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Certain messaging apps... All bets are on centralized and/or proprietary ones that can afford to pay for the privilege. I have been saying from day one that St

by lrvick 4y ago

Certain messaging apps... All bets are on centralized and/or proprietary ones that can afford to pay for the privilege. I have been saying from day one that Starlink is well poised to end net neutrality.

adev_ 4y ago
> All bets are on centralized and/or proprietary ones that can afford to pay for the privilege Or not. App like Silence (https://silence.im/ https://silence.im/) have been able to do secure e2e messaging using SMS as transport layer for almost one decade now.
- lrvick 4y ago
  SMS makes it very hard to be anonymous. Not a good option IMO.
  - adev_ 4y ago
    > SMS makes it very hard to be anonymous. Not a good option IMO. How is that even related ? Silence is the equivalent of Signal over SMS instead of the usual Mobile Data: There is nothing by design in Signal to stay anonymous. E2E encryption are mainly there to prevent eyes dropping, not to provide anonymity.
    - lrvick 4y ago
      I was simply pointing out Starlink supporting SMS is not good enough, even with layers like Silence on top.
      - crangos 4y ago
        A major use case is in emergency situations or catastrophes when no classical cell service is available. If you are hoping to message someone to rescue you, I don't think anonymity is your concern.
        lrvick 4y ago
        Unless you are a journalist or a dissident and need to relay information that will save human lives, but cannot risk exposing your identity, location, or the message content to anyone but the recipients. Not all emergencies are the same.
      - Sporktacular 4y ago
        Good enough for what? If you have SMS where you didn't before you're still equally free to not use it. Personally I like the idea of always having a simple channel for emergencies.
        lrvick 4y ago
        Not good enough to be the only standard form of communication permitted other than a handful of centralized proprietary apps. A journalist or a dissident may wish to get critical communications out from a remote area without exposing their identity or location.
        v0idzer0 4y ago
        Whose goal is to solve this? Not T-Mobile or SpaceX
        lrvick 4y ago
        When you are the only source of a critical service in an area, you become a utility and should shoulder the responsibilities that come with that.
        Sporktacular 4y ago
        They don't have a responsibility to help you stay anonymous if they don't promise it. Follow your logic and we wouldn't have remote schooling or medical services over HF radio either. It extends the capabilities of normal phones to provide a feature we didn't have before, so you can't expect the capabilities of full fat, dedicated hardware. It's better than nothing, so why complain? You want net neutrality for a non-Internet service?
        Sporktacular 4y ago
        Then this isn't the solution for them. You keep assuming this is an internet service when it's not. Internet protocols are massively inefficient and have latency constraints that would choke narrow channels while offering almost no utility. This will be a modified SMS service, not a not an IRC service. Don't like it? Go buy an actual satphone with a data plan.
Cogito 4y ago
At the event they addressed this, and said they would work with anyone, and that the real issue is making sure that the data is correctly identified as messages and not generic data. This apparently would require back-end work between T-Mobile and the messaging app to identify the data in some way.
- lrvick 4y ago
  This is a net neutrality killer any way you look at it as whitelisting apps in any way will by design mean blocking legitimate privacy focused messaging solutions that do not have fixed IP addresses or identifiable traffic patterns. I somehow doubt for instance they would have a way to allow a federated and often self-hosted messaging protocol like Matrix over an anonymization networking layer like Tor, which is the only chat solution I use. Breaking net neutrality even a little bit has consequences like creating network effects further favoring centralized solutions forcing vulnerable people like journalists, dissidents, female healthcare seekers, etc, to take on a lot more risk. If SpaceX has bandwidth limitations they should cap everyone to dialup speeds and keep it neutral. If they insist on breaking net neutrality, people like me will be forced to do stupid nonsense like piping arbitrary TCP/IP as base64 blobs via chatbots over some whitelisted app like Whatsapp. Or masquerade traffic as port 53 DNS queries like dnstunnel. Protocol/app whitelisting will most discriminate against those with low technical ability. We have been down this road.
  - Cogito 4y ago
    I mean, sort of? I believe they have some sort of similar solution in place for free messaging on in-flight wifi. Having a look at how they've done that might give a better idea for what this will look like than speculation. Still, it's a hard problem. They want to prioritise connectivity on an extremely low bit-rate channel that covers an extremely large geographic region. Messaging apps needs to be a part of that connectivity solution, but you can't have one user making the entire cell unusable by everybody else. I don't know if there is a 'net neutral' way to do that, but would love to hear your ideas.
    - 4y ago
tomohawk 4y ago
Net neutrality is not a good thing in and of itself. It is one value among many. If you're a firefighter trying to call for assistance from base camp, you don't care about net neutrality. You want your emergency phone call to have priority over everything else. You want the net to be extremely non-neutral. On the general internet, where bandwidth is plentiful, net neutrality can keep certain pathological things from being a thing. On a specialized network where bandwidth is very scarce, it can be the cause of pathology.

by lrvick 4y ago

adev_ 4y ago

> All bets are on centralized and/or proprietary ones that can afford to pay for the privilege Or not. App like Silence (https://silence.im/ https://silence.im/) have been able to do secure e2e messaging using SMS as transport layer for almost one decade now.

lrvick 4y ago
SMS makes it very hard to be anonymous. Not a good option IMO.
- adev_ 4y ago
  > SMS makes it very hard to be anonymous. Not a good option IMO. How is that even related ? Silence is the equivalent of Signal over SMS instead of the usual Mobile Data: There is nothing by design in Signal to stay anonymous. E2E encryption are mainly there to prevent eyes dropping, not to provide anonymity.
  - lrvick 4y ago
    I was simply pointing out Starlink supporting SMS is not good enough, even with layers like Silence on top.
    - crangos 4y ago
      A major use case is in emergency situations or catastrophes when no classical cell service is available. If you are hoping to message someone to rescue you, I don't think anonymity is your concern.
      - lrvick 4y ago
        Unless you are a journalist or a dissident and need to relay information that will save human lives, but cannot risk exposing your identity, location, or the message content to anyone but the recipients. Not all emergencies are the same.
    - Sporktacular 4y ago
      Good enough for what? If you have SMS where you didn't before you're still equally free to not use it. Personally I like the idea of always having a simple channel for emergencies.
      - lrvick 4y ago
        Not good enough to be the only standard form of communication permitted other than a handful of centralized proprietary apps. A journalist or a dissident may wish to get critical communications out from a remote area without exposing their identity or location.
        v0idzer0 4y ago
        Whose goal is to solve this? Not T-Mobile or SpaceX
        lrvick 4y ago
        When you are the only source of a critical service in an area, you become a utility and should shoulder the responsibilities that come with that.
        Sporktacular 4y ago
        They don't have a responsibility to help you stay anonymous if they don't promise it. Follow your logic and we wouldn't have remote schooling or medical services over HF radio either. It extends the capabilities of normal phones to provide a feature we didn't have before, so you can't expect the capabilities of full fat, dedicated hardware. It's better than nothing, so why complain? You want net neutrality for a non-Internet service?
        Sporktacular 4y ago
        Then this isn't the solution for them. You keep assuming this is an internet service when it's not. Internet protocols are massively inefficient and have latency constraints that would choke narrow channels while offering almost no utility. This will be a modified SMS service, not a not an IRC service. Don't like it? Go buy an actual satphone with a data plan.

Cogito 4y ago

At the event they addressed this, and said they would work with anyone, and that the real issue is making sure that the data is correctly identified as messages and not generic data. This apparently would require back-end work between T-Mobile and the messaging app to identify the data in some way.

lrvick 4y ago
This is a net neutrality killer any way you look at it as whitelisting apps in any way will by design mean blocking legitimate privacy focused messaging solutions that do not have fixed IP addresses or identifiable traffic patterns. I somehow doubt for instance they would have a way to allow a federated and often self-hosted messaging protocol like Matrix over an anonymization networking layer like Tor, which is the only chat solution I use. Breaking net neutrality even a little bit has consequences like creating network effects further favoring centralized solutions forcing vulnerable people like journalists, dissidents, female healthcare seekers, etc, to take on a lot more risk. If SpaceX has bandwidth limitations they should cap everyone to dialup speeds and keep it neutral. If they insist on breaking net neutrality, people like me will be forced to do stupid nonsense like piping arbitrary TCP/IP as base64 blobs via chatbots over some whitelisted app like Whatsapp. Or masquerade traffic as port 53 DNS queries like dnstunnel. Protocol/app whitelisting will most discriminate against those with low technical ability. We have been down this road.
- Cogito 4y ago
  I mean, sort of? I believe they have some sort of similar solution in place for free messaging on in-flight wifi. Having a look at how they've done that might give a better idea for what this will look like than speculation. Still, it's a hard problem. They want to prioritise connectivity on an extremely low bit-rate channel that covers an extremely large geographic region. Messaging apps needs to be a part of that connectivity solution, but you can't have one user making the entire cell unusable by everybody else. I don't know if there is a 'net neutral' way to do that, but would love to hear your ideas.
  - 4y ago

tomohawk 4y ago

Net neutrality is not a good thing in and of itself. It is one value among many. If you're a firefighter trying to call for assistance from base camp, you don't care about net neutrality. You want your emergency phone call to have priority over everything else. You want the net to be extremely non-neutral. On the general internet, where bandwidth is plentiful, net neutrality can keep certain pathological things from being a thing. On a specialized network where bandwidth is very scarce, it can be the cause of pathology.