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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

#331

Post by chimeracoder »

CalChris wrote: post #322
chimeracoder wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and Gary Johnson who happily sent people to prison for drug crimes. ...what? Gary Johnson is himself a marijuana user who has long been am advocate of drug policy reform (not just for marijuana, but for other drugs as well). http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/qa-former-nm-gov-gary-jo...

As Republican Governor of New Mexico.

> As Republican Governor of New Mexico.

When running for governor, Johnson campaigned on a platform of marijuana decriminalization and harm reduction for all other drugs. This was during the height of the Clinton-era anti-drug hysteria - you'd be hard pressed to find many other politicians who supported harm reduction at that point.

There are things to dislike about Johnson, but criticizing him on drug policy is really bizarre. He's been one of the strongest (if not the strongest) political advocate for abolishing the War on Drugs for over two decades - much more vocally so and for far longer than any other politician I can name offhand.

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

#332

Post by Clubber »

3131s wrote: post #258
AlexB138 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of those are made up prescriptive guidelines, mixed in with some common misspellings. One grumpy person does not get to decide how the rest of us choose to use and evolve language. The "forceful" / "forcible" example is particularly inane and pedantic but hardly the worst on that page. I'll continue to say "being that", "ice tea", "center around", etc. as I please. In linguistics the illustrative analogy is that…

That's on fleek, whatever the hell that means.

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

#333

Post by gwu78 »

openasocket wrote: post #299
gwu78 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Getting the hostname from SNI requires TCP sessionalization and at least some form of DPI." I have done it with tcpdump. What does getting the hostname from an encrypted packet require? Assume DNS is not used and there is no reverse DNS information available that gives the specific domainname requested by the user.

tcpdump does TCP sessionization, yeah. But we're talking about ISPs extracting the hostnames in bulk for all their customers' traffic live, right? Maybe you're talking about something else, but I figured, based on the article we're having this conversation about, the attacker is these scenarios is an ISP, which only cares about doing these things at scale. You can't put tcpdump in front of a 100Gbps switch and do ses…

"If it's a hostname it has to correspond to a valid domain name, right?"

If it is listed in the ICANN DNS, maybe.

DNS is not mandatory for a website to work.

Most of the time I do not use DNS when reading the www. I have my own databases of the info I need to reach websites. Not that I expect anyone else would do this, but it is very fast and reliable.

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

#335

Post by adventured »

dfar1 wrote: post #32

I never cared too much for privacy, but that's one step too far. Lawmakers probably don't understand how this makes them a target, and how their own information will be accessible. Hopefully this will create a market for ISPs that want to protect you. I see VPN markets growing even more.

> Lawmakers probably don't understand how this makes them a target, and how their own information will be accessible.

Your "will be" should be changed to "has been." The data selling was possible (100% guaranteed to be occurring rather) prior to Trump's election for example.

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

#336

Post by adventured »

rodgerd wrote: post #93
Jach wrote: post #83

Maybe someone at YC could reach out to Thiel who could convince Trump to veto? Something like that is probably the only realistic chance of this failing, and I have no idea how much Thiel personally cares about this issue anyway.

> Maybe someone at YC could reach out to Thiel who could convince Trump to veto? What makes you think the guy who describes his preferred business model as being to establish a monopoly would do that?

Because in Thiel's case, he has repeatedly demonstrated himself as being in favor of privacy more than not. That said, it's unlikely Thiel would get personally involved, and it's unlikely Trump would go against such a block Republican vote (especially given the party's cohesion problems currently, Trump needs them all to get on to tax cuts & infrastructure etc).

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

#337

Post by thomastjeffery »

clubm8 wrote: post #157
thomastjeffery wrote: post #2

Time to start paying the VPN tax.

Unfortunately some popular services (Netflix, Hulu) block VPN traffic. So I've moved a large chunk of my browsing over to Tor, but that makes it an open target for the NSA since they feel they can attack any data passing through links outside the NSA. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Not to mention a VPN is another expense, and a bandage for the greater problem..

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

#338

Post by adventured »

intrasight wrote: post #260

Isn't "https everywhere" going to make this a moot point?

Only partially. Your ISP can sell what domains you visit and the details of those visits such as duration. Your ISP can push various trackerware that steps in front of the https. Your ISP can do trackerware pre-installs on hardware you buy for example, such as smartphones.

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

#339

Post by spenvo »

vancan1ty wrote: post #73

Something that is not mentioned in the article is that the FCC regulations in question were passed in October 2016 and have never gone in to effect. So, to be strictly accurate, the vote does not roll back any regulations which actually ever affected the internet. Sources: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/03/02/fcc-sets-... http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/03/28/broadband...

But what's also not mentioned is that AT&T and Verizon have already shown willingness to sell use browser data via supercookies http://techmeme.com/search/query?q=supercookies&wm=false, and the reason they backed off is because the FCC showed it had a spine. There is every reason to believe ISPs will begin these practices again because these rules have been lifted and Ajit Pai-led FCC is very different from Wheeler's... and there is very little reason for ISPs to fear losing consumer trust because of few local high speed options

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

#340

Post by rhino369 »

ComradeTaco wrote: post #235
noobermin wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or that tech companies are a democrat lobby and telecoms are a republican lobby.

Democrats wouldn't apply this rule to search engines or email. Why? Because tech companies would flip out.

Democrats are free to vote ideology when it's a GOP ox that is going to get gored. And vice versa.

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