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Comment by darkhorn | Hacker News Reader

This is another reason to use HTTPS.

HTTPS doesn't mask the source IP block of the content. Pretty easy to throttle Youtube, Netflix, etc based on their CDN blocks.

Yup, this is more a reason to use a VPN.

this.

VPNs cost money. Until it is forced, there isn't much of a point in using a VPN (besides AT&T's wonderful spying track record). VPNs are great but until more are free, it's better to deal with switching a setting.

> Until it is forced, there isn't much of a point in using a VPN

Well, America just elected Trump to office, and here in Europe the situation doesn't look much better (crisis law in France, calls for more and more surveillance state across Europe, and right-wing populists/extremists gaining power in country by country). I'd say there has never been a better argument for VPN/Tor usage than right now.

Ms Clinton did not communicate any intentions of shutting down the NSA domestic surveillance apparatus, part of Obama's legacy (which she campaigned on).

VPN to a home broadband device is free, modulo ISP data caps.

If they just throttle your bandwidth and not play around with CDN's (ISP's actually mirror and cache YT and Netflix videos) then it doesn't matter.

If they only give you 1mbit/s of bandwidth you aren't going to be watching HD videos unless you are willing to let it constantly buffer, and there are also ways for them to screw with that like resetting the connection every 5min or so.

I've never seen an ISP use TCP resets against any traffic other than BitTorrent, but I suppose it could be done by a particularly aggressive operator.

It doesn't mask the domain either, at least where SNI is involved.

Regardless of SNI the certificate is unencrypted (until TLS 1.3).

The original comment is absolutely correct in that if the video stream is delivered via HTTPS it is impossible to downsample it. Now, whether YouTube et al actually use HTTPS for the video stream, I don't know...

Not true. You can throttle packets by source or destination IP block, and by throttling the connection, the player will be forced down to a lower bitrate rendition.

This is how T-Mobile performs their throttling, and could be done to any class of traffic.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles...

So what happens when there is only one bitrate available at 1080p and it's encrypted?

Your player is going to stutter hard if it doesn't wait to preload enough of the content.

Disclaimer: My last job was infrastructure at an Internet-only video news org.

Is it possible to multiplex from various IPs? IPv6 has a huuuuge address space.

A pretty easy traffic pattern to identify and respond to (just like bittorrent or OpenVPN over SSL).

As an aside this type of thing gets me throttled pulling down 500MB+ git repos. Not T-Mobile specifically but Clear.

The majority of video traffic on the internet is encrypted. But it doesn't need to be downscaled directly by the operator, since almost all streaming services will adapt the actual video quality to the observed bandwidth. All you need to do is detect video traffic (quite easy to do even if it's encrypted) and selectively throttle it. The servers will take care of the rest.

It doesn't need to be downsampled, though -- merely rate-governed.

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