They monitor all DNS requests(no matter who provides the DNS server). So the solution is DNS over HTTPS.
The SNI method is a bit tricky. ESNI does prevent the blocking, but currently it’s rarely implemented by websites. One other solution is TCP fragmentation. Split the packet containing SNI into two. This prevents them from catching the whole URL mentioned in the SNI. Thus, they are unable to block it.
Why does no one talk about brave’s approach to micro payments. It makes micro payments effortless. One doesn’t even need to use their ad based model. Instead, just buy some of the BAT tokens and use them.
Is there some inherent flaw in there approach that it’s not more widely discussed.
I think the goal needs to be to remove the "micro" from micropayment schemes.
At some point, the overhead of managing and tracking payments takes up a major part of its value.
Federation is the potential counter-argument. Let me buy one USD20 per month subscription that covers a huge swath of media. Divide the revenue among publishers based on aggregate metrics.
Then you're dealing with only relatively large and infrequent transactions-- consumers paying $20 per month, the aggregator paying each publisher a monthly cut of $100 or $100,000-- something that doesn't require a completely new financial ecosystem to make viable.
Making it a fixed-dollar subscription helps with risk-aversion. If you're buying 200 other media products in the same subscription, you can avoid second-guessing "will I use this?" It avoids any client-side "I have to consciously specify what I want to back" friction like Patreon.
I think a Brave-style approach is better than an advertising-supported model just because Internet advertising is a scam for everyone involved. Unfortunately Brave doesn't solve the underlying problem of "views = $$$", which means journalism would have to continue to rely on being clickbait to survive.
It does make an effort to solve the problem. It currently uses a time based approach in which tokens are credited to a publisher based on time spent by the user reading the article.
Also there is a threshold of some seconds before any tokens are accounted for an article. So basically click baits won’t account for any tokens because the user might quickly close the article.
Most comments here are blowing things way out of proportion. Links are in no way getting modified by the browser.
The issue is that when someone types binance.us(or a few other brave affiliate sites) in the address bar, the top recommended link comes to be one with the referral link appended. When enter is hit that link is automatically selected(normal chromium behaviour) and page opens with the url with referral code.
This sure is problematic. As Brendan has said[1] it sure was not the right way to do it.
Again, the links in pages are in no way modified as people are trying to portray.
India has strict net neutrality. ISPs cannot throttle some services and allow others. If you are talking about banning websites(torrent, porn) then that's a different issue. That is enforced due to a court order.
I have a Jio connection. Torrents work at same data speeds as other downloads. But the torrent websites are banned using DPI. So easy hacks like https upgrade don't work. Hopefully wide adoption of encrypted SNI will hinder their capability to ban websites.
They monitor all DNS requests(no matter who provides the DNS server). So the solution is DNS over HTTPS.
The SNI method is a bit tricky. ESNI does prevent the blocking, but currently it’s rarely implemented by websites. One other solution is TCP fragmentation. Split the packet containing SNI into two. This prevents them from catching the whole URL mentioned in the SNI. Thus, they are unable to block it.
One such tool: https://github.com/SadeghHayeri/GreenTunnel