TIL another reason why Ma Bell doesn't like neutrality. If they get their way we can expect performance on unobfuscated VPNs to suffer.

You can expect it because VPNs are overwhelmingly used by technologists and 'business' users. In general, these people have an ability to pay (much) more, so ISPs would like to charge them more.

One can imagine ways to tunnel VPN traffic over ISP-approved traffic, but that arrangement might have other drawbacks.

Yes, you could tunnel VPN traffic over an HTTPS connection. I have built VPNs using ppp over ssh tunnelling before, and that works fine.

Now, let's talk solutions.

This made me smile. I would like to imagine that there were consensus on this point.

Now, let's talk solutions.

I think the effective solution for much of the nation will be wireless, but FCC and affiliated interests have been postponing the liberation of enough unlicensed spectrum to make that feasible. The dominant regulatory scheme creates scarcity where none should exist, and that's how all of these bastards keep the gravy train rolling. They rue the day they decided to just let the microwave ovens have 2.4 GHz, because now that frequency is proof that there is no physical reason to "license" electromagnetic radiation. If we can just pry a few more spectrum slices from their grasp, including those better suited to slightly longer ranges, that's the hole in the dike that will eventually create a market in telecom.

Of course I don't suggest that cognitive radio could have existed in the 1930s. Instead I suggest that it should be given more room to operate now. So they had a problem demo seven years ago: what has happened since? Is it "off-the-wall" to wonder why licensing hasn't changed in response to the invention of the integrated circuit?

EDIT: I'm talking about opening specific, limited bands ("a few more spectrum slices") to unlicensed use, in precisely the fashion in which 2.4 GHz is currently open, although at higher power. Though I do dream of the FCC folding (in much the way I dream that of the DEA or CIA), I realize that in serious conversation with serious people one must focus on the tenable.

It might have been one bad demo, but it was also a very simple, controlled experiment. The spectrum environment without FCC licensing would be orders of magnitude more challenging. The technology just isn't there yet to replace the FCC across the whole spectrum. The FCC certainly could move faster to allow the technology to develop, but your characterization of the situation and aspersions are inaccurate and unwarranted.

You're also ignoring how expensive this equipment is. Simple white spaces devices are pretty cheap, but the kind of radio that would could freely operate over a large part of the spectrum is still very expensive. Just the analog frontend capable of tuning to a wide range of frequencies is expensive. Retrofitting existing devices with the technology, at the scale that would facilitate deregulation, would be quite impractical right now.

It's a really interesting space, and I think it has tremendous potential, but there is a lot of development to be done before the technology lives up to the libertarian fantasy. I think we're at the stage where it would make sense to have an unlicensed band that allowed "smart" devices only, which followed a minimum set of rules. The challenge here is getting someone to give up their spectrum.

Then we agree on the only point that matters.

The challenge here is getting someone to give up their spectrum.

That is indeed a challenge. In one case, this effort included updating every television in the nation. Yet still, five years after the digital transition, from the WIA Spectrum Policy [0] page:

Rural areas continue to be the most underserved market in terms of wireless reach and innovation. However, the abundance of white spaces in these regions provides a unique opportunity for rural wireless providers to use this unused spectrum to promote coverage through high-capacity service. While the advantages to expanding this expansion remain undisputed, firm action has not been taken as of yet in order to allow the operation of higher powered spectrum in these areas. At present, TV band devices are not permitted to operate at power levels greater than 4 watts EIRP, even though expanding this power limit would pose virtually no threat of interference to current broadcast bands. The delay in the advance of power limits only serves to hinder wireless progress in rural areas of the country.

That seems wasteful: usable white space was one of the selling points of the digital transition, and yet giant blocks remain unusable for no publicly-acknowledged reason. I mean, I hesitate to even ask what the military are doing with all their spectrum while this is still going on.

[0] http://www.wirelessinnovationalliance.org/index.cfm?objectid...

I'm a big proponent of having minimum interference tolerance requirements for receivers, and there's work happening on that front: http://transition.fcc.gov/bureaus/oet/tac/tacdocs/WhitePaper.... But we'd be talking about another round of updating every television in the nation...

When I enter "Los Angeles CA" on the FCC reception map site [0], there are 23 green/strong broadcasters listed. When I enter the location of my home, there are two. Are we to believe devices that can handle the presence of 22 "competing" signals in one situation will be completely overwhelmed by the presence of one or two extra signals in the other situation?

[0] http://transition.fcc.gov/mb/engineering/dtvmaps/

One of the most complex aspects of doing this sort of thing is various permutations of the "hidden node" problem. Essentially, the problem is that a "smart" transmitter may not hear a dumb one, and use an in-use channel, interfering with a dumb receiver, which otherwise could hear the dumb transmitter. This tends to happen because geographic obstacles can cause individual nodes to have a different view of the spectrum environment.

Even if we were limited to listen-before-talk, the linked study recommended 10 W rather than 4 W, and that was in the urban context of Baltimore-DC, rather than out here in the hills where we rural people would like a choice in ISPs.

I think trying to change that might cause a few problems!

What do you mean by this? 2.4ghz is used for low-power, short range communication, so of course there are fewer issues with interference. You can't say the same about the FM radio bands, for example.

EDIT: In case this is still unclear: I'm talking about opening specific, limited bands of spectrum to unlicensed use. I would not nominate FM radio as the first such band. Just as wifi chips today are capable of not interfering on bands they don't use, super-wifi transmitters would not interfere on bands they don't use.

My pipe dreams are about a series of tubes.

Fiber hardware at $30 each is probably not happening, since we barely get ethernet hardware in that price range, and certainly not of any quality.

It really needs to be something where they plug in a box and hot and cold running Internet comes out when they open the faucets. And if you thought disruptions were bad when some country "misconfigures" their BGP to route the entire Internet through their spy agency's offices for 15 minutes, wait until a thousand Joe Bagadonuts are doing it truly accidentally, all the time.

True, a VPN in hostile environments might be a good idea. If the termination endpoint is secure, is another question.

If my ISP has a poor path to (for example) Netflix, but my VPN provider has a good (unsaturated) path, it could be advantageous. But this requires my ISP to have a good connection to my VPN provider.

No chance of pushing any serious traffic through a VPN though unless you control it.

Unfortunately, in my case a VPN would probably put me on weaker legal ground. My ISP is not legally entitled to monitor my traffic...once it hits the VPN provider the local laws apply & I can do without US laws on the privacy front.

That being said, I also have an Xposed module to get rid of the confirmation prompt entirely (I use Tasker to enable the VPN automatically when my phone connects to unsecured wifi networks).

I can't speak to how Apple does it, so maybe it's just an OpenVPN vs IPsec thing. If you setup your own IPsec VPN you could possibly have it activated automatically. There was a post on HN a few months ago with a script to basically setup an IPsec VPN automatically for you.

As a result of this bugginess, I'm no longer willing to use untrusted wi-fi networks even with VPN. It's really too bad that Apple is not fixing this, because it renders the Connect on Demand feature useless from a security point of view, and it nullifies the functionality of Cloak. Cloak is otherwise an awesome app and service, and it's not their fault as they can't control this code.

Anyone know of a portable, travel wifi router that supports VPN and fails closed?