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I applaud Mozilla and Google for this. It does get me wondering however, how viable this would be in other countries. Say, what if the UK or the US were to try
by korethr 7y ago
I applaud Mozilla and Google for this.
It does get me wondering however, how viable this would be in other countries. Say, what if the UK or the US were to try to pull something like this. There's not much that Kazakhstan can do against Mozilla. However, if something similar were tried here in the US, it seems to me Mozilla would be a lot more vulnerable to government retaliation, or being forced to do what the Fed says whether they want to or not. The Mozilla Foundation is incorporated here in the US. Those board members whom are not US citizens could be deported or prevented from entering the US. Those board members whom are US citizens and residing here could be arrested. The IRS could be weaponized to revoke their 501(c)3 status. There's probably other things I'm not thinking of.
I'm not saying the US is quite that bad, or that it's going to get that bad here soon. But I don't think it's unreasonable to think that such could happen if people don't remain vigilant. We need only to look at the history of other nations abroad and our own history here to see just how quickly and easily it can and has gotten that bad in the past.
Again, I'm glad of Mozilla's and Google's technical solution to this problem. But, as it seems governments continue to lean in this direction, I worry that failing to pursue the policy angle in addition to the technical angle when addressing these problems will cause the technical solutions to be or become brittle.
Edit: I was reminded that donations to groups who do pursue the policy angle, like the EFF, would be more effective than handwringing on HN. I would encourage those of you whom are also concerned about this to do the same.
- grlass 7y agoWorth looking at what the response to Mozilla's DNS-over-HTTPS system in the UK has been. Disabling it by default is a good way to avoid conflict, but means that the feature effectively doesn't exist for the vast majority of users. https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-no-plans-to-enable-dns-over-https-by-default-in-the-uk/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-no-plans-to-enable-dns...
- vbezhenar 7y agoMozilla takes action to protect users in Kazakhstan. Mozilla does not take action to protect users in UK. That's funny.
- eternalny1 7y agoAs if the NSA isn't all over this already? Or are we ok with that given the nature of their work? They literally dug holes in the ground to tap Google's fiber lines and bypass encryption. The Snowden slides showed with gleeful joy how they were siphoning all data from Yahoo, Skype, Google, and numerous others. The real question is will all this stored data be used for the stated mission purpose of the NSA, or will we get (do we have?) "mission creep"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- roca 7y agoThe NSA was able to read Google's traffic because Google did not encrypt traffic over their fiber. When they found out that the NSA was tapping their fiber, they started encrypting that traffic. I don't know of any reason to believe that the NSA has access to decrypted Google traffic today, except via court order.
- xg15 7y agoWhat I'd be interested to know is how the situation is past the encrypted connections, i.e. inside the data centers. If you can't wiretap the connection, it seems like a logical choice that your next angle of attack would be the data centers. While you might not get insight on Google (without cooperation), the growing centralisation would actually make it easy to access data for many smaller companies: If you can convince just Amazon to work with you, you have potential access to the data of everyone that uses AWS.
- feelix 7y agoYou wouldn't know of any reason to believe that the NSA had access to google traffic back when they did if Snowden didn't allow you to know. Why choose to assume they don't rather than do?