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Lammyyesterday at 4:17 AM1 replyview on HN

> in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs

Not what I'm saying. No coordination is necessary. I'm talking about metadata, not encrypted contents — just the fact that you made some number of connections, at a certain time, from a certain network, to a certain network, in a certain order, with requests and responses of a certain size. It really doesn't matter what's inside.

- https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

- https://youtu.be/kV2HDM86XgI?t=1072 “First of all, David's description of what you can do with metadata […] is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata.” ― Former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden (2014)


Replies

nlyesterday at 4:30 AM

Sure, but hiding the contents provides a lot more value than hiding some parts of metadata.

It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.

It's true that general resources could be cached in some cases, but personalized information couldn't be (and yes was served over HTTP, not just HTTPS).

> It really doesn't matter what's inside

It certainly does matter what is inside, and it's trivial to think of cases where it does. Hiding that content is much much more valuable.

> We kill people based on metadata.

Sure, but they also kill people based on content.

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