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Why do I always get a bad feeling about the motivations behind stuff like this? I want to believe it's for better privacy and security, but it's being driven by
by andrewstuart2 4y ago
Why do I always get a bad feeling about the motivations behind stuff like this? I want to believe it's for better privacy and security, but it's being driven by a corporation or two, and that makes me 100% suspicious. Like, for example, suddenly Edge is no longer respecting local DNS options and my pihole protects one fewer device from the real dangers to privacy. I don't want to be cynical so often, but this really doesn't feel like a benevolent move. Yeah, it's conditional at the moment, but as with Chrome and manifest v3, among many other examples, I'm losing my faith that anything with the potential to increase ad revenue will remain turned off for long.
- spicybright 4y agoAnything that decides to wrap around your internet traffic without telling you should definitely raise your antennas. Even if they had the best intentions, it's pretty easy to botch these things which erode your privacy even more.
- pricci 4y agoAbout the pihole problem, redirect all calls to port 53 to your pihole. If Edge is using DoH, you're out of luck.
- numpad0 4y agoDoes something like `source 0.0.0.0 dest 8.8.8.8 dport 443 action drop` work for DoH?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- d0mine 4y ago"bad feeling" is too generous. Microsoft is famous for its ubiquitous telemetry. It is not a suspicion, data collection is a fact. today. already.
- jahewson 4y agoThe motivation here is surely reducing ad tracking.
- marcosdumay 4y agoIf it was good for you, Microsoft would the the one announcing it. Loudly and repeatedly. They would do it even if it was harmful, but there existed some artificial narrative where it sounds good. You are hearing it from a third party exactly because they couldn't construct any explanation minimally realistic that sounded good.
- ratg13 4y agoThey haven't announced it yet because it hasn't been released. Reading the article, it does sound pretty decent. Partnership with cloudflare, selectively enables when you are connected to untrusted networks like public wifi. Pretty much the only downside is that they turn it on by default... which is always tricky when most of your target audience is not computer savvy in the least. How to give people security features that they have to figure out themselves when they can barely open the browser .. a dilemma for the ages.
- numpad0 4y agoBlock UDP port 53(DNS).
- amatecha 4y agoNo, yeah, it's sketchy as hell. Welp, another browser I'll never touch I guess.
- mgraczyk 4y agoIf you have never worked at a large tech company like Microsoft, you'll probably have a bad feeling because there's a lot you don't know about the business process of shipping features like this. It's reasonable to be cynical and confused if you have never seen it from the other side. For the most part, product features like this are shipped for boring and completely non-nefarious reasons. It's just hard to believe that if you've never worked on one.
- samstave 4y agoIMO its so they can keep the data-usage metric in their hose and not leak it to other companies which are competing for ad attention...?
- jvanderbot 4y agoHow is this not a transparent attempt to secure user information and conceil it from the usual other suspects?
- ekianjo 4y agojust creating a honeypot for the 3 letters agency. Microsoft loves doing that. just dont use edge I guess?
- newZWhoDis 4y agoThe pain/anger you’re feeling is called stallmanogenesis: the suffering induced by realizing, by force or otherwise, that stallman was right
- kranke155 4y agoNostradamus of technology, even if we all didn’t want to believe him.
- idiocrat 4y agoMS motivation is quite clear. Windows is an appliance (an interface) for amazon shopping and watching netflix. The MS telemetry has proven that 99.999% of consumers do not tweak default settings or dig under the hood. The 1-2 million now former "windows power users" are just too small population to be economically feasible to deal with. For MS it does not matter to lose those few to other tweakable OSs. Instead MS's product department is dreaming of scooping the remaining billions of cash-laden consumers. Presumably this is what the telemetry tells them. Cash is good, consuming is good, keeps the economy running, making shareholders happy.
- stinos 4y agoOk, but how exactly is your story an explanation of the motivation for VPN in their browser?
- eastdakota 4y agoThe motivation is to keep up with Apple who themselves are trying to distinguish themselves from Google. Doesn’t need to be sinister. If your primary business model doesn’t depend on tracking people to sell ads, and you’re competing with someone else whose does, then leaning in to making the use of your software/hardware more private makes sense.
- simonh 4y agoThis is where Apple's implementation, where the info is split between them and a third party with neither of them able to read the traffic on their own is so smart. Especially since there are multiple counter-parties to Apple. It also negates the risk of an MITM attack. Yes of course they could collaborate with a counter-party to break the system, but it seems significantly less likely to happen, and if it was happening it would be significantly more likely to come to light.
- chinathrow 4y agoFirefox, having your back since 2002.
- marcodiego 4y ago> Why do I always get a bad feeling about the motivations behind stuff like this? Because of microsoft history. Including recent history.
- Markoff 4y agoI mean nobody is forcing you to use Edge or Chrome, there are better alternatives like Vivaldi or if you really want to take it to extreme Ungoogled Chromium. But I agree with your sentiment, although it just means you should probably move to open source and obscure options. Also: > Brave, Mozilla, and Vivadi have said they intend to continue supporting Manifest v2 extensions for an indeterminate amount of time.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoExactly.. I would take it from Firefox if they offered something like iCloud Private Relay. But the thing they offer from Mullvad is no better than a traditional VPN (because it is a traditional VPN). And even more limited because it only works in the browser. And indeed the circumvention of Pihole is a big problem.
- bitsoda 4y agoI noticed today I can't find the Chrome flag (v105) to enable its reader mode. It's like they just nuked it since it made articles actually readable. It's not a huge deal, but I liked not having to launch another service like Pocket.
- uup 4y agoVPNs don’t help privacy at all. They allow you to substitute trust in your ISP for trust in a different entity. For some, that may be good, but for most others it’s a wash.
- riedel 4y agoIn Germany (according to TTDSG) an ISP does not have to claim that. They need explicit permission to track you. It is pretty much as the post does not have to claim that they open your envelopes.
- Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 4y agohttps://www.ivpn.net/ https://www.ivpn.net/ see "Do you really need a VPN?" - not affiliated with them, but tell me any other VPN-service that is actually this upfront... most are marketing the hell out of their apparent magic effects... since we're on the topic: how is it still a thing that vpn services are actively pitching content-block/copyright circumvention? Seems weird to pitch something as shady this loud and publicly? Reminds me of how weird I find it that trackers and illegal hosting sites have twitter accounts...
- Nifty3929 4y agoI believe it is harder for my government to get my data from a foreign VPN service than from my local oligopoly ISP that is already effectively an arm of the government.
- wan_ala 4y agoI think the only good reasons to use VPNs are for torrenting and accessing movies only available in other countries. For any privacy reasons its best to use Tor.
- andrewstuart2 4y agoI'd say they're still a net win, generally. The ISP vs VPN service tracking who does cancel out (if you ignore privacy claims of VPN providers, vs ISPs generally not guaranteeing that at all), but for every other service I might consume, when I'm on VPN I'm no longer connecting from a unique IP that can have other identifying information tagged to it.
- cowmix 4y agoYou are actually being too kind IMHO.
- r00fus 4y agoWhen trying to ascertain the intents of large organizations, I find it useful to examine previous actions. In the case of Microsoft, their willingness/intent to add ads and telemetry (including keylogging) into their OS seem to indicate they are doing this for serving ads better to their larger (paying) customers. If you're not paying for the (specific) service, you are the product.
- cm2187 4y agoBecause every recent development in the evolution of Windows has been hostile to privacy.
- legitster 4y agoI mean, if you have an attitude that anything an organization does must be for an ulterior motive, you're always going to get what you are looking for. Heck, people too for that matter. Maybe my dog just pretends to love me to get food. But in this case, Microsoft is looking for any competitive advantage against Google. They won't win on targeting, and they still make more money selling software than ads. So this does seem like an easy win for them.
- hamburglar 4y ago> if you have an attitude that anything an organization does must be for an ulterior motive … Well in the case where they are spending a lot of money to implement and operate a feature that nobody asked for and which has obvious privacy downsides, it does seem worthwhile to examine their motives. It’s not like we’re responding to the announcement for the next model of the Microsoft ergonomic keyboard with “hmmm, what are they up to?”
- nearbuy 4y ago> obvious privacy downsides What is the obvious privacy downside of selectively enabling a Cloudflare VPN when browsing on public Wifi or unsecured sites (which is when it enables)? That Cloudflare can see what sites you visit? On public Wifi and unsecured sites, anyone could potentially see and modify the data anyway.
- hamburglar 4y agoThe privacy issue is obvious. If my browser is funneling all of its traffic through a specific VPN instead of letting my system handle it, I have to wonder whether that choice was based on the VPN operator wanting to see my data or cooperating with someone who does. This is like finding out Microsoft decided all internet traffic on windows should be proxied through their servers. Could there be a benefit? Yes. Does it raise serious questions? Most definitely.
- nearbuy 4y ago
- aeturnum 4y agoI am 100% with you in general, but this feels more like the Windows Defender launch than some fully cynical power grab. That is to say - Microsoft gets a lot of grief and work from windows installs getting taken over / viruses / etc. For users who don't pick up their own protection (and don't choose to turn off the default windows protection) this feels like a better default. I don't trust Microsoft, but you are already exposed to their manipulations when you are using their OS - and this will help protect you from other manipulations.
- deviantbit 4y agoThe reason you have a bad feeling is it gives the FBI/FEDS a single point to collect your data, with a man-in-the-middle attack that you will have no idea is there. This is absolute BS they're implementing this.
- muricula 4y agoLike your internet service provider you already have??
- xboxnolifes 4y agoAn ISP is not a single point for all Windows users.
- BillinghamJ 4y agoCloudflare is probably not far off, though not an ISP in quite the same sense
- bisby 4y agoWhile I agree with the sentiment that ultimately we have to have some level of trust somewhere on the stack, there are a few minor differences. In theory anyway, I pick my ISP. If this was "support for using a VPN" instead of "we're injecting OUR VPN" I would feel a lot better. I'm aware Im using my ISP. Even someone who doesn't know much about computers knows their traffic is going somewhere. They might not know the repercussions of that, but if this is just transparently on in the background, effectively a keylogger, a user might never know this is happening. I give my ISP money. Back to the choice option. Some ISPs are bad and are trying to nickel and dime you to maximize profits. Some ISPs are actually good (I'm not swiss so I don't know for sure, but Init7 looks amazing https://www.init7.net/en/support/faq/privatsphaere/ https://www.init7.net/en/support/faq/privatsphaere/). I don't have to question with my ISP "how are they profiting off of me" because I give them money every month. They might be, but they don't intrinsically NEED to be scraping my data. I am not sure how Microsoft benefits from giving me a free VPN unless they are scraping my data. I can use a VPN to bypass my ISP monitoring if they do monitor. I have no idea how Microsoft's stuff is set up here. If the end result is that it gets routed through their VPN after my VPN, or instead of my VPN, or even through their stuff at all, but with stamped metadata, then there's not necessarily a great way to get around it other than "don't use Edge" In general, yes, your ISP isn't your friend. But an ISP is something I asked for, have a use for, and need. A Microsoft stealth VPN is none of those things.
- kirillzubovsky 4y agoCheck out the book “Hard Drive” about the early days of Microsoft, and you will never be able to see anything that corporate does without suspicion, and for a good reason.
- kirillzubovsky 4y agoAnd apparently we now get downvoted on Hacker News for a book recommendation. Amazing.
- nerdawson 4y agoProbably because Facebook already tried the free VPN and it was every bit the privacy nightmare you'd expect it to be. Given Microsoft's track record, there's no reason to expect that to be any different.