Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 534 posts

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

#461

Post by davidf18 »

The Register: Your internet history on sale to highest bidder: US Congress votes to shred ISP privacy rules

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/28/congress_approves_s...

"Now, the really big question is: can your ISPs see the content of your online interactions? Can it read your emails? Can it read your search results? Can it store and search through the words you typed into a webpage?

And the answer is: yes, sometimes.

If the website you visit is not secured with HTTPS – meaning that any data between you and the website is encrypted – then your ISP can see exactly what you are doing."

Read the article for suggestions on how to protect yourself.

Also read: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/28/so_my_isp_can_now_se...

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

#462

Post by gwu78 »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #402
gwu78 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you like to make all sorts of assumptions about users, what software they use, what software they "should" use and what software "no one uses"? I don't. Unlike many forum commenters, I do not try to convince people what software to use. I am not telling any users to stop using SSL. (Even though I strongly dislike it myself.) I am only addressing SNI, an extension to SSL that has become widespread in recent years.…

I really don't care what you do, my only "assumption" was that you claimed, repeatedly and loudly, that privacy advocates should step away from SNI and that SSL was "so flawed". You didn't start making your statements only apply to yourself until you ran out of arguments that people should do just that. Also I went looking for TLS libraries released in the past ~10 years without SNI, my only "assumption" about users…

"I really don't care what you do..."

Then why comment? One user expresses dislike for SNI and you feel compelled to respond? If you have your own reasons for liking SNI you could have stated them, but you did not.

If I do not like SNI, then why would you care? My reasons are my reasons.

SSL-enabled software has to be "updated" because SSL-enabled software did not support SNI since 2003. It spread more recently. The reasons behind this I leave as an exercise for the reader.

As a user, I have no need for SNI. It is annoying for multiple reasons. Leaking hostnames is among them.

I am still able to use many websites that do not require SNI. They are no less "secure" by virtue of not enabling it. And the software I use is no less secure for not supporting SNI.

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

#463

Post by oostevo »

yborg wrote: post #69
beamatronic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just moves the problem

It moves it from an entity that is highly motivated to monetize the customer's information to one whose business is to do the opposite.

You can roll your own VPN on a cloud provider.

Still not perfect, but I'd argue Azure, AWS, and the like are less likely to try to inspect/monetize traffic than a consumer ISP.

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

#464

Post by ascagnel_ »

makomk wrote: post #429
entee wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't do that for rule repeals, they are only subject to a majority vote in the senate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Review_Act Relevant section: The law provides a procedure for expedited consideration in the Senate. If the committee to which a joint resolution is referred has not reported it out within 20 calendar days after referral, it may be discharged from further consideration by a written p…

Probably with good reason too, since if I'm understanding the US system correctly proposed regulations are created by unelected officials and can come into effect without any congressional vote whatsoever. Allowing filibustering of CRA votes would mean that regulations could be created despite the majority of the Senate and House strongly opposing them.

Not really -- rulemaking from the executive branch agencies is supposed to be what takes laws and implements them into concrete policy. The CRA is supposed to allow Congress the ability to void the rules that are perceived as going against the spirit of the law that was passed.

I haven't seen any reporting on a specific law that these rules were tied to, but I have seen references made to laws predating the public internet that mandate privacy on phone calls that.

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

#465

Post by alexgaribay »

kej wrote: post #100
atomi wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...

15 House Republicans voted against it: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2017/roll202.xml

I'm glad to see that my congressman is on the list of republicans who voted nay. I would like to think that my call to his office made a difference.

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

#466

Post by shams93 »

benevol wrote: post #426
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…

Withdrawal from politics certainly is an important factor that has made America a currently sinking ship. But the problem is more systemic. It's at the center of the culture of this society: it's the fact that MONEY (== DOMINATION) has been made the most central and culturally venerated value. To change that, a lot of suffering will have to occur, because those who benefit from MONEY (== DOMINATION) will use exactly…

Yeah this has a lot to do with the disaster called the Citizens United decision giving corporation's unlimited ability to donate to politicians. Back in the 50s that still had the concept of the crime of bribery.

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

#467

Post by malchow »

warlox wrote: post #319
malchow wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my argument was impaired, it was certainly less impaired than the parent, who declared that the glorious free and open internet is over (b. 1974, d. 2017) because of this regulatory rollback. By the way, the fact that you cannot predict Microsoft's "new and exciting" ways of targeting me is a great example of why your argument is unconvincing. Do you really want me to believe that, as long as we kept this rule in…

If you knew the first thing about economics, you would know that the natural, regulation-free state of ISPs is for them to merge together into a single company the way that oil companies merged together to form Standard Oil at the turn of the 20th century. In that scenario, what you would get is the choice of one product, and you would pay an unreasonable amount of money for it. Of course, since you don't know the fi…

You are embarrassing yourself. Care to offer a testable hypothesis? You appear to predict that the market, with this rule repeal, will not yield any non-tracking ISP options. Is that your prediction?

You may wish to read this (now antiquated) document, which details why verticalization was market-motivated in the oil industry in the industrial age: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Vertical-Inte...

And, again, do you really want to be in the position of saying that the ISP industry will consolidate the way the oil companies have? Do you have any idea how rambunctious the energy industry is at the present moment? At best, you've shown that you are correct for a very short timeframe, and proven that you are wrong on a longer timeframe.

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

#468

Post by vvanders »

malchow wrote: post #467
warlox wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you knew the first thing about economics, you would know that the natural, regulation-free state of ISPs is for them to merge together into a single company the way that oil companies merged together to form Standard Oil at the turn of the 20th century. In that scenario, what you would get is the choice of one product, and you would pay an unreasonable amount of money for it. Of course, since you don't know the fi…

You are embarrassing yourself. Care to offer a testable hypothesis? You appear to predict that the market, with this rule repeal, will not yield any non-tracking ISP options. Is that your prediction? You may wish to read this (now antiquated) document, which details why verticalization was market-motivated in the oil industry in the industrial age: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Vertical-Inte... And,…

Nice personal attack there.

For what it's worth the parent is right. I have a single ISP available to me, as is the case with the majority of the US(or maybe two if you're lucky enough to live in a large metro that hasn't signed exclusivity agreements).

The free market isn't going to bring a solution to this. When the internet started out there were tons of ISPs, now there's only a few large ones that are split by region so they have an effective monopoly.

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

#469

Post by BearGoesChirp »

k_sh wrote: post #27
orbitingpluto wrote: post #12

What about COPPA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...

You raise a good point- IANAL, but I can see this being a good avenue for challenging this soon-to-be law. Per COPPA, you have to confirm that someone is 13 years of age before collecting information on them. What are they going to do, repeal a law that was sold on the premise of "think of the children"? Sounds like something that would come up during re-election: imagine a "Rep. X voted to make it easier for online…

For the children might be one way we can get them to support keeping search results private. Imagine some predator who decides to buy the history of certain demographics that will capture those 13 to 17 (and those under 13 who lie). They can then go through the search and look for anything that indicates someone who can easily be preyed upon. Find someone who searches things like how to be beautiful, use the internet history to stalk them on social media, and then use their internet history to form of a connection.

Condense something like this into a 1 minute add, run it as a 'how to' aimed at predators with the intent of striking fear into the hearts of parents who see it, and then end it with a short message on why we should keep internet usage private.

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

#470

Post by CalChris »

chimeracoder wrote: post #331
CalChris wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 real…

What did he actually do when he was twice elected as the Republican governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003. I give credit for what people do rather than what they say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Johnson#Governor_of_New_M...

Also, he didn't campaign on legalization. He gave a speech about it in his second term. Did he parole any non-violent drug offenders? Did he use the powers of his office?

Post reply on HN