions of 300 million Americans represented by TWO parties. Two. So Americans choose to agree with either EVERYTHING person A says, or EVERYTHING person B says. That's what it boils down to. And it freaks me out that in a day and age where we're so educated and "free",…
It's not that anyone is defending this system, it's that it is the only stable equilibrium of the winner-takes all parts of our elections.
Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections
#274Before 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.
Couple of issues here:
1. The opposing party's opposing the ruling party is a natural process of government. It's the normal state of things. Your saying that it was "poor behavior" implies that it was an anomaly, that the Republicans did something wrong by not supporting everything Obama wanted to do, and that the minority party is supposed to accede to every demand of the ruling party, which would be absurd.
2. The Democrats only controlled Congress for 2 of Obama's 8 years. You imply that, even when Congress is not controlled by the President's own party, that Congress should accede to his demands. This is absurd. It's not how our government works, it's not how it's ever worked, and it's not how it was intended to work--indeed, exactly the opposite is the case.
3. If your implications were true, you should be criticizing the Democrats for doing exactly the same thing right now with far more vehemence.
4. The ostensibly "grassroots supporters" of the current opposition is actually ruthless. Were there violent riots in the streets of cities across the country when Obama was elected?
Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always interpreted that resignation as "both sides are terrible, so I'm going to keep voting for my side". I wonder how many people really felt strong enough about politics to claim both sides are equally bad and then decided not to vote on that basis alone.
I wonder how many people really felt strong enough about politics to claim both sides are equally bad and then decided not to vote on that basis alone. Since both sides are astonishingly bad, I usually end up voting third party in races where there is one.
The third parties are even worse than the two parties. The Libertarians ran Bob Barr, a Clinton House prosecutor and Gary Johnson who happily sent people to prison for drug crimes. Jill Stein supports Putin.
Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What if the user already has the IP address and knows the hostname? Then the ISP just does a reverse DNS lookup, which can be implemented a bunch of different ways, it's not particularly difficult. > SNI makes getting the hostnames easier Getting the hostname from SNI requires TCP sessionization and at least some form of DPI. Getting the hostname my way just requires single-packet inspection with a reverse DNS look…
Do you understand why I do not like SNI? It has nothing to do with getting these stupid hostnames. It is a modification that needs to be made to software to accomodate the spread of the use of the SNI extension. As a user, I have no need for SNI. Are you saying that doing reverse lookups on every IP address, where some of these IPs will have many virtual hostnames, is easier than extractng the plaintext hostname from…
> Are you saying that doing reverse lookups on every IP address, where some of these IPs will have many virtual hostnames, is easier than extractng the plaintext hostname from a certain offset in a Client Hello packet?
If the SNI info was at a fixed offset in a packet, it would be easy. But, per the RFC, it goes at the end of the client hello, after the list of supported cipher suites and compression methods. Not only does that mean it's not at a fixed offset, the actual client hello message may not be contained in a single packet, but rather several. So the ISP has to gather the packets and put them in order to re-construct the TCP stream, and then compute the offset. That is not trivial to do, especially at scale. Reverse DNS lookups are much much easier. Trust me: in my work I've helped implement both TCP sessionization and reverse DNS lookup infrastructure, and the latter is far more scalable.
Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what happens when you vote Republicans. Republicans will do anything for profit. This is their core driving force. For them, money determines value for everything. "Who gives a shit about anything else? We should reinstate slavery because it would increase profits! Also, poor people are terrible people!" Democrats believe profits are nice and all, but isn't the final metric on value. There are a lot of other…
I realise this is a total straw man, but whenever I read Republicans vs Democrats I can't help but think about how utterly insane it is to have the opinions of 300 million Americans represented by TWO parties. Two. So Americans choose to agree with either EVERYTHING person A says, or EVERYTHING person B says. That's what it boils down to. And it freaks me out that in a day and age where we're so educated and "free",…
In the general. But you also have to look at the primaries. For instance, this year we had 22 major candidates running for president in the two major parties. And people like Trump and Sanders show that there is plenty of room for heterodox candidates to be successful.
Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
So as it's going to be a flame war apparently I've deleted the comment. I'd just like to register my opinion that I don't see Washington Post is an objective, nor even a trustworthy source at this point. When they print something it's often worth looking deeper into I believe.
> Last time I posted something like this it turned into a bit of a flame war Gee I wonder why.
You've been posting quite a few unsubstantive and borderline uncivil comments to HN. Would you please stop?
Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what happens when you vote Republicans. Republicans will do anything for profit. This is their core driving force. For them, money determines value for everything. "Who gives a shit about anything else? We should reinstate slavery because it would increase profits! Also, poor people are terrible people!" Democrats believe profits are nice and all, but isn't the final metric on value. There are a lot of other…
I realise this is a total straw man, but whenever I read Republicans vs Democrats I can't help but think about how utterly insane it is to have the opinions of 300 million Americans represented by TWO parties. Two. So Americans choose to agree with either EVERYTHING person A says, or EVERYTHING person B says. That's what it boils down to. And it freaks me out that in a day and age where we're so educated and "free",…
This is definitely something worth pushing for, if you're an American. Figuring out how to shift our system into one where viable third parties can play ball would be frigging grand.
I'd like to see the GOP split into the 2-3 parties it shelters, and the Democrats go their 3 or so ways as well. I'd bet it'd significantly stabilize US policy and reduce the zero sum power plays that are becoming quite common.
Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections
#280Before 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…
> 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 to the FCC and is acting to put them back in line with the law.
It was the FCC that decided in the first place to classify ISPs as information services rather than common carriers. They have the authority from Congress to do that, and I'm aware of nothing in the laws that granted that authority that say that once the FCC makes such a classification they cannot later revisit that and change the classification.
> The lesson here really is that if the issue is really important, then get an actual law passed instead of trying to contort regulatory authority based on laws from the 1930s.
There have been several additions and amendments to the 1930s laws, such as the Telecommunication Act of 1996. It is disingenuous to suggest that the FCC is relying on 1930s laws for their authority.