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Would such a thing have a positive side effect of effectively encouraging decentralized end-to-end encrypted technologies?

eugeniub 7y ago
People almost never deliberately use end-to-end encryption. They use it by accident when centralized services they already use like WhatsApp and iMessage implement it.
- hnuser123456 7y ago
  For the layperson (not trying to be insulting, just honest), sure. For hn readers, it's probably more appealing. I find the parent comment more insulting than stating there is in fact a group of good people out there who value and seek privacy. Interesting that people are taking issue with my comment instead.
  - outworlder 7y ago
    Elitist connotations aside, the fact that you want to use encryption is irrelevant if noone else is using. Are you going to talk to yourself, or only with a close-knit group?
    - hnuser123456 7y ago
      I'm a member of several group chats on keybase which I use daily... Who is elitist here exactly? Sure I also have several friends who I talk to not on keybase. As soon as there's a service that's easier to setup, more reliable, and supports voice, I'll push it on all my friends. Also, the keybase app on desktop runs 8+ processes, chewing more than 1gb of ram and several gb of storage, and the phone app is using about 1gb of storage too. I very begrudgingly endure this because it's the only service I trust so far, along with my friends who also value e2ee. Really not sure what makes you adopt your attitude, can you explain? Do you think e2ee is not a worthy pursuit, or are you just being cynical? I didn't intend "commoner" to be as insulting as people here seem to be reading it. Not everyone understands e2ee yet. I'd like to change that but it's the current reality.
      - barbecue_sauce 7y ago
        Probably your use of the word "commoner".
        hnuser123456 7y ago
        It's just being honest, not insulting. Most people don't understand e2ee. They don't realize that reclaiming some privacy is an option available to them right now. (Or, they don't care, in which case I really do have less sympathy.)
        jrockway 7y ago
        "layperson" is a better word with a little less bite.
        hnuser123456 7y ago
        Thanks.
- eikenberry 7y ago
  The people encouraged to use the decentralized end-to-end encryption would not be the average end user but the people who write the next generation of applications would use it and the end users would get it by accident just like they do now.
tialaramex 7y ago
Don't Stand Out is a key privacy defence and is impossible with actually decentralized technologies. "The alleged terrorist was communicating with somebody else" is nothing, whereas "The alleged terrorist was communicating with JeremyNT's Private Node" means now you (JeremyNT) are getting the third degree. "It was somebody else" will get you just as far then as it would any number of people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and went to prison (Birmingham Six) or worse (several inmates at modern US "black sites" as described in the Senate's book on torture). When fifty people organise something the government wants to track but it can't distinguish that from the five hundred people ordering an Uber, the five thousand people reacting to a funny cat video or the fifty thousand people who just got a weather update those fifty people have privacy. That's important, it's why for example Signal uses Google's and Apple's generic notification frameworks rather than only using their own. It's also why eSNI plus DoH is on the critical path for the Internet.
- toast0 7y ago
  eSNI still gives away the public key for the encrypted host name. You only get a privacy advantage there if you're going through a large aggregator (Cloudflare, maybe Google and AWS load balancers), in which case, you have maybe reduced the number of governments that can identify your users. That's useful if you're trying to evade the GFW and you can find a service provider they won't block, but that's assuming GFW doesn't just block DoH and the ESNI txt records over plaintext DNS. And it adds a reliance on a small list of providers that have a scary monitoring capability themselves.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    That's a problem with the internet in general really. eSNI or not, "don't stand out" can only work if you aren't standing out in regards to the source and destination IPs your packets have.
    - toast0 7y ago
      You can easily run a proxy from AWS (or whoever) to wherever, and get don't stand out, without giving the keys to your proxy host. If you cycle those often enough, you'll have some degree of don't stand out. Of course, if you use eSNI, or SNI, you'll still stand out

eugeniub 7y ago

People almost never deliberately use end-to-end encryption. They use it by accident when centralized services they already use like WhatsApp and iMessage implement it.

hnuser123456 7y ago
For the layperson (not trying to be insulting, just honest), sure. For hn readers, it's probably more appealing. I find the parent comment more insulting than stating there is in fact a group of good people out there who value and seek privacy. Interesting that people are taking issue with my comment instead.
- outworlder 7y ago
  Elitist connotations aside, the fact that you want to use encryption is irrelevant if noone else is using. Are you going to talk to yourself, or only with a close-knit group?
  - hnuser123456 7y ago
    I'm a member of several group chats on keybase which I use daily... Who is elitist here exactly? Sure I also have several friends who I talk to not on keybase. As soon as there's a service that's easier to setup, more reliable, and supports voice, I'll push it on all my friends. Also, the keybase app on desktop runs 8+ processes, chewing more than 1gb of ram and several gb of storage, and the phone app is using about 1gb of storage too. I very begrudgingly endure this because it's the only service I trust so far, along with my friends who also value e2ee. Really not sure what makes you adopt your attitude, can you explain? Do you think e2ee is not a worthy pursuit, or are you just being cynical? I didn't intend "commoner" to be as insulting as people here seem to be reading it. Not everyone understands e2ee yet. I'd like to change that but it's the current reality.
    - barbecue_sauce 7y ago
      Probably your use of the word "commoner".
      - hnuser123456 7y ago
        It's just being honest, not insulting. Most people don't understand e2ee. They don't realize that reclaiming some privacy is an option available to them right now. (Or, they don't care, in which case I really do have less sympathy.)
        jrockway 7y ago
        "layperson" is a better word with a little less bite.
        hnuser123456 7y ago
        Thanks.
eikenberry 7y ago
The people encouraged to use the decentralized end-to-end encryption would not be the average end user but the people who write the next generation of applications would use it and the end users would get it by accident just like they do now.

tialaramex 7y ago

Don't Stand Out is a key privacy defence and is impossible with actually decentralized technologies. "The alleged terrorist was communicating with somebody else" is nothing, whereas "The alleged terrorist was communicating with JeremyNT's Private Node" means now you (JeremyNT) are getting the third degree. "It was somebody else" will get you just as far then as it would any number of people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and went to prison (Birmingham Six) or worse (several inmates at modern US "black sites" as described in the Senate's book on torture). When fifty people organise something the government wants to track but it can't distinguish that from the five hundred people ordering an Uber, the five thousand people reacting to a funny cat video or the fifty thousand people who just got a weather update those fifty people have privacy. That's important, it's why for example Signal uses Google's and Apple's generic notification frameworks rather than only using their own. It's also why eSNI plus DoH is on the critical path for the Internet.

toast0 7y ago
eSNI still gives away the public key for the encrypted host name. You only get a privacy advantage there if you're going through a large aggregator (Cloudflare, maybe Google and AWS load balancers), in which case, you have maybe reduced the number of governments that can identify your users. That's useful if you're trying to evade the GFW and you can find a service provider they won't block, but that's assuming GFW doesn't just block DoH and the ESNI txt records over plaintext DNS. And it adds a reliance on a small list of providers that have a scary monitoring capability themselves.
- judge2020 7y ago
  That's a problem with the internet in general really. eSNI or not, "don't stand out" can only work if you aren't standing out in regards to the source and destination IPs your packets have.
  - toast0 7y ago
    You can easily run a proxy from AWS (or whoever) to wherever, and get don't stand out, without giving the keys to your proxy host. If you cycle those often enough, you'll have some degree of don't stand out. Of course, if you use eSNI, or SNI, you'll still stand out