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FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available

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Re: FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available

#51

Post by kstrauser »

cperciva wrote: post #34
drewg123 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This helps protect member privacy, particularly when the network is insecure — ensuring that our members are safe from eavesdropping by anyone who might want to record their viewing habits." from https://netflixtechblog.com/protecting-netflix-viewing-priva...

Come on Drew, you know as well as I do that media can be unmasked via side channels if an attacker really cares.

People, before you downvote, check out the username.

But yeah, you’re right. You could glean a lot of information from nothing but a collection of movies’ exact runtimes, as visible from the network stream. Although that wouldn’t tell you much about a single movie, given enough viewings you could make pretty good guesses about which movies someone is watching.

Re: FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available

#52

Post by mapgrep »

tal8d wrote: post #50
mapgrep wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One key impetus for Linux moving to systemd was faster boot time, parallelizing init tasks. Is FreeBSD looking at moving beyond traditional rc script boot?

As somebody who fled Linux to FreeBSD in order to avoid systemd, the prospect of that happening again makes me a little sick to my stomach. Running out of places to go that aren't controlled by people who are openly hostile to POSIX standards.

Wouldn’t have to be systemd, macOS has launchd for init, FreeBSD could come up with its own thing. This is a good talk I saw recently (by a FreeBSD contributor) on why these sorts of systems have become more common, and why they seem so sweeping in scope. https://youtu.be/o_AIw9bGogo

(In fact systemd and launchd are so tailored to their respective operating systems that FreeBSD likely would have to do their own init replacement if they cared to.)

Re: FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available

#54

Post by geofft »

cperciva wrote: post #34
drewg123 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This helps protect member privacy, particularly when the network is insecure — ensuring that our members are safe from eavesdropping by anyone who might want to record their viewing habits." from https://netflixtechblog.com/protecting-netflix-viewing-priva...

Come on Drew, you know as well as I do that media can be unmasked via side channels if an attacker really cares.

Is this actually in reach for realistic attackers?

Like let's say you're a network admin of a college with conservative religious views, and you want to see if anyone in the dorms is watching "immoral" content. You probably can just intercept an entire unencrypted session and replay it on your machine and see what it was. But you don't really have the funding or access to expertise to develop a side channel attack yourself, and there are no off-the-shelf devices that will do this for you, are there?

Encryption is likely the difference between your management saying "Show me what the kids are watching" and "This isn't worth assigning our network admin to spend half a year on effectively a cryptography research problem."

(Incidentally, encryption may also be what allows a sympathetic network admin to refuse an order from their management, which is also worth considering in your threat model.)

I think it's true that if you had either the resources of one of the richest handful of countries in the world or access to some talented grad students etc., you could do it. But if you're even a non-rich country (like one of the many small countries with moralistic governments that censor the internet) it seems harder, and if the goal is spying on what people watch, it's unlikely that people talented enough to do it will find this a problem they're happy to volunteer their time to solve.

(This is a genuine question - the attack might be much easier than I think!)

Re: FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available

#55

Post by [deleted] »

drewg123 wrote: post #22
jiggawatts wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I haven't quite understood is why Netflix even bothers to encrypt the video streams. It seems like a waste of effort, since Netflix isn't exactly serving content that would qualify as "secret". There's not even any porn on there, so it's not the biggest concern if someone were to find out what some people were watching. This data is being collected anyway via endpoint technologies like Samsung's Automated C…

"This helps protect member privacy, particularly when the network is insecure — ensuring that our members are safe from eavesdropping by anyone who might want to record their viewing habits." from https://netflixtechblog.com/protecting-netflix-viewing-priva...

[deleted]

Re: FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available

#56

Post by dddddaviddddd »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #30

I wish FreeBSD booted faster. I recall it took nearly a minute from turning my machine on (with an SSD and a recent Intel i5 processor) before I was prompted for my login credentials. It's little things like that which make the system feel a bit dated, at least to someone like me who is an outsider to FreeBSD but has used Linux for a decade. I also wished FreeBSD needed less configuration to use as a desktop (see htt…

> Also, does Zoom work on FreeBSD?

Native client: no. The web client is useable though, and virtualization can work: https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/freebsd-videoconferenci...

As others have mentioned the comparatively slow boot is because (for simplicity's sake) the process isn't parallelized. You can install alternate init systems from ports if you want to speed this up.

Re: FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available

#57

Post by michaelmrose »

mapgrep wrote: post #35
gautamcgoel wrote: post #30

I wish FreeBSD booted faster. I recall it took nearly a minute from turning my machine on (with an SSD and a recent Intel i5 processor) before I was prompted for my login credentials. It's little things like that which make the system feel a bit dated, at least to someone like me who is an outsider to FreeBSD but has used Linux for a decade. I also wished FreeBSD needed less configuration to use as a desktop (see htt…

One key impetus for Linux moving to systemd was faster boot time, parallelizing init tasks. Is FreeBSD looking at moving beyond traditional rc script boot?

I would question whether boot time is such a meaningful target. It's trivial to leave a system up days or weeks relying on hibernation or suspend instead. This seems especially true given that freebsd is even more likely than Linux to see use as a server instead of a desktop.

Besides boot time on any init system with a fast ssd seems to be pretty damn quick. Saving 10 seconds every month will take a long time to pay off.

Re: FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available

#58

Post by tal8d »

mapgrep wrote: post #52
tal8d wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who fled Linux to FreeBSD in order to avoid systemd, the prospect of that happening again makes me a little sick to my stomach. Running out of places to go that aren't controlled by people who are openly hostile to POSIX standards.

Wouldn’t have to be systemd, macOS has launchd for init, FreeBSD could come up with its own thing. This is a good talk I saw recently (by a FreeBSD contributor) on why these sorts of systems have become more common, and why they seem so sweeping in scope. https://youtu.be/o_AIw9bGogo (In fact systemd and launchd are so tailored to their respective operating systems that FreeBSD likely would have to do their own init…

> This is a good talk

That is not a good talk unless you already advocate for abandoning standards, and celebrate Linux's growing power to dictate how the shrinking number of remaining OSes design things. You might easily miss it if you're already onboard with systemd, but in his point by point address of systemd's shortcomings - he repeatedly handwaves and redirects.

Systemd is a mess, which is an amazing accomplishment considering the fact that it is supposed to be this great unifying/simplifying layer. So awful that the DoD held out for the longest time in formalizing any kind of baseline security audit procedures that address it. Compare that to something like Solaris SMF. I've never had a problem with the rc system that made me blame the underlying design, but if I did - systemd would be at the bottom of a very long list of my potential solutions, right under 'Set the machine on fire and pickup a copy of "Industrial Society and Its Future"'.

I really like the guy running the OpenZFS project, but it is painfully obvious that it is only going to increasingly cater to Linux - and coincidentally a lot of the really annoying aspects of the project are a result of that. For example: that Rube Goldberg build system, with massive amounts of code duplication... that wouldn't be there if not for autotools and gnu export symbol games.

Re: FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available

#59

Post by stock_toaster »

tal8d wrote: post #50
mapgrep wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One key impetus for Linux moving to systemd was faster boot time, parallelizing init tasks. Is FreeBSD looking at moving beyond traditional rc script boot?

As somebody who fled Linux to FreeBSD in order to avoid systemd, the prospect of that happening again makes me a little sick to my stomach. Running out of places to go that aren't controlled by people who are openly hostile to POSIX standards.

There are a few Linux distros that use OpenRC with decent success. I run lots of FreeBSD servers, but I also run some Alpine servers, where openrc works well for me (with some s6 thrown in for a few services).

Re: FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available

#60

Post by mrpippy »

stock_toaster wrote: post #19
jiggawatts wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I haven't quite understood is why Netflix even bothers to encrypt the video streams. It seems like a waste of effort, since Netflix isn't exactly serving content that would qualify as "secret". There's not even any porn on there, so it's not the biggest concern if someone were to find out what some people were watching. This data is being collected anyway via endpoint technologies like Samsung's Automated C…

My guess would be to prevent middlebox fiddling. Such as an end user device asking for 4k, but a middlebox somewhere between the customer and Netflix inspecting the http content and blocking it (or modifying the client request in flight), because "only 480p allowed here" or something like that.

US cellular carriers do that by throttling bandwidth to the network ranges used by video providers
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