Tom Cross’ Post

Interesting article on what happens to gTLDs when the country they're associated with vanishes. If you have any .io domains, might be worth planning for what you need to do if that TLD goes away! https://lnkd.in/ep3u6vR6

Tor’s new WebTunnel bridges mimic HTTPS traffic to evade censorship “The Tor Project officially introduced WebTunnel, a new bridge type specifically designed to help bypass censorship targeting the Tor network by hiding connections in plain sight. Tor bridges are relays not listed in the public Tor directory that keep the users' connections to the network hidden from oppressive regimes. While some countries, like China and Iran, have found ways to detect and block such connections, Tor also provides obfsproxy bridges, which add an extra layer of obfuscation to fight censorship efforts. WebTunnel, the censorship-resistant pluggable transport inspired by the HTTPT probe-resistant proxy, takes a different approach. It makes it harder to block Tor connections by ensuring that the traffic blends in with HTTPS-encrypted web traffic.” https://lnkd.in/dYJA3feb

Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy A biography of Tor—a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, and global politics at the internet's core. Tor, one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, is best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. But the real “dark web,” when it comes to Tor, is the hidden history brought to light in this book: where this complex and contested infrastructure came from, why it exists, and how it connects with global power in intricate and intimate ways. In Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy,Ben Collier has written, in essence, a biography of Tor—a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, politics, and empire in the deepest reaches of the internet. The story of Tor begins in the 1990s with its creation by the US Navy's Naval Research Lab, from a convergence of different cultural worlds. Drawing on in-depth interviews with designers, developers, activists, and users, along with twenty years of mailing lists, design documents, reporting, and legal papers, Collier traces Tor's evolution from those early days to its current operation on the frontlines of global digital power—including the strange collaboration between US military scientists and a group of freewheeling hackers called the Cypherpunks. As Collier charts the rise and fall of three different cultures in Tor's diverse community—the engineers, the maintainers, and the activists, each with a distinct understanding of and vision for Tor—he reckons with Tor's complicated, changing relationship with contemporary US empire. Ultimately, the book reveals how different groups of users have repurposed Tor and built new technologies and worlds of their own around it, with profound implications for the future of the Internet. The MIT Press Books https://lnkd.in/dZ25F_aM Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 #Tor #DarkWeb #Privacy #infrastructure #Internet #Future #politics #mit #freebook

New article is up! This one is "A Day in the Life of the Global BGP Table'. An exploratory dive into that chaos that is internet peering. Including the time it took to re-write my bgpsee peering tool, it's been a long slog, but worth it in the end. Also - finally - I've got a post to the front page of Hackernews 😏 #bgp #networking

https://lnkd.in/ge9SPMjx - exposing #Fargate to the public internet with #SSL takes some work. Nice solution ... and nice callout of why it's typically a bad idea https://lnkd.in/gapA5f28.

The encrypted Client Hello RFC draft is up this month https://lnkd.in/gb-vguwH and it will be interesting to see how technologies that do network routing based on SNI will adapt to this. Given that ESNI was left out of TLS 1.3 due to the added complexity, I’ll be excited to see how the various minds of the world attempt to make this as easy as possibly for adopters.

This is a really nice paper if you are interested in systems engineering and the practical applications of algorithmic theory! Following a request through the Akamai content delivery network from client to origin, the authors look at various routing- and caching-related problems that arise, the formalisms and algorithms chosen to solve them, and some practical considerations not covered by the formal theory. In some cases, they also include empirical performance statistics. Unexpectedly (to me, at least), Gale-Shapley/deferred acceptance from economics also makes an appearance, as an extension of it is used for matching clusters of CDN servers to clusters of clients.

I would so like to get an IPv4 255/8 and 0/8 experiment off the ground. I´d like to see udp-lite, in particular, start to get successfully natted. https://lnkd.in/eM9gDZcA

Domain to IP

In the realm of digital communication, relying on a centralised DNS resolver contradicts the core principles of decentralised DNS. Centralised resolvers are gatekeepers, controlling access to information and making the system inherently permission-based. They require trust in a single entity, which can lead to potential manipulation or censorship, undermining the trustless nature of a decentralised system. Moreover, this central point of control is a prime target for censorship, as it can block or alter domain resolutions based on various motives, straying far from the ideals of censorship resistance. In contrast, decentralised DNS must embody the ethos of decentralisation, ensuring that no single point of control can dictate access or compromise the network’s integrity. Try to distinguish the difference between decentralised DNS, and protocols that are pretending to be. 👀Web2 in sheep’s clothing pretending to be Web3 🤔