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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

> My local ISP seems more trustworthy to me than a big US-based corporate which acts under the guise of a selfless privacy rights defender.

I have never trusted any local ISP. They’re commonly expressly allowed by law to share roughly whatever they like about you†, and they are known to do so.

Cloudflare has at least promised not to be evil, and is to be audited annually concerning it. If they desire to be evil I have no doubt they could wangle it, but I still trust them way more than I trust any ISP, because they’re already known to be evil under these definitions.

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† (This is a gross simplification, but it’s broadly true enough in most countries.)

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> (This is a gross simplification, but it’s broadly true enough in most countries.)

Seems like you forget Europe and e.g. GDPR.

It would be a big no-no in Denmark: My bank has one division for normal accounts and another for mastercard. The 2 divisions are separate companies, so I have to sign a paper to allow the MasterCard division to know about my normal account.

So Danes have no hesitation giving out personal information as they know it’s protected by law. “We don’t sell your info” is redundant in Denmark.

I wish that was the case. TDC (the largest danish telco) actually sold information about mobile users, including roaming users to VisitAarhus. Specifically, it was data about the locations of mobile users.

Danish article on the subject: https://www.version2.dk/artikel/tdc-saelger-data-mobilbruger...

So there is still plenty of reasons not to trust your ISP in Denmark and Europe in general.

Telia did the same thing in Sweden some years ago. There are however ISPs who have a business model based on them having a very high profile in personal integrity politics (like Bahnhof), which I would feel more comfortable with thanany other DNSs

By wouldn’t you expect Bahnhof to offer a DoH-capable resolver for its customers then, that you could use in FF if you choose to enable the feature once it’s out of the experimental phase?

What prevents them from selling aggregated DNS statistics?

For what was queried on their servers.

> I have never trusted any local ISP.

You are forgetting that the author is from Switzerland.

Cloudfare can promise what they want, they can still be subject to warrantless spying by US agencies and not disclose anything about it.

As a user whose trust has already been broken by both ISPs and governments, I see no drawback in participating as a user in this public experiment. What you describe as a drawback is a privacy improvement for me.

The DNS implementation used by every non-Tor user around the world today is already subject to warrantless spying by every ISP and government in the world, due to the property known as “cleartext”. If you opt-in to the Cloudflare trial, you are only at risk of warrantless spying by Cloudflare — rather than every ISP — and the US government — rather than every government.

My cellular ISP sells my DNS queries to advertising networks, and my home ISP is wiretapped warrantlessly by the US government. This experiment decreases the chances of the resale of my personalized data to data warehouses and decreases the chances of success of warrantless wiretapping by my government.

I envy those of you that believe you can trust your ISPs and governments.

And lets not forget that their CEO will arbitrarily censor and stop serving people he doesn't like. He's done it before. He'll do it again. Cloudflare has already lost my trust.

In his blog post on that, he said pretty clearly that he doesn't want and should not have this power. https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

(Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare.)

But he does and does. And now in the Perfect 10 lawsuit against your company it's biting you in the ass. Now you have to censor everything. Good going.

But in agreeing to spy they would violate their contract with Mozilla.

Presumably, that would make them liable to damages.

Moreover, they will be subject to audits, where such spying is at risk of getting caught.

This is a lot better than everyone trusting their own ISP.

Cloudflare has already received NSLs. Once they provide both encrypted DNS and TLS-termination for a good chunk of the internet they'll become a juicy target for the three letter agencies and you might not know about it for years.

If you don't live in the US a local ISP might be a lesser evil and I wonder why mozilla should make that tradeoff for everyone.

Sure, some jurisdictions might be worse than the US and TRR might be a win there. But for some it's worse. So we shouldn't pretend it's a one-size-fits all solution.

I wonder what kind of ISPs you use? Here in .ch, ISPs can be rather small and you even know the operators personally. So trust ISP >> cloudflare.

I live in Australia; ISPs are basically all big entities, altogether unworthy of trust. The US is broadly similar. In both countries, you do get some obscure tiny ISPs, but they’re fairly rare overall.

I’ve also spent time in India with a small ISP, and I hated their DNS: they actively intercepted all DNS and replaced it with their own OpenDNS arrangement, involving the horrible NXDOMAIN replacement that was still a thing at the time, and in such a way that you couldn’t opt out of it! I don’t know how trustworthy they might or might not have been (I didn’t personally know them), but I do know that I loathed their technical decisions and would fain have bypassed them.

I get the point. If your ISP is also not trustworthy, the situation probably does not change much for you. Then again, maybe the right solution is to look at how to get back trustworthy ISPs.

Which is a goal to strive for as well however this endeavor is still valid as the client can be mobile and transient across ISPs. So until you can trust all Is as you might come into contact with, having a secure and hardened client is the better of the two.

There are (privacy) pro's and con's to having a small(-ish) ISP. 1: you have a payment relation with your ISP so your identity is 100% known. 2: Operators you know personally might turn against you, as it happens between people.

I use Swisscom (larger ISP here in Switzerland, both for mobile & home connectivity) but damn if I do not encrypt /hide as much traffic (DNS first) as possible to prevent exactly them from being able to see exactly what I do.

I have worked for far larger providers and I have personally investigated 10's of cases where a "roque" operator has fired for "abusing" access to very privacy sensitive data (being it internet access or mobile phone locations etc). As [most of the time|always] in these cases, the offender gets offered a decent exit to prevent (public exposure via) lawsuits so little gets known to the outside world.

In the end it is up to you, but my advice would always be: do not put all your eggs in one basket.

> Cloudflare has at least promised not to be evil

Remember when Google did so, too? Then they bid on military contracts and bought a military contractor.

Indeed. My choice of words there was deliberate and a subtle acknowledgement that such things can go awry over time.

It may surprise you, but not everyone believes the military is evil, and thus working with them is evil.

Speaking for the US now (this is an outside view) but to me it looks like institutions such as the CIA or the NSA are indeed seen as evil by the majority of the public. Now, both the NSA and the CIA would mean nothing in the medium and long span of time if it weren’t for the power projected and often times actually exercised by the US military. As such, one can be forgiven for looking at the military as “bad”, if only for the fact that it “supports” bad institutions. Or, in other words, you cannot pick the “good guys” out of the military-industrial complex, to think otherwise is just self-delusion.

For me this comparison is seams false as it would work the same way if you replaced "military" with "US taxpayer".

Indeed, all us US taxpayers and, more importantly, citizens are complicity with the myriad heinous crimes of our government. They do them in our name, with our money, and in most cases with our vote.

OK, but I hope that you don't propose vilanizing any support helping US taxpayers because of it, as it was the purpose of the analogy to explore that. Are hospitals evil for providing healtcare to US citizens who are enabling NSA?

No, that's absurd.

Well, military's purpose is killing people. Now if that is evil or not of course depends on your beliefs.

Cloudfare engaged in censorship so they've already broken that promise.

Refusing to host neo-Nazis might be inconsistent, but calling it "evil" is pushing it.

Censorship is evil, regardless of who it is directed against.

But if they violate their promise to Mozilla, won't they be liable? And won't Mozilla have standing to sue?

What do you think damages would be if you violate a contract with Mozilla that puts millions of users at risk? (I wouldn't want to test that)

And won't they get caught during audits? Or at least risk it.

I don't really care about "promises" and contracts made between faceless corporations. I have no reason to trust Cloudflare or modern Mozilla, neither have I a reason to believe Mozilla would litigate against a breach of contract publicly instead of settling privately and secretly to prevent public outrage.

You trust Mozilla code, why not trust them to negotiate on your behalf?

Do you think you'll be able to negotiate a better solution on your own... If so, just change the defaults.

"Cloudflare has at least promised not to be evil"

I have a bridge to sell!

> They’re commonly expressly allowed by law to share roughly whatever they like about you†, and they are known to do so.

Why would this not apply to Cloudflare as well?

Because you may live in a country where the government is much more hostile than cloudflare.

Those of us, who live in democracy, can do something about our government. We can do zilch about Cloudflare, when they do something wrong.

> Cloudflare has at least promised not to be evil

lol

It's not a ISP vs Cloudflare issue though, the ISP will know where you are connecting to anyway...

This is such a toxic decision by Mozilla, but I'm not surprised since they have been leaking customer data to other companies (Google) that threw money at them in the past too.

but your ISP will still be able to see all your connections even if you don't use its DNS servers unless you use a VPN... this just spreads the information to a third party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Securit...

Downvote me all you want, but domain names are still being sent to the ISP unencrypted, as of TLS 1.3... so it doesn't matter who processes your DNS queries, your ISP still knows everything about which sites you are accessing... but anyways, bare IP addresses still reveal a lot (metadata)

right - but we're coming for cleartext sni too:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-rescorla-tls-esni-00

interestingly, something like DoH is a pre-requisite for pulling off esni.

that's great, but are you coming for the ip addresses too (probably the bigger challenge)?

wrt esni the anonymity pool is definitely the set of content that can share the same address pool. In a world with lots of CDNS (and several multi-CDN switching services) this covers a huge amount of content - but I agree - not everything.

If you think about the best/worst case scenario, would you be happy if one CDN would deliver everything? I think that we would be in a worst situation... ideally, I think that everyone would have their own servers and that your ISP would not even be able to see which IP addresses you are talking too (completely decentralized)

cdn switchers/sharers are very interesting here. e.g. cedexis

Yes, we are. After ESNI we’re working on DNS IP address randomization.

is that a joke? sorry I don't see how that would help... where could I get more info?

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