Hacker News Reader

Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

Part of the counter-argument that has been so prevalent on HN (most recently: [0]) is that when you prevent middlemen on your network from being able to see what website you're browsing, you're doing exactly that: preventing anyone, even a trusted network administrator, from being able to inspect traffic. I'm all for DoH and ECH since US ISPs have a history of inspecting and logging traffic, but it seems like there should be a way to manage the devices on your network besides being forced to set up MDM on everything.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25314182

View on HN

Yeah, but that argument sounds like asking people to use “logmein” as a password so they don’t need to install MDM on everything.

Management of devices without authentication and authorization means anyone can do it. Which is the state of things today (for DNS).

I think you've nailed the core of it.

Managing traffic over your network and the devices on your network are very similar tasks that aim to accomplish very similar things. However, they are not equivalent tasks. Relying on traffic management to accomplish device management eventually runs into conflicts. These may stem from unmanaged devices, guest devices, unmanageable devices, or the consequences of the total lack of authentication and authorization.

Ultimately, managing traffic and managing devices are not tasks that replace one another.

> it seems like there should be a way to manage the devices on your network

Administering devices with network settings is convenient, but rapidly vanishing because there's no technical difference between you administering your local network and a totalitarian ISP administering their users.

My ways of dealing with the modern world, in order of preference:

1. Use Free software, so that devices develop user-empowering features instead of being locked down.

2. Firewall all general Internet access from a device/VM, and let it talk to local network devices only.

3. Firewall the device/VM from accessing most of your network, allow Internet access (ideally through a VPN), and inspect the hardware to make sure there aren't microphones or cameras.

The vast majority of users do not have a "trusted network administrator"; they have a hostile upstream network. That's where the defaults come from. Trusting the network (or anything outside of the device itself) should always be a non-default setting, and nothing from the network should be able to change that setting. You should have the option of configuring a device you own and control to make its traffic inspectable, but that should never be the default.

> a way to manage the devices on your network besides being forced to set up MDM on everything.

It's sort of like cleaning malware off of an infected PC from within the infected OS.

It was always theoretically impossible, and now we're just seeing the gap of "Well in this case the enemy was imperfect" closing. It was never going to stay open in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com