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There have been a few of these plugins floating around recently, and really everything that needs said about them appears in the comments already. Fake traffic
by _wmd 10y ago
There have been a few of these plugins floating around recently, and really everything that needs said about them appears in the comments already. Fake traffic is wasteful, hard to make look authentic, and only serves to create more records of the end user around the web rather than less (e.g. your laptop IP was generating fake traffic? That probably means you had the lid open and were doing something with it at that time)
I'd much rather see a browser with some kind of built-in distributed cache, something along the lines of FreeNet, but trading perfect anonymity for performance. Given a large chunk of disk space, and a handful of browsers talking to each other in a local area (e.g. same ISP), it should be viable to concoct a scheme where after a handful of browsers request a particular page, the remaining browsers are confident enough that the data cached in their local group is representative of the data sourced from the origin network.
There are a million issues to iron out with a scheme like that, e.g. bad actors injecting crap into the cache, handling staleness, interactions with dynamic content and API endpoints etc., but I think something like this would have a much greater privacy benefit by denying at least some traffic to the origin networks, or simply by keeping some of that traffic within the boundary of the local ISP's network (and if the local ISP is evil, requests between the nodes could be encrypted as in FreeNet).
- ntaylor 10y agoDistributed caching is challenging enough to get right when you know the segmentation parameters; inferring these accurately from any old website would be incredibly difficult. Still, it's a neat idea.
- eecc 10y agoI'm hacking at an article repository for that, bloody difficult... Maybe I should try with https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs
- _jal 10y agoNot quite what you're describing, but the venerable Squid cache can do distributed caching. Something, at least, to play with with your nerdy friends.
- _wmd 10y agoIt needs to happen in-browser because of the modern prevalence of SSL. I think only Firefox has APIs powerful enough to intercept stuff on this level, and even those APIs are obsolete, so I think it really needs to be integrated straight into a browser fork. Chrome / Firefox WebExtensions have request interception, but I'm not sure it's powerful enough to do this kind of stuff (Also, the mere fact such a scheme would have to jinx with the mechanics of a fundamental browser security mechanism should be enough to indicate how difficult it would be to implement safely!)
- j_s 10y agoNot while SSLKeyLogFile is still around. I keep wondering how long it will last, but it's been a while already.
- aianus 10y agoThe cache/proxy just needs to install its root certificate into your system store and no changes to the browser would be necessary.
- _wmd 10y agoIt's not sufficient due to certificate pinning, and it also completely short-circuits any browser-based security policies keyed on the certificate or options advertised in the protocol like SPDY. That would be the worst possible outcome, and why any correct solution (i.e doesn't break security or functionality) would be hard to reach
- detaro 10y agoLocal root certificates are prioritized by all browsers over certificate pinning, for exactly such intentional MITM.
- dredmorbius 10y agoOr an alternate model / protocol for content retrieval. Consider that SSL is largely used for connection encryption, though it has the additional side-effect of site authentication. If you can still validate the site, and rely on a hash of the content to detect changes, then you're starting to get toward a cacheable, secure, autenticated, system. I need to think more about this.
- ComodoHacker 10y agoStatic data caching is solved without p2p. Dynamic (personalized) data caching is unsolvable by p2p.
- guelo 10y agoThat would be a cache of what's popular. That would actually help on the surveillance side because it would effectively be a filter of the common traffic allowing them to focus on your unique traffic.
- novaleaf 10y agoI didn't get it for the purpose at the time, but my PrivateInternetAccess (PIA) account seems to be getting more useful because of this. unfortunately a lot of abuse is performed via PIA so some sites (especially financial and forums) block PIA ip's.