Live data from Hacker News

The Internet of Onions

lwn.net

1–10 of 38 posts

Re: The Internet of Onions

#2
I work for a large IoT PaaS provider. Would this be valuable for customers on our platform if we supported something like this? I'm trying to think through all the problems with this and while I think the redesign of our platform will actually make this harder, there's no reason it wouldn't be possible.

I also don't really understand how Tor works. Does this break anything like persistent connections or letting screw up anything with using UDP over longer time spans? (My other pet project is CoAP.)

I don't actually work on the products team, but I bet I could fight for something like this. (Plus figuring this out would actually be fun rather than the tedium that my real job has become.)

Re: The Internet of Onions

#4

Off topic ish, am I supposed to be able to read this without a subscription?

Yes! This is a subscriber link, which can be used to share articles with non-subscribers. My understanding is that as long as it's not systematically abused to avoid subscribing, sharing is encouraged.

Re: The Internet of Onions

#5

Off topic ish, am I supposed to be able to read this without a subscription?

Yes, LWN has a feature that lets subscribers share a subscriber-only article with non-subscribers. I think there should be a message on the page along the lines of "A subscriber has made this available to you, would you like to subscribe?"

Re: The Internet of Onions

#6
post #2

I work for a large IoT PaaS provider. Would this be valuable for customers on our platform if we supported something like this? I'm trying to think through all the problems with this and while I think the redesign of our platform will actually make this harder, there's no reason it wouldn't be possible . I also don't really understand how Tor works. Does this break anything like persistent connections or letting scre…

Supporting Tor is a niche thing, but... it would be very very helpful if everything in the IoT could be persuaded to go through a customer-controlled local gateway, which could proxy, rate-limit, redirect, and firewall connections according to the owner's policy.

Every device that reaches back to the mothership with a proprietary protocol is another device which gets discarded when the mothership loses interest in supporting it, and probably has major holes in it as well.

Re: The Internet of Onions

#7

Off topic ish, am I supposed to be able to read this without a subscription?

> "The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber..."

You're probably not the only one who missed this. This relates to another active story on HN now regarding LWN. Maybe this should be a clear in-your-face-but-please-not-modal-clickthrough header similar to Wikipedia's pledge drive style? LWN, take note: some of your guest readers don't know they're guests and might be willing to subscribe or contribute if it were more obvious.

Re: The Internet of Onions

#8
post #2

I work for a large IoT PaaS provider. Would this be valuable for customers on our platform if we supported something like this? I'm trying to think through all the problems with this and while I think the redesign of our platform will actually make this harder, there's no reason it wouldn't be possible . I also don't really understand how Tor works. Does this break anything like persistent connections or letting scre…

Tor isn't designed for UDP. There are workarounds to tunnel UDP, but they're fragile and not suitable for production.

Re: The Internet of Onions

#9
post #6
post #2

I work for a large IoT PaaS provider. Would this be valuable for customers on our platform if we supported something like this? I'm trying to think through all the problems with this and while I think the redesign of our platform will actually make this harder, there's no reason it wouldn't be possible . I also don't really understand how Tor works. Does this break anything like persistent connections or letting scre…

Supporting Tor is a niche thing, but... it would be very very helpful if everything in the IoT could be persuaded to go through a customer-controlled local gateway, which could proxy, rate-limit, redirect, and firewall connections according to the owner's policy. Every device that reaches back to the mothership with a proprietary protocol is another device which gets discarded when the mothership loses interest in su…

What do you propose manufacturers do? (This is a serious question.) Customers aren't witholding money from products, so there isn't much in the way of economic incentives. Having and supporting open protocols is more work than internal only. Often times the mothership is using other products to provide the service which are proprietary and paid for, so nothing is free (as in beer) or free (as in speech). "Do more work for no additional revenue" is a very hard sell!

I desperately want LAN SSL for a product I work on. It isn't simple, but there is a known approach (Plex do it) and it would be great for letsencrypt to solve. You can see my last plea from just over a month ago in HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956088

Re: The Internet of Onions

#10
post #6
post #2

I work for a large IoT PaaS provider. Would this be valuable for customers on our platform if we supported something like this? I'm trying to think through all the problems with this and while I think the redesign of our platform will actually make this harder, there's no reason it wouldn't be possible . I also don't really understand how Tor works. Does this break anything like persistent connections or letting scre…

Supporting Tor is a niche thing, but... it would be very very helpful if everything in the IoT could be persuaded to go through a customer-controlled local gateway, which could proxy, rate-limit, redirect, and firewall connections according to the owner's policy. Every device that reaches back to the mothership with a proprietary protocol is another device which gets discarded when the mothership loses interest in su…

I'm not sure what you mean by "persuaded", since unless the IoT device has its own cellular connection, it can't prevent being passed through a consumer-controlled device. Do you have such a device right now that is being bypassed? Because if the answer is no, that's your real problem.
Post reply on HN