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There are decentralized and anonymized networks (Tor, I2P, etc) that may be effective to prevent ISP interference but on the other hand those networks are not k

by throwaway2016a 9y ago

There are decentralized and anonymized networks (Tor, I2P, etc) that may be effective to prevent ISP interference but on the other hand those networks are not known for their speed so while it may prevent tampering it will be certainly slower than whatever the ISPs put in place. There are also decentralized VPN-like networks such as Zeronet and Docker overlay that route peer to peer and plain VPN which requires traffic routed through a central server. Which are very efficient and as a bonus, traffic is encrypted at least part of the way and thus can't easily be tampered with without raising red flags. Then there is decentralized file hosting like Dat, IPFS, and if you want to go old school Bittorrent (though that has centralized trackers). All are great for spreading bandwidth across hosts and if throttling is bandwidth per destination IP based it might be an effective way to get around it. None of them would be great at preventing throttling though, except in that they would be less obvious than large amounts of data coming from a central source. But ISPs could "solve" that but using a white list to make some sites immune to limits but have destination IPs severely limited by default. Overall, I'm not worrying about throttling of websites. I'm worried about throttling of protocols and tampering with websites. An ISP can easily say, for example, only allow some ports to go limitless and completely cripple any other ports. For example... forcing customers to use their DNS which is a big privacy concern. Edit: Just to add to that DNS piece. I've always felt that Namecoin and the like are underrated. That is to say, DNS on the blockchain. It is an awesome use of blockchain tech that provides both transparency and allows users to look up domains 100% anonymously. Tor and Zeronet both have decentralized service lookup (others do as well, I'm sure) but the service names are often hashes not something friendly,

3pt14159 9y ago
I really do not understand why DNS was done so poorly. This could have been so much more simple and more secure in so many ways. Why can't I serve a HTTP header or status code to update DNS? Why does propagation take hours when a simple pub-sub model would have worked and been a couple seconds of latency at most? How does DNS, something more important to get right than cryptographic certificates authorities, not come secure by default? How is it that a wildcard cert costs 10x as much as a TLD? Why does my browser not come pre-loaded with the top million DNS records? It would be a couple dozen megabytes (uncompressed). The whole thing seems so stupidly put together.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  The simple answer is because it was rolled out in the 1980s, far before the Internet existed in its current form. Hindsight is 20/20.
- stevekemp 9y ago
  Remember when DNS was created, and that answers your question. It's the same reason why FTP is terrible, and SMTP allows spoofing. The DNS protocol has been updated with additional record-types over time, but the protocol itself is largely unchanged since the time it was created, when the network was smaller, and the world was more trusting.

3pt14159 9y ago

I really do not understand why DNS was done so poorly. This could have been so much more simple and more secure in so many ways. Why can't I serve a HTTP header or status code to update DNS? Why does propagation take hours when a simple pub-sub model would have worked and been a couple seconds of latency at most? How does DNS, something more important to get right than cryptographic certificates authorities, not come secure by default? How is it that a wildcard cert costs 10x as much as a TLD? Why does my browser not come pre-loaded with the top million DNS records? It would be a couple dozen megabytes (uncompressed). The whole thing seems so stupidly put together.

matthewmacleod 9y ago
The simple answer is because it was rolled out in the 1980s, far before the Internet existed in its current form. Hindsight is 20/20.
stevekemp 9y ago
Remember when DNS was created, and that answers your question. It's the same reason why FTP is terrible, and SMTP allows spoofing. The DNS protocol has been updated with additional record-types over time, but the protocol itself is largely unchanged since the time it was created, when the network was smaller, and the world was more trusting.