What is the overlap of people who are reading a blogpost about Cloudflare standards and people who need a metaphor to understand what compression is? You have 7 paragraphs of highly technical information then just in case, you need to explain how compression works? Just tell your reader you think they're a moron and save yourself the keystrokes.
New standards for a faster and more private Internet
61–70 of 87 posts
Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet
#62The benchmark for Zstandard against Brotli seems to miss a key information---the compression levels used for both algorithms, because both the compression ratio and compression time will depend on them. In fact this had been my long suspicion about introducing Zstandard to the web standard, because lower compression levels for Brotli are not that slow and it was never publicly mentioned whether improving lower Brotli…
Meta drove the Zstandard content encoding, but Google drove the adoption of Zstandard in Chrome. The faster Brotli levels could probably be made to match Zstandard’s compression speed. But we’ve invested a lot in optimizing these levels, so it would likely take significant investment to match. Google is also contributing to improving the speed of Zstandard compression. A cheaper conversion from Zstandard to Brotli is…
The conversion is meant to avoid the expensive backreference optimization when it has been already done once by Zstandard, because you can't prepend a Zstandard bitstream with a Brotli bitstream without turning one to another. But well, I think such hybrid scheme is hard to make when the latency is at stake.
Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the other poster was implying that the governments don’t care.
Disagree on this take. Blocking services does have an economic impact. This alongside people smuggling in starlink is making censorship useless.
Freedom of information is an existential threat to authoritarian states. There is no amount of money they're not willing to give up if it mean they stay in power.
That's said, it will not come to that. They'll just mandate spyware installation.
Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet
#64A very nice feature of zstd is that it is seekable . So you could map that to HTTP Range requests and go crazy about it.
I don't think so? It's only seekable with an additional index [1], just like most other compression schemes. Having an explicit standard for indices is definitely a plus though.
[1] https://github.com/facebook/zstd/blob/dev/contrib/seekable_f...
Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet
#65ECH is going to be huge for people in regressive countries. For example Iran.
Many such countries already block traffic with ECH entirely. There's no technical solutions to a polical problem.
I remember when you can just change your DNS provider to bypass censorship. Nowadays, browsers and OS provide safe DNS by default, and thus censors had mostly switched to DPI based method. As this cat and mouse game continue, inevitably these governments will mandate spyware on every machine.
These privacy enhancements invented by westerner only work for western citizens threat model.
Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
People trafficking drugs into Australia were using a secure, encrypted messaging service developed by a private third party provider.
They eventually found out that the third party provider was in fact the Australian Federal Police, reading all their messages in clear and in real time.
The government only needs to compel a corporation if that corporation has an adversarial relationship with them.
We have tried the centralized model pushed by Cloudflare before, it was called the Minitel.
Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet
#67I use Tor for privacy. CF blocks Tor; you can't get past the captcha.
Pffff you think you're edgy and hardcore.
I use the elite hacking tool know as FIRE FOX and I get CF gatekept all the time.
Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet
#68ECH - 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…
> When both are operated by the same company, how can you know they aren't colluding? You don't. At best the client can check domain names and IP addresses, but that's hardly a guarantee. To solve that problem, you can combine multiple parties. For example, you can use https://odoh1.surfdomeinen.nl/proxy as a proxy (operated by SURF [1]) to use the Cloudflare servers for lookup. I think for ODoH to work well, we need…
> That could be ISPs, Google/Microsoft/etc. or some kind of non-profit.
Or Apple[1,2].
[1] Oblivious DNS over HTTPS, https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc9230.txt
[2] About iCloud Private Relay, https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602
Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The title of something should reflect the content. This is an article about a new compression format, and thus the title should say that.
The first third of the article is indeed, maybe read the rest?
I read really, really far into the article.
The summary at the top made it look like the whole article was about compression.
Re: New standards for a faster and more private Internet
#70ECH - 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…
> 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
Yeah, and unfortunately it increases the moat such companies have. They can offer a privacy screen that smaller orgs just can't match.