7 votes

How Facebook is bringing QUIC to billions

3 comments

  1. [3]
    jokeyrhyme
    Link
    If the pro-surveillance crowd was upset about DNS-over-HTTPS, they're really going to hate HTTP/3:

    If the pro-surveillance crowd was upset about DNS-over-HTTPS, they're really going to hate HTTP/3:

    TCP is also prone to ossification, where the protocol becomes difficult to upgrade because network middleboxes such as firewalls make assumptions about the packets’ format. QUIC avoids this issue by being fully encrypted, making protocol extensibility a first-class citizen and guaranteeing that future improvements can be made.

    1 vote
    1. [3]
      Comment deleted by author
      Link Parent
      1. skybrian
        Link Parent
        It seems like it prioritizes endpoints over middleboxes, making the Internet more of a dumb pipe, along the lines of the end-to-end principle and network neutrality. Whether this is good or bad...

        It seems like it prioritizes endpoints over middleboxes, making the Internet more of a dumb pipe, along the lines of the end-to-end principle and network neutrality.

        Whether this is good or bad depends on who controls the endpoints and the middleboxes. If the middlebox is your own Raspberry Pi running Pi-Hole then bypassing it is bad, but if it's whatever your ISP or some random public WiFi network is running, maybe it's good?

        A problem with that argument is that it's quite common these days for people to be using hardware they don't entirely control, particularly in the case of mobile phones. DoH seems possibly good provided that you control which DNS server your client connects to, less so otherwise, and most people just stick with the system defaults provided by whichever WiFi or cell network they've connected to.

        It's even worse with other random Internet devices people buy (sometimes called the Internet of Shit), but wanting to control what devices are doing on your home network via router settings is a specialty interest of people who know something about routers and have one that they actually control, versus running whatever their ISP gave them or using a cell network directly and not having a router at all.

        But it seems like the people who were most upset about this general trend toward turning middle-boxes into dumb pipes, enforced via encryption, are financial firms that are required to snoop on their workers to prevent insider trading. In that case, snooping seems... good? But I wonder what they do now that people are working from home?

        Individualism is popular in the US in theory, less so in practice since convenience tends to win, and it isn't everything; sometimes the organization has a legitimate claim for wanting control, in the public interest.

        5 votes
      2. Macil
        Link Parent
        How is that true? Their benefits of security, speed, and reliability apply for any kind of site transferring much data.

        How is that true? Their benefits of security, speed, and reliability apply for any kind of site transferring much data.

        1 vote