[AusNOG] Data retention

Geordie Guy elomis at gmail.com
Mon Oct 12 16:16:09 EST 2015


On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 4:06 PM, Damian Guppy <the.damo at gmail.com> wrote:

> What's your end goal? If it is to avoid the new datarention going into
> effect tomorrow, using a VPN isnt going to change what is being recorded on
> you. Dataretention is capturing Email headers on ISP (australian) email
> addresses, which a VPN wont change, and the IP assigned to your session
> when you connect (either via ADSL, NBN, 3/4G etc), which again, a VPN wont
> change.
>

Few people are *just* using a VPN to avoid retention most are ensuring they
don't use ISP email, and deploy other encryption heavily.  Done right (and
it's not that difficult), the only audit trail you leave is quite boring -
all data is from the same IP, to the same IP, and encrypted.


>
> VPN also introduces a lot of other issues such as latency and GEOIP
> breakages that it reduces the end user experience of the internet, so for
> most people, pumping all their data through an international VPN is going
> to make using the internet unjoyful.
>

How are GEOIP breakages a bad thing? Most people using VPNs before data
retention were doing it *explicitly to break* IP geolocation.  Latency is
similarly not a drama, particularly in circumstances where people are using
carriers that pick losers on a TCP port by TCP port basis and actually get
a net experience improvement.

The VPN from my phone transparently routes all my traffic via New Zealand.
I don't notice any difference.


>
> Then there is the whole issue of complication, what % of australian users
> have the technical ability to set up a VPN?
>

The one I use on my phone processed a payment, took me to the App Store to
download their client, I picked a country from a list of flags.  The
experience was infinitely easier most other tasks I've performed this week.
This is progressing in the same vein as everything else - there's money to
be made if you present a compelling use case (would you like Netflix to
think you're American?) and price it correctly (well Netflix will think
you're American if you give me $3.95 a month and click here).


> I would put that in the single digit percentage, and then what % of thoes
> will actually set up a VPN? Again I would guess maybe 10% if you're lucky?
> So worst case maybe a 0.5% increase in international traffic? That's not
> even factoring in how much was international traffic to begin with which
> wouldnt increase international usage anyway, just change how its coming in.
>


The idea that this is hampered by difficulty and poor experience is wrong.
It hasn't always been wrong, setting up a VPN was a new and hard thing for
people not all that long ago, but the Internet has done what the Internet
does and people have made it easy to set up with easy payment options.


>
> --Damian
>
> On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 7:14 AM, Alex Samad - Yieldbroker <
> Alex.Samad at yieldbroker.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> I see a lot of privacy advocacy groups recommending using VPN out of
>> australia. I wonder where can we see easily the change to from local
>> traffic to international traffic.
>>
>> So I have friends who are thinking of just setting up a vpn to take all
>> their traffic overseas including access to local sites, like smh commbank
>> etc etc.
>>
>> My presumption we double up on Intl traffic outbound and then inbound !
>>
>> A
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