[NakedSecurity] The UK Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) has provocatively shortlisted Mozilla for the sort of award that, on the face of it at least, no tech company should be keen to win ‐ '2019's Internet Villain'.Mozilla's claim to infamy? From ISPA's point of view, it's Firefox's imminent inclusion of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) ‐ a technology many experts endorse as the biggest jump for internet privacy since the expansion of HTTPS itself.
The problem, according to the ISPA press release, is that the arrival of this technology in the Firefox browser used by millions will make it possible to:
Bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet safety standards in the UK.
The point of DoH (and the related DNS over TLS, or DoT) is to encrypt DNS requests, which makes it impossible, or at least very difficult, for entities such as ISPs or governments to monitor which websites people are visiting. And because the DNS requests are sent inside encrypted HTTPS requests they're also indistinguishable from other web traffic, so they can't be blocked without blocking all web traffic.
To privacy enthusiasts, this is good because neither ISPs nor governments have any business knowing which domains users happen to frequent.
For ISPs, by contrast, DoH hands them several headaches, including how to fulfil their legal obligation in the UK to store a year's worth of each subscriber's internet visits in case the government wants to study them later for evidence of criminal activity.
Years in the making, this is a collision foretold. One side (Mozilla and Cloudflare, the latter providing the DoH resolution that supports the whole endeavor) thinks that internet privacy is an immutable principle that demands a technical solution, the other (governments, police and at least one anti-child abuse campaign group) think that privacy carries risks that must always be qualified through intervention.
Technical details follow at link.
While I can understand them wanting to filer out illegal sites, with the EU it is always always always about control.
They want to know if you are visiting sites that they may not agree with. Can't have that. Might get some Brexit ideas or something.
I fall on the make it difficult for the government to see what I am doing. Not because I am doing illegal stuff, but because it is none of their goddamn business.