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How New Default Consensus Realities Instantiate

15 April 2007

Death of the Darknet and the End of Encryption

by metavalent

Either the cost of security against identity theft and other information security risks is increasingly high, or Comcast has joined the broadband providers who are killing encryption by degrading anonymized traffic:

Anonymizer Identity, Password, and Data Theft Protection Encryption turned on:

Anonymizer Identity, Password, and Data Theft Protection Encryption turned off:

Just so the reader is not confused by the graphics, the first three download numbers are in “kbps” and the bottom is in “mbps” … if all were in kbps the numbers would be 1074, 1110, 8643 and 21,830, respectively. Yes, the cost of protecting your own internet traffic in this case is an 8X to 20X reduction in downstream performance.

Of course, UPSTREAM bandwidth is crippled from 3X to a whopping 60X of downstream capacity, and I’m utterly dumbfounded that the market continues to accept such stifling bandwidth offerings in this Web 2.0, user-generated content era. Of course, I was dumbfounded that people couldn’t see this inevitable situation from about 1992 when I first began fervently advocating construction of carrier networks based upon the principle of delivering Massive SYMMETRIC bandwidth; but that’s another story, far better articulated by people far more insightful than myself.

Such results give the appearance that if legislators can’t make encryption illegal, the DHS-ass-kissing service providers will simply make it utterly impractical. I can imagine it even now, as one CENTRALIZED Telecom Act of 1996 violator after another announces a complete shut down of port 500 and IPSEC traffic … “there was just no interest in encryption from users, as our data on encrypted traffic shows.”

Yeah, after Comcast and others DEGRADED traffic by a factor or 20X for years and years in order to punish privacy advocates and “prove” that secure traffic isn’t practical in everyday use. Even walking is not practical as a mode of transportation if someone is kicking you in the shins with every step.

I’ve run dozens and dozens of such tests, with all other variables held equal, and these are typical results.

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