I disagree.
While these are good to have, they are not enough.
The reason is always the same: if you are found to be using the circumventing tech., you'll likely be in breach of the law, which will give the goons a legitimate reason to come and harass you.
In a civilized country, that can translate into a fine, community service, etc...
In the borderlands, it'll land you in jail or worse.
For the common man non-compliance is the only non-violent way to preserve his rights or exercise freedom. You can do it successfully if you are smart and agile.
I live in Europe and I don't think there is a country where politicians aren't corrupt.
https://www.mvcr.cz/soubor/krit-memo-putin-hlad-komunikacni-...
If you search for articles, they are writen following this guide exactly.
This is a nice take, that would be the right one if you operated in a fair system.
But if you have ever engaged in the very dirty game of trying to change or remove a bad law (bad for whatever reason), you soon learn how very dirty the game is.
Extremely few people who play that game are in it for the betterment of society as a whole rather than the betterment of their own destiny and that of their friends.
And even if they started out that way, it never lasts. Human nature.
Want to change policy? Quid pro quo. Read all about it, and be ready to do nothing but.
Isn't it tiring? I mean you can raise hell and get some picture but you know one or 4 years from now they will try the same bullshit with a different name until it works.
You are wasting your time and energy on activism while there are crooks literally getting paid (by your money) to degrade your life. I think that time and energy should be best spent building things which are immune to power abuse.
I'm not sure such a thing exists. What technologies built by humans do you know of that are immune to power abuse?
Not if almost everyone does it at once.
Omnicriminalization is not a good thing for the rule of law, much less for opponents of the people in charge
also dns and the tls ca system, even including let's encrypt
1: I'm seeing names like "Actalis", "Baltimore CyberTrust", "Cetrum" - some of these sound more like pharmaceuticals than tech companies...
by contrast, the ca you chose to sign your cert can revoke it, or refuse to renew it, taking your website permanently offline with zero effort on their part, unless you can find another ca to sign a new cert for you
but if you could, let's encrypt wouldn't have had to exist in the first place
the dozens of companies you mentioned make that less of a threat, not more of one
DNS or host/IP control is not a requirement at all: a Trusted CA is already trusted to sign a certificate for any hostname (with exceptions): that's what Trust means, and it also means that we trust them not to issue certificates for domains/hostnames without doing at-least Domain Validation - and we have schemes like Certificate Transparency to help bolster that trust, but it still doesn't prevent an already-trusted CA from issuing its own certificate for, say, google.com or microsoft.com. This is why techniques like Certificate Pinning and co/counter-signing, and others exist - but they're only useful when the client isn't a human-operated web-browser ("smart clients", "IoT", etc). EV certificates were (amongst other things...) meant to help protect against small-time crooks but again, don't help when the CA itself is compromised.
but, as i said, if you can feed me fake dns results so i connect to the wrong ip, or if you can arrange so that packets to gmail's legitimate ip go to your server instead (for example by having me connect to your wifi), then you can leverage the fake certificate into a successful mitm attack
but your explanation of the part of the basics of tls you understand, incomplete though it is, is irrelevant to the attack i was actually discussing, where someone doesn't like what you're saying (or the communication service you're providing) and gets your cert revoked to shut you up
Unless a router is compromised along the route, which is a known thing, and part of why we use ssl everywhere now.
the grandparent comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34629050 also describes some more common ways that this can happen without routers being compromised
Taking the first one: AC Camerfirma S. A.
I suspect I've never authenticated anything against that CA. I'd love to know what sites it has authenticated, and maybe I'd be happy with a lot of .es sites
Wouldn't surprise me if I rarely if ever encounter 80% of the CAs that I trust. Looking through I'd be happy if some of the signed .ae, or .cn, but not .de.
If I did visit an unusual CA, I'd like to make a judgement call on that access. Sure, the big ones (letsencrypt, globalsign, etc) woul dneed to just trust completely, but having a "you are visiting youremail.com, last time you visited this was signed by Globalsign with a certificate expiry of 5 months time, today it's signed by Odd Looking CA, continue?
Sure for 90% of users would click though, and it shouldn't be an option for 90% of users, but I'm not 90% of users.
Same with importing. If I make my own certificates for my own stuff, I want to import my CA and trust if for .mydevdomain.com, but not for mybank.com, because I don't trust my own security enough to have anyone, including me, have a skeleton key to my entire communication chain for key sites.
AC Camerfirma seems to operate multiple CA certificates (e.g. some labeled by year). Here's a search that finds certificates issued by one of them: https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=51020
Even so-called "encrypted DNS" such as DNSCrypt or more recently DoH only applies to the path between the client and the cache, not the cache and the authoritative server. In the same way that the path between a client and Cloudflare and the path between Cloudflare and the origin server are separated by CF as a "MiTM".
NB. It's possible to exclude the remote DNS cache and have encrypted DNS between client and authoritative server, the software exists, even for DNSCrypt, but it never caught on. I have often thought about starting a registry that requires registrants to offer encrypted authoritative DNS.
Apple, Google, and Facebook are the 5th, 6th, and 7th largest lobbyists in the EU.
Your statement makes it look like OAuth2 is inherently endangering net freedom.
This isn't true.
If OAuth2 was used ...
- for authentication (versus authorization) only AND
- AND by a select few providers (e.g. Google, Github, Facebook, Twitter) solely AND
- AND NO other privacy-protecting authentication methods (e.g. classic username-password credentials) are available
... THEN your statement has reasonable truth.
You cannot solve human issues by technical solutions
> One major factor that works against users is central authentication. Schemes like oauth2 might bring convenience and security in many cases, but will endanger net freedom overall.
And what is your solution for that? Any authentication solution will inevitable converge to having trusted actors authenticating you. There's no technical solution for that.
> It just released a law (DSA) that allegedly to restrict the influence of tech giants. That their proposals will drive people into ID schemes
So what is your technical solution to this human law?
> The only defense against such laws is to make them technologically not feasible.
I also want to wish for moon and the stars. But we're not dealing with the realms of fantasy.
One major factor that works against users is central authentication. Schemes like oauth2 might bring convenience and security in many cases, but will endanger net freedom overall.
Google just added age restriction on blogger. Result is that you need to provide Google with ID information to access some content. If more an more users elect to ID with their Google account you can see where it can lead. Naturally the EU wants to increase such schemes as well.
It just released a law (DSA) that allegedly to restrict the influence of tech giants. That their proposals will drive people into ID schemes of said tech companies is either an oversight or something worse. I would think it is the latter and giant tech companies are very glad about the behavior of the commission. Because they too tried get people to use their ID solutions.
Digital tech doesn't really prosper in the EU but certainly surveillance leveraging services of others.
The only defense against such laws is to make them technologically not feasible. While Google did many good things for net security, their compliance on topics that serve its self-interest is a danger. Same goes for other large tech companies.
That there is close collaboration between certain political elites and tech companies is pretty much a given. It was decried as a conspiracy theory until it was proven. Although it should be no surprise that there are such connections. Perhaps the influence of the EU commission is smaller, but I would not bet on it. Access to the market is on the hand they can play. Easily a strong enough hand to subject users to surveillance.