Comment by jjbinx007 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjbinx007 | Hacker News Reader

>The logs will show every web site you visited – for example, bbc.com – as opposed to the specific pages on that website, for example bbc.com/news.

>This information, especially when accumulated over a period of a year, would still be highly personal, potentially revealing your political preferences, sexuality, religion, medical problems, and other details that could be used to draw inferences about your private life.

Would there be any merit in people installing a script en mass to regularly access a list of legal URLs? If the logs show that everyone was visiting VD Clinic, Text-files.com, pastebin, Catholic News, Muslim News, Atheist News, 4chan, pornhub, and so on regularly then surely it must make the spying less effective and also offer some plausible deniability?

This may be a terrible idea, just thinking out loud.

Looks to me like it will be a log of your DNS lookups.

Deep sniffing Host: headers from HTTP seems like too much work.

But I wonder how it will work with Proxies / Manually setting DNS lookup to outside your ISP?

I can SSH tunnel my desktop (or phone when using Wifi on Android) computer requests both HTTP and DNS to my VM on another network. It makes me wish I was interesting enough to be snooped on.

> It makes me wish I was interesting enough to be snooped on.

Oh, but you are. Having access to VMs on other networks makes you a sysadmin, which automatically raises flags[0] within NSHQ.

I've used DNScrypt[1] for some time now, which tunnels all DNS requests to a remote site over SSL. Coupled with a local DNS server[2] to cache lookups, this works amazingly well.

It will be interesting to see how this "snoopers charter" will be implemented, if at all. I get the impression it's mostly to legitimize (and scale out) what GCHQ and MI5 have been doing for a long time already, while adding some form and structure to it.

0: https://theintercept.com/2014/03/20/inside-nsa-secret-effort...

1: https://dnscrypt.org/

2: https://unbound.net/

Cool, I feel important. Mood: lulz

Reply on news.ycombinator.com