Comment by beeboop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beeboop | Hacker News Reader

I don't worry about stuff like this too much, or stuff about the UK wanting to do stupid stuff like ban all encryption. I believe the internet is going to become more private and more anonymous as time goes on. Eventually everyone will be using the equivalent of VPNs on machines/browsers that don't give out any identifying information unless a user extremely explicitly tells it to. Or perhaps something similar to Freenet will become much more popular. We're already seeing hardware (like the iPhone) coming encrypted from the manufacturer with seemingly no way for any government agency to decrypt it forcefully. Ad blockers and tracking blockers are more popular than ever. Firefox just today released an update to help prevent trackers.

It's just a matter of time - ISPs and governments and corporations will lose the ability to track their users outside of their specific platform, and many of the platforms we use today will be replaced with P2P alternatives that make tracking impossible and aren't "owned" by anyone. I am sure the governments of the world will be livid.

It's important to distinguish political rights from mere consumer choices, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/7/stop-treating-c..., "The consumer-citizen pops up all over the place, like a cardboard stand-in for democratic citizens who have no other political concerns beyond self-interested consumption .. the public is hung out to dry with effectively no defense or recourse since our political rights have evaporated into market choices."

Isn't a big side effect of laws like these that tools such as encryption and P2P can be classified as designed to violate IP, and banned?

Yes, GP's view seems extremely naive. Unless you are using a pirate radio network, your ISP can simply turn off all your encrypted traffic .

Agreed. Thankfully, commerce and many other well-accepted forms of traffic are end-to-end-encrypted by design. Distinguishing between the legitimate forms of encryption and those presumed to be illegitimate will be difficult/impossible. Can you imagine what it might be like to try and add TLS/IPSec to the Internet only just now?

However ISPs can filter endpoints that they believe to be associated with undesirable activity.

your ISP can simply turn off all your encrypted traffic .

And then everyone starts using steganography.

Yeah, I can totally see my mum doing that.

Does she use email today? That was an esoteric practice only twenty years ago. If the need arises, steganography will evolve to become similarly easy to use.

And making traffic that looks like streaming 4k video. Lots of bandwidth for real-time communication!

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