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Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

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Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#311

Post by izacus »

massysett wrote: post #294
izacus wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this is great, if only as a way to kill the bullshit consumer VPN business, which sells snake oil. Having a US megacorporation kill a whole market segment and pull it into their monopolized walled garden sure seems like an improvement. After all, they pinky promise they will not ever abuse that! /s

By this logic our computer operating systems would not improve, ever. Web browsers, built-in networking, music players, image editors, mail programs, even Solitare - all things that at one time were separate market segments.

All of those products have been improved by COMPETITION. The most critical, most important and ONLY thing that makes modern capitalism work for non-rich human beings.

Every single field you mention was thriving when there were multiple players fighting over your money and have started to become exploitative and abusive as soon as one player killed the others and started rent-seeking. Competition is crucial for market economy to work.

I find it utterly bizarre that someone educated would think that a death of market by megacorp monopoly would somehow drive improvement.

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#312

Post by wmf »

Jiocus wrote: post #24
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 use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly). This made me smile. Good one. For context, copyright trolls recently tried to extort torrent users for downloading and sharing Ubuntu ISOs.

The sad thing is that actual Linux ISOs are so over-mirrored that using BitTorrent generally has no benefit and may be slower.

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#313

Post by withinboredom »

kmeisthax wrote: post #102
hnlmorg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BBC aren't allowed to. There are very strict terms in which the BBC can operate. So what they have to do is sell to subsidiaries like BBC America. And there in lies the licensing issues described in the GPs post. This is one of those classic examples of something that looks really simple from an outsiders perspective but once you have to deal with the details you realise it's anything but simple. And through no f…

More generally, geographic licensing maximizes revenue without damaging brand goodwill for the vast majority of customers, so pretty much everyone is going to do it. Hell, I thought the practice would die (or at least slow down) when Netflix started transitioning away from syndicated TV and movies; this never happened. Netflix will totally geoblock their own shows so they can, say, release a cartoon on a weekly basis…

> the US is the biggest market for a lot of this stuff

I have a funny feeling that a very large percentage of that market comes from VPNs. Everyone I know watches the US Netflix and we aren’t in the US.

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#314

Post by 867-5309 »

larkost wrote: post #194
867-5309 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the tenants wouldn't approve (they pay for elec and internet). plus I'm away for twelve months so no chance of onsite troubleshooting, physical reboots after power outages, etc.

So, you are saying that the TV license you are paying for is actually being used by the renters in the house you own. Is that a fair statement? That puts a bit of a different spin on it.

due to the timing of things, I prepaid for ten twelfths of their residence. I didn't seek recompense as I knew I would be consuming one channel. I am unaware if the tenants use a tv

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#315

Post by ehsankia »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #39

So far, partners of Apple I’ve seen the service forwarding to are CloudFlare, Akamai, and Fastly. There may be more but those are the ones I’ve seen and heard.

Wait a second, didn't the Fastly breakage happen the day after WWDC? What are the chances that the one client was Apple and their config was for this service :)

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#316

Post by o8r3oFTZPE »

Here is a simple question: Why is there only one "Tor".

Why haven't there been more onion routing projects. (Maybe there have been and I am just not aware.)

Perhaps the same reason(s) we never saw widespread adoption of remote proxies, despite their usefulness in many situations.

Although in some respects onion routing seems quite an improvement over "simple" proxies.

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#317

Post by Jiocus »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #261
Jiocus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly). This made me smile. Good one. For context, copyright trolls recently tried to extort torrent users for downloading and sharing Ubuntu ISOs.

"Linux ISOs" has been slang for a very long time: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Linux+ISO&am...

Thanks for clarifying. I've not encountered the use before, maybe because here in the Nordics piracy has been -is- very normalized.

The other reply told about a uni tale. I've heard about a similar story about someone torrenting actual Linux ISOs on university network. That resulted in a stern warning else the student would be barred from using the network and computers. Basically an automatic fail for future studies.

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#318

Post by stock_toaster »

williamtwild wrote: post #12
pilif wrote: post #3

My experience with this so far was... mixed. - This breaks DNS resolution for company-internal domains. - This routes all my traffic through CloudFlare or another CDN I might or might not trust (yes, the IP is hidden, but not the data) - it significantly slows down my internet access on my location. - it tends to turn itself on again without my intervention especially the last point is very problematic for me

"yes, the IP is hidden, but not the data" Using TLS it certainly should be.

Does it work like an https proxy (with CONNECT) or a socks proxy?

Because if it is instead actually unwrapping the connection somehow (eg. mitm) then they would be able to see the content, and that seems like a huge no-go -- both for the users, AND for apple as I would think it would open them up to liability.

note: they certainly would be able to see unencrypted http traffic regardless though.

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#319

Post by unknown_error »

willis936 wrote: post #279
unknown_error wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> personal privacy from the government is enshrined in the 4th amendment Yeaaaaah, let's just pretend Snowden and Manning never happened.

I'm doing the opposite. Saying that the fed is actively engaging in illegal search and seizure is not ignoring the whistleblowers that brought the scope of the issue to light, it's acknowledging the issue.

The point is that the Constitution is largely meaningless, feel-good fluffery that has no actual bearing on which of our so-called rights are actually available to us.

It's an aspirational document in a largely lawless land, more a historical oddity than the supreme anything. If you wait for legislators and law enforcement to fix personal privacy, you've already lost... the US law enforcement culture is actively hostile towards individual rights because it makes their jobs harder. The only real difference to, say, China, is that we like to pretend otherwise. But the reality in the ground is that nobody on the grid has had meaningful privacy for decades now.

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#320

Post by gabmiral »

o8r3oFTZPE wrote: post #316

Here is a simple question: Why is there only one "Tor". Why haven't there been more onion routing projects. (Maybe there have been and I am just not aware.) Perhaps the same reason(s) we never saw widespread adoption of remote proxies, despite their usefulness in many situations. Although in some respects onion routing seems quite an improvement over "simple" proxies.

If I recall correctly, I2P uses some sort of onion routing.
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