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As another HN user put it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349426 > Administering devices with network set
by Kalium 6y ago
As another HN user put it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349426
> Administering devices with network settings is convenient, but rapidly vanishing because there's no technical difference between you administering your local network and a totalitarian ISP administering their users.
Your ability to terminate things locally means that finding Paul Revere with metadata isn't needed. It's a lot of work when you can just directly look at all your country's traffic.
- hkt 6y agoPeople in totalitarian regimes aren't safe. This is kind of a given. What everyone everywhere can resist, though, is corporate surveillance. That's the aim people should have.
- Kalium 6y agoYou're absolutely right. Corporate surveillance can, should, and must be resisted. It is perhaps worth considering carefully if exposing most people to surveillance they are not equipped to defend against from lots of entities (such as with typical DNS) is an improvement over something like Oblivious DoH. It might even offer some protection against some totalitarian governments in some cases. Again, you're completely right. Protecting people from corporate surveillance is very important! I just think it might be worth considering that we don't have a perfect answer at the moment, and some subtlety in how we think about this might be in order.
- core-questions 6y agoYes. The alternative is what I call "totalitarian liberalism" - it's not going to be communism, it's not going to be fascism, it's going to look a lot more like IKEA, and while it may be easier to physically step out of line, the incentives structure is rapidly converging on finding ways to keep you corralled in invisible ways.
- xg15 6y agoUntil the country where all those network connections terminate turns totalitarian...
- Lammy 6y agoOr until your country makes some friends and they decide to share their piece with each other until they recover your whole request.
- Kalium 6y agoThere is no system that both allows communication between multiple parties and is infinitely resilient to a sufficiently determined, large, and well-funded group of people with guns. What we can do with design and architecture is make each breach of communications security consume greater resources than unencrypted DNS, unencrypted HTTP, and unencrypted email.
- Lammy 6y agoThere is no bit of land left on Earth where I could go live and not be governed by a determined, large, and well-funded group of people with guns. Perhaps it's time to start building with them in mind first?
- Kalium 6y agoQuite. That said, migrating to new protocols and systems is rather challenging. So we get retrofits like DNS over HTTP, and Oblivious DNS over HTTP. Historically, radicalism in the form of whole-protocol-suite replacements has often seen little in the way of adoption. Whereas incrementalism in the form of tunnels and other protocol amendments has been much more successful.
- jbc1 6y agoThere actually is unclaimed land left on Earth. I know there's a bit between Egypt and Sudan. Claiming the land would worsen their claim on a different, better, piece of land that they both claim is theres; so neither does. Unsure of the status of non-government large, well funded groups of people with guns there is though.