Net Neutrality: How will the new policies against net neutrality work for the Safe Network?

In what ways will the effects of ISPs taking advantage of new net neutrality policies work with SafeNet?

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Look at the rest of the world that doesn’t have a USA “net neutrality” and have learnt to balance the internet usage. Obviously not all the same way but examining them you should get an idea.

For Australia the ISPs big attack was on NNTP traffic and P2P bittorrent.

Many slowed down NNTP by routing the NNTP port traffic through a slow link. But once people used different ports and took advantage of encryption that the newsgroups providers offered then the ISPs lost that battle. Partly because their DPI could not distinguish NNTP encrypted traffic from normal traffic.

They slowed down the P2P bittorrent traffic which was 30-75% of all traffic through an ISP using DPI. The ISPs doing this were exposed and suffered some because of this. They reduced their slow down and many removed their unlimited quota plans instead.

Now though the ISPs improved their links and the undersea cables has exploded in bandwidth, so unlimited plans has returned and cheaper than before and the link speeds are now faster ADSL 1/2 back then and now upto 100Mbps.

This is for Australia and I gather Europe is offering much faster plans than AU and plenty of unlimited.

So I guess like has been said in the other topic discussing this, USA will be exception to the majority of the world and will need to be careful in any plans to restrict encrypted traffic that cannot be separated from normal traffic.

From what I’ve seen the ISPs will simply be giving the giants the fastest links to/from the ISP and all other traffic will just continue as normal.

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“It won’t affect anything important” is certainly the sales pitch. From what I’ve seen, in the USA, if it can be privatized and overpriced, it will.

Having worked at Comcast as a sysadmin, I can say for certain that they can, and do, distinguish encrypted and open traffic internally, and they ran a MITM attack (“trust our custom SSL certs or don’t bother trying go online”) on employee SSL connections.

If they can charge extra for allowing encrypted traffic, they will. If they can distinguish and charge extra for different protocols, they will. If they can use this to establish and maintain monopolistic control on business interests, they will. The question is not whether they will, but whether we’re going to allow it.

Short term we ought to hold the line with https://www.battleforthenet.com.

Long term I’m wondering whether Safenet could run on top of an open mesh network, and whether that open mesh network, and whether said mesh network could somehow fund itself via Safecoin?

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This is one of the unpredicted situations that I talked about may happen. If safenetwork were to launch and the bandwidth cost suddenly increased, data reduancy could be seriously at stake.

I proposed the current model needs changing so that even if anything happens it’ll basically let the people who are currently storing data pay for it, and not from new people storing data(as with a situation such as this new people storing data on the network could seriously reduce as they lose faith in the network) . Most vocal people have disagreed that the safenetwork model should change but I urge you to reconsider.

Anyway my thread is here if you want to have a look - The safenetwork as is right now is technically logically inconsistent with it’s philosophy. Safenetwork sustainability concerns - Bandwidth has an ongoing cost however Safenetwork is a pay once, benefit forever model

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It has everything to do, I am talking about long term sustainability afterall…

First of all I don’t think it’s correct to consider what I’m proposing ‘rent’, as discussed, depending on how you define rent. You can own a washing machine but still pay for washing powder and electricity to use it. In the current world, you don’t have FULL control over your data, it can be given to someone else by someone else and is vulnerable. Safenetwork solves this, whether you pay for some bandwidth to access the data or not I think isn’t really “renting” the data, you still own it.

Second of all there’s no point in claiming you will OWN your data if the network itself isn’t sustainable and you lose the data you ‘own’ permanently. I very much like the idea of the safenetwork too, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect currently as is and does not need any modifications to make it better.

Thirdly, I’m not talking about this scenario specifically at all, but rather any scenarios that can affect the factors that sustain the network dramatically, whether it’s increasing cost of bandwidth, less and less new data being stored or safecoin devaluing. So by not considering this you basically have to assume there is ABSOLUTELY NO scenarios that would affect such factors for a reasonable period of time, or affecting those factors won’t reduce the redundancy and hence reputation as well as sustainability of the network.

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I am wondering about how people can work together and put firms like comcast that profit from undermining the public interest out of business and go even further to criminalize their business as usual and go after both there management not just civilly but also criminally and also go after their major private stock holders criminally and civilly. My opinion, F the public and get life plus total asset forfeiture. The way I see it they are undermining our life and liberty putting us at risk for incredibly bloody civil strife so this outlook is hardly agressive but simply measured. Try to silence people as a first step to taking their rights- what could it be but a declaration of war on the public.

The basic premise of trying to profit from censorship is idiotic and it requires that they be able to spy on us and violate our privacy. What we want and need and what we paid for is dumb pipes, we were never financing self appointed harrassers. And even economically it doesn’t work because it incentivizes against fixing network performance issues because doing so would eliminate useless premiums. Also overcharging is theft and there is no all-the-market will bear idiocy to justify it, if people feel ripped they are, its theft and needs prosecution.

Finally I think the EU hardwired neutrality or is attempting to do so. But in the US the criminal class momentarily ceased power and is advocating criminal petrol and criminally advocating censorship, probably in part to protect petro crime. @foreverjoyful it looks like the EU may hold while SAFE scales up- don’t know about UK, but that may provide a solid scaling there.

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Actually a lot of companies do that.

Only in the “great” USA. If you read my responses you would know that even in AU we have gone the other way and Europe too. The USA will be more and more isolated. Oh and if we used your solution SAFE would have even less people using it… Also as SAFE traffic increases over normal web then they have to increase bandwidth or lose customers. Business 101 mate.

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I’m glad you’ve got internet access that works well enough for you in AU. “Learn to balance your internet usage” does not sound like a feature I want to pay for.

You said yourself that in AU the companies tried to kill NNTP and P2P, but they failed because they have a competitive market. That’s great.

Taking away Net Neutrality in the USA means they would try to do the same thing here, but be more likely to succeed.

For all practical purposes, most of us in the USA are dealing with monopolies for Internet access; the idea that we can just go to a competitor is based on the premise that competition exists or is allowed to exist in our markets. Per capita, that’s pretty rare here.

Are you allowed to run a server on your standard home Internet connection? That used to be common among techies in the USA, but is effectively illegal for me today. I’m also reminded that Napster was technically legal when it started here, and quickly killed because it disrupted profits and wasn’t controlled by the right people.

We have every reason to believe that companies in the USA will try to kill P2P access, SafeNet, and any other technology that might interfere with their profits, and we’ve already seen them succeed at doing so. Maybe this wouldn’t be a concern if we had competitive markets like you seem to, but in the face of centralized monopolies, Net Neutrality is the closest thing to freedom we have.

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Yea, it sucks to be in the USA. You used to have the better internet service in the world, but not now. Maybe google gigabit will come to a town near you, but seriously the USA needs to lift their game or be left in the dust of the world.

Yesterday I bought some 20 year technology (but very useful) in a cyber monday sale that started on friday. But I had to “sign” that I was the end user and not going to sell it to a set of nations and I wasn’t going to use it for bad things. Mind you this is in technology that the rest of the world is using every day and sourced from China. Crazy export restrictions. There was another product that was JUST plain cardboard and a RPi that could not be exported.

At first they were really strict, but that was in the days where email servers were the main thing. My ISP only restricts port 25 now. Plenty of people run private game servers and other things. The technology has progressed so far that its very difficult to detect a server and they don’t even mention it anymore.

We are getting the NBN which allows 40Mbit/sec up and 100Mbits/sec down, so to restrict “servers” is a bit silly, since any video conferencing is in effect a server, unless you use one of the giant’s services.

They may very well try. Be interesting to see what they do when people use various methods to bypass such restrictions. That is what happened here and pretty much changed the ISPs views.

May very well. Remember that they pay for “pipes” and restrict their customers to a quota. What happens if people try to shuffle more data than the “pipes” can handle is that things slow down for everyone. So while they are giving the big companies priority QoS the others get lower QoS.

Now since SAFE is indistinguishable from https they will have a hard time restricting SAFE over other https traffic not going to the big companies.

In the end though the USA ISPs will have to install larger/faster links if they are to remain competitive in the world market. Though you might be in a rough slow ride for a few years while things sort out.

Although just watch the fun and games as people learn to bypass the ISPs attempts to slow down P2P (not SAFE) traffic. You will get VPN providers providing servers in the big company’s data centres (eg amazon) to keep the traffic moving fast while providing specialist P2P connections. If you look at many VPN providers they already provide specialist servers for P2P

EDIT:

Another thing is that it should be faster getting data from SAFE than a lot of other sites/services not in the “fast lane” group of sites/services since the chunks will be coming from many sources.

So the major effect will be for nodes/vaults operating in the USA. Good idea to get USA people hooked on SAFE then when SAFE is the majority of the traffic then things will change for the better because of customer demands.

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Considering that a blocked network will likely be suffocated regardless of the payment model, I would suggest attempts to prevent blocking are concentrated on first.

Safe net has been designed to withstand and adapt to attempts to block it. I am pretty certain that its traffic already looks pretty generic and I’m sure more work can/will go into this area. I would appreciate a comment from @maidsafe on this, as it would be good to understand specifics. There were pretty big debates about this in the past, specific to Rust modules to disguise the data.

Safe net has a goal to blast through the great firewall of China. If it can do that, surely that sets the bar rather high?

Is this 100% true? I would love to hear confirmation from the team. If it is, then really this is largely a moot point - ISPs cannot be trusted with private SSL keys, so interrogating contents would be futile (unless they cripple the encryption strength, but crime will escalate if they do).

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David has said this. But in essence encrypted packets are similar if they are https (one form) or another application encrypted packet (NNTP encrypted say). They have the packet header and encrypted payload. https when using the better https is a header and encrypted payload.

The real need is not in that the individual packets are in the same form as https but for patterns when intense DPI is being used. DPI for encrypted https only works if the encryption does not encrypt the whole payload. Remember DPI on encrypted packets is greatly hampered since the DPI cannot read port# or domain name or anything else in the payload unless the browser is using the lesser encryption. SAFE is fully encrypted so DPI cannot distinguish it from fully encrypted https, so DPI has to use very expensive (CPU + time) methods to see what the traffic maybe and this is not good for ISPs as its often more expensive than just assuming what it is by the IP address the packet is going to.

Look for obscuration

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Thanks for reply and link.

Yes, from packet sniffing in the past, I can attest to encrypted traffic all looking like gibberish. I suppose my question is more about it looking indistinguishable from regular https traffic.

I suppose at https is a protocol which can be used peer to peer or client to server, any pattern monitoring/matching for safe net traffic is going to be pretty much impossible. If they, say, only allowed encrypted traffic to specific servers, they could probably be less specific, but that leaves all sorts of data vulnerable and would surely never be desirable be legislators.

Considering we have numerous encryption protocols, all with different transmission characteristics, it would seem incredulous to think ISPs could block with precision. Even with fancy comms pattern monitoring, safe net could emulate another accredited pattern.

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What I’m concerned about is the ISPs having the ability to block traffic to systems such as SAFE. If the ISPs have their way would that mean peer to peer mesh networking could eventually pickup adoption?

As @piluso pointed a few months ago, one possible way to distinguish our traffic from regular https is that there is no cryptographic handshake before establishing the connection.

I still am wondering if the ports we use can be an issue or not ( see above link ) : I suppose a nasty ISP could decide that anything that doesn’t go to 443 should be throttled down.

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Is safe net alone in not performing the handshake though? While standard client/server https web requests are surely one of the most common forms of encrypted traffic, there will be many other less common applications which behave more like safe net (i.e. any app which uses custom encryption for transit, other established non-https protocol transit, etc).

So, while we may be able to say it won’t look exactly like https traffic (without some feigning), it may be indistinguishable from other encrypted data transit techniques. That would make it a lot harder to identify specific safe net packets from the others. Moreover, safe net could mutate to mimic others too if needed.

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I gather you are referring to the USA here, as there is no change to the rest of the world.

They have to know what traffic is SAFE traffic and that is what they won’t be sure of. And to scatter gun blocking of packets they suspect will be suicide for the ISP, especially at the political level. Its not china and the voters will complain when their streaming is intercepted and blocked. Or their email to family is blocked when its encrypted. All they can really do is slow down traffic not going to the big companies who pay for the “fast lanes”

That is what I meant by expensive DPI and still very much imprecise. Also there will be a handshake since that is part pf the TCP/IP protocol which is being used for the encrypted packets. So I doubt even that would work.

EDIT: as @Traktion says there are a number of other encrypted traffic that does not use the crypto handshake like https.

There is no reason SAFE could not use port 443 too.

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I think one of the main reasons they want to crack down on neutrality now in the US is the want to turn up the lie on petrol and war in Iran. Petrol has been killing the global economy, in particular the useful non parasitic economy, since at least 1950 and will make it unworkable if allowed to continue and do so for economic reasons.

So (unsurprisingly) Trump lackey Chairman Pai and his GOP backed minions have voted to repeal net neutrality.

The launch of the SAFE network can’t come soon enough. A revolution is coming. Let them eat Pai.

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Land of the (not so) free.

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