[talk] a Guardian article

[Antti Kantee]

On 31/03/17 13:09, George Rosamond wrote:
> Mirimir:
>> On 03/30/2017 08:16 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Mar 30, 2017, at 9:20 PM, Antti Kantee <pooka at iki.fi> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 31/03/17 00:38, George Rosamond wrote:
>>>>> Yet another article about mitigating the sale of user data by ISPs...
>>>>> except this one features a picture which is piqued my interest...
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/30/privacy-protection-web-browsing-history-data-congress
>>>>
>>>> Does anyone have recommendations for a daemon which creates fake traffic?
>>>
>>> A Tor exit node? :)
>>
>> Or install Hola VPN, which routes users through other users' uplinks.
>> And sells them as a service through Luminati.
>
> I think it depends on what he means by "fake traffic." My first read of
> his email was to assume he meant "fake news."... oh these crazy times...
>
> Tor, without acting as an exit, can generate encrypted traffic depending
> on usage and configuration.
>
> Or you could just run a background script pulling/pushing traffic over
> ftp/curl/fetch/wget from a $hosts list...

Well, if the attack is the ISP looking at your traffic, generating a 
profile, and selling that to advertisers (or who knows where), and fake 
traffic is the countermeasure, then fake traffic should somehow prevent 
the attack from happening.  In other words, the traffic should look like 
a handful of people browsing, but be "all over the place" so as to 
prevent profiling -- e.g. generate traffic both to fox news and msnbc 
and also somewhere else for actual news.

I fear that approaches such as a tor exit node supply traffic which is 
all too easy to discard from consideration for the profile.

Hmm, I just wrote a mail about a subject I don't know anything about and 
hope someone else did the work.  The spirit of open source is truly in me!