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New standards for a faster and more private Internet

blog.cloudflare.com

41–50 of 87 posts

Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet

#42
post #38

"This means that whenever a user visits a website on Cloudflare that has ECH enabled, no one except for the user, Cloudflare, and the website owner will be able to determine which website was visited. Cloudflare is a big proponent of privacy for everyone and is excited about the prospects of bringing this technology to life.' This isn't privacy. This is centralized snooping. It's like Google's approach to third party…

Another HN hot take about the Cloudflare bogeyman.

The CDN can't give you content you're asking for without knowing which content you're asking for.

This improvement prevents your ISP and the government from reading your packets to get that same information.

Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet

#43
post #42
post #38

"This means that whenever a user visits a website on Cloudflare that has ECH enabled, no one except for the user, Cloudflare, and the website owner will be able to determine which website was visited. Cloudflare is a big proponent of privacy for everyone and is excited about the prospects of bringing this technology to life.' This isn't privacy. This is centralized snooping. It's like Google's approach to third party…

Another HN hot take about the Cloudflare bogeyman. The CDN can't give you content you're asking for without knowing which content you're asking for. This improvement prevents your ISP and the government from reading your packets to get that same information.

What makes you believe CloudFlare wouldn’t do this? They may have state actor employees or be compelled by a government to surveil users.

Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet

#44

After examining how scammers and phishers host their sites, I’ve realised that “private” for Cloudflare means protecting the privacy of criminals. ECH makes it hard to block known scam sites at the network layer, for example.

Network layer blocking is almost never in the interest of the end user. It's typically used to block users from accessing sites they want to visit, like The Pirate Bay, or recently Russian Times and Sputnik News.

End users who want to protect themselves can easily install blacklists on their end. All major browsers support something like Google Safe Browsing out of the box, and these blacklists are more likely to be kept up-to-date than those of the average ISP.

Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet

#45
post #42
post #38

"This means that whenever a user visits a website on Cloudflare that has ECH enabled, no one except for the user, Cloudflare, and the website owner will be able to determine which website was visited. Cloudflare is a big proponent of privacy for everyone and is excited about the prospects of bringing this technology to life.' This isn't privacy. This is centralized snooping. It's like Google's approach to third party…

Another HN hot take about the Cloudflare bogeyman. The CDN can't give you content you're asking for without knowing which content you're asking for. This improvement prevents your ISP and the government from reading your packets to get that same information.

Especially since, as another top comment put it, ECH only gives privacy benefits if the serving IP is serving multiple domains.

I'm all for being wary of large-scale consolidation, but I feel like these lazy gripes aren't assessing the pros and cons dispassionately.

Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, they're just going to block the whole ECH handshake. Idk about Iran, but Russia and China just block eSNI, QUIC and whatever their DPI firewalls can't really handle on the fly.

The idea is to make ECH too large of a target to make blocking it practical. If you block ECH you end up blocking access to a large portion of the internet in that region. It's why some major browsers have chosen to not gracefully fallback to non-ECH handshakes upon connection failure.

[deleted]

Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet

#47
post #9

ECH - if I understand correctly it's effective for sites hosted on big providers like Cloudflare, AWS, etc, but doesn't add much value when it comes to self-hosted domains or those on a dedicated server, as you'd still see traffic going to whatever IP and be able to infer from that which domain the user's browswer is talking to. I'm hoping someone can explain that I missed something. And while we're explaining things…

I don't know the implementation details, but it should be doable in a way that degrades back into encrypted DNS where at least you get rid of a MitM. Someone else already mentioned that making sure that the 2 servers have different owners may help, but if people are after you it's probably not enough.

I'm thinking that maybe I'd like to be able to avoid mentioning the server I'm interested on, and simply send a hash of it (you can cut a prefix such that a bunch of matches are found, but not too many)

Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet

#48
post #43
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another HN hot take about the Cloudflare bogeyman. The CDN can't give you content you're asking for without knowing which content you're asking for. This improvement prevents your ISP and the government from reading your packets to get that same information.

What makes you believe CloudFlare wouldn’t do this? They may have state actor employees or be compelled by a government to surveil users.

So now the government needs to compel a corporation to hand over some data, because they are no longer able to read it straight off the wire like they could before. That sounds like a significant improvement to privacy.

Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet

#50
post #38

"This means that whenever a user visits a website on Cloudflare that has ECH enabled, no one except for the user, Cloudflare, and the website owner will be able to determine which website was visited. Cloudflare is a big proponent of privacy for everyone and is excited about the prospects of bringing this technology to life.' This isn't privacy. This is centralized snooping. It's like Google's approach to third party…

> This isn't privacy.

It will be when everyone adopts ECH. It's a fantastic start.

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