I would say that the most effective form of protest against this would be to agitate and get a much larger portion of the population to use VPNs, and it would have the added benefit of making bulk filtering a lot harder.
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This is only a controversial statement if you interpret him to mean “ever once using a VPN is a sign of your capitulation to the machine, and all counterrevolutionary dogs like you have no place in the People’s glorious internet future.”
But what he’s actually saying is that constant escalation in a technological war with your ISP is a suboptimal solution compared with the legislative fix, which would be as simple as commenting out a single line of code.
I’m not saying BB is hyping this to sell their umpteenth different “recommended” VPN of the last few years, but I am saying this is hyped up.
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Geeks are maybe 1/10th of the population, and maybe only 60% of geeks identify as progressives. Telling geeks to abandon their VPNs and try to strongarm politicos into acting in the interests of privacy over dollars is stupid, and Tim should feel stupid.
It takes an army to win a war. Guerillas can only harry, harass, and annoy, but cannot achieve social change.
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I would also have to wonder about the problem of either having the “noise” cutting into your available bandwidth during times when you’re actually using your computer, or having your actual use look obviously different than the generated noise.
(in either case, I would think that with good enough analysis it would be really difficult to hide any real usage within the noise, since with enough monitoring your real usage is likely to have patterns that the noise is unlikely to simulate)
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Yeah, I wouldn’t worry too much about the bandwidth on a solid high speed connection, but I think it likely that even if you have multiple family members and devices using the connection, the patterns would still be distinct enough to be discerned within the noise. I do think white noise can be useful at times (like to make it harder to find an identity to track), but I don’t think that this is one of them.
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All this sidesteps the main usage of VPN’s, which is to access addresses and servers that are not available on the main net. Some might be darknet, but the vast majority of VPN usage is corporate. Getting into the company’s private network from outside of the office. JIRA and Wikis instead of drugs and warez.
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reading some of our JIRA issues feels like a very bad trip, though
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Also getting around licencing bullshit.
The statistics and graphical analysis programs I used as a researcher were bought at an “academic discount” rate (but they were the sort of programs where the overwhelming majority of the users are academic researchers, so those were actually the standard rates in practice).
The stupid things would log into the corporate DRM every time they started up, and refuse to operate if they didn’t recognise their location as a university campus. So I had to VPN into the university any time that I wanted to work from home.
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This is America we’re talking about, though.
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I guess what I’m saying is that Tim shouldn’t feel stupid because it seems pretty clear to me he’s not saying that. I mean, I think you “shouldn’t” do business with a private health insurance company, because I think what you “should” be doing is pushing for a single-payer system. But I’m not actually telling you to cancel your coverage, just pointing out that the current system sucks and could be changed more easily by a single law than by a million of us haggling with our HMOs individually.
A world in which VPNs aren’t necessary in order to maintain the tiniest shred of privacy is better than a world in which they are. I truly think that’s all he’s saying here.
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He’s still dumb for saying it at geeks, as if geeks weren’t “with it” already. Yes, the optimal solution involved writing new legislative code in addition to technical means. We already know and push for it.
Tim should be educating the general public instead of preaching to the choir.
Tim also realizes that using a VPN doesn’t do a thing about the privacy issues you face when using web services after the endpoint.
So… your ISP might be able to mine a few things that aren’t using HTTPS or another encrypted protocol, but Google, Facebook, et al see it all. You willingly give it to them.
He doesn’t support DRM, he supports EME.
EME is just a better way of interfacing with DRM that, like it or not, is here to stay. The alternative is for browsers to use the same insecure, non-standard plugins they are using now.
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Actually, no. The alternative is desktop applications… Like the one Amazon uses for Kindle and the one that already exists for Netflix. Keep your spyware shit out of my browser, bro.
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Google and Facebook are blocked at my router level. Really easy to do, as well, on mobile thanks to Firefox (with Disconnect and uBlock Origin). As far as corporations go, Google is relatively benign compared to… Johnson & Johnson, GM, etc. Facebook, on the other hand, is actively courting anti-freedom extremists.
Keep your spyware shit out of my browser, bro.
That is precisely what EME does. It allows for license/key exchange and pipes encrypted media to the DRM black-box. The DRM can choose to send unencrypted media back or display it natively. It has no access to the browser data.
I’m definitely not convinced that Berners-Lee isn’t badly out of his depth once he leaves the tech side for political matters; but I have to sympathize with him on this one; if only because of how VPNs are in essentially the same position as ISPs in terms of playing man-in-the-middle; and the occasional review of VPN offerings has shown some shockingly awful stuff even in terms of basic technical details; never mind the(much less visible) matter of what sort of eavesdropping the VPN vendor may or may not be doing.
At least in theory, the VPN market is slightly more hopeful(since barriers to entry are minimal, and costs of switching small, hence a vastly more competitive market than ISPs); but unless theory actually translates into practice for the one you choose, you are merely adding some latency and another trusted-but-untrustworthy agent to your connection.
If he were advising against using a magic bullet, I’d wonder what the hell he was thinking; but VPNs aren’t magic bullets: they provide certain, rather specific, features; along with not-always-reliable insinuations of more; but with limited need to actually deliver, or even much risk of getting caught if cheating.
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If you have to install crapware to watch Netflix, why build a bridge to
display it in the browser? Today it’s “just license keys”, tomorrow it’s
2004 again and this time Adobe and Netflix are Sony with rootkits in every
device thanks to EME/browser-enabled DRM.
