Re: [Add] [EXTERNAL] Re: draft-grover-add-policy-detection-00

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

Il 16 luglio 2019 13:26 Alec Muffett <[e-mail]> ha scritto:

That's kinda the whole point; the problem is that innocent people might try using Firefox to access Twitter from Turkey during a civil rights crackdown, their Firefox-implementing-this-mechanism will give them away as trying to evade Government blocking of Twitter, and they will end up arrested or worse.

I agree with you that it would be foolish for Firefox to look for local policies in that case, and it would endanger the user; that is a case where no policy discovery should ever be performed, and I would find that totally justified, with the caveat that if you replace "innocent people" with criminals, "Twitter" with a criminal website, and "Turkey" with the Western-democratic country that you like, you get the very same technical situation but with a completely different policy, regulatory and ethical flavour; but how to tell the two situations apart is a policy/UX problem that each application has to solve for itself.

However, that case does not make a policy discovery mechanism useless or unnecessary.

There are two symmetric cases of adversarial scenarios: one is the one that you describe, i.e. an application needing to bypass any local policy without leaving traces, and the other one is the local resolver willing to enforce any local policy even on users that want to bypass it by using other resolvers. In both cases, the non-cooperative actor will just ignore whatever mechanism for local resolver and policy discovery we devise: the application will not perform any policy discovery attempt, and the resolver will not advertise that it applies any policy. So, the fact that a discovery mechanism exists is irrelevant for those two cases.

On the other hand, the case by far most common is that of an ordinary consumer in an averagely democratic country that wants to access the Internet as securely as possible, relying for that on all the actors - the application, the Internet access provider and the public authorities. In that case, it is reasonable to expect that those actors cooperate and exchange the necessary information to establish the best possible environment for the final user, generally following whatever configuration the user prefers or needs for the application-level services to work. This, I guess, is the use case that the draft wants to address.

Ciao,

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
[e-mail] 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy