A thing that's been annoying me in tech jargon: "VPN" means two very different things.
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RE: https://mendeddrum.org/@fanf/115791581817238151
A thing that's been annoying me in tech jargon: "VPN" means two very different things.
1. A piece of restricted network address space, which only authorised people can access.
2. A way to access public network resources indirectly, forwarding via an intermediary.They both _work_ in more or less the same way: encapsulate inner IP traffic via cryptography and framing, re-send it over the public Internet, verify and decrypt on arrival. They differ in what's done with the traffic after decryption. So it makes sense from that point of view that they share an acronym: the acronym describes the mechanics of what the software is doing. In some cases the same software tool is flexible enough to do either job.
But in spite of that, they're very different in what they're used for. Moreover, they don't really interpret the acronym in the same way: "private" is doing very different work in the two cases, and so is "network".
In sense 1, "network" means a specific _area_ of the network – an address space full of clients and servers. And it's private in the sense of "not public": not everyone is allowed to use that network at all.
But in sense 2, "network" doesn't refer to clients and servers at all, but to the transport in between them. And "private" doesn't mean the network _is_ private, it means it preserves _your_ privacy.
This ambiguity can actually confuse! The blog post linked from the quoted toot starts off by saying "the US government is coming down hard on VPNs". I initially assumed it meant sense 2: the spooks want to eavesdrop, so they're against people using tools that make it harder. Seemed very plausible, given the current state of the crypto wars. But in fact it's talking about sense 1: they think you shouldn't be relying on restricted-access address spaces to keep your network resources secure (instead you should secure each one well enough that it would be safe even if an attacker did get in to the private network).
It's too late to say that "VPN" means only one of these two things. But maybe it's not too late to invent a pair of more specific words, to distinguish the two senses without having to write a whole clarifying extra sentence.
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undefined oblomov@sociale.network shared this topic
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RE: https://mendeddrum.org/@fanf/115791581817238151
A thing that's been annoying me in tech jargon: "VPN" means two very different things.
1. A piece of restricted network address space, which only authorised people can access.
2. A way to access public network resources indirectly, forwarding via an intermediary.They both _work_ in more or less the same way: encapsulate inner IP traffic via cryptography and framing, re-send it over the public Internet, verify and decrypt on arrival. They differ in what's done with the traffic after decryption. So it makes sense from that point of view that they share an acronym: the acronym describes the mechanics of what the software is doing. In some cases the same software tool is flexible enough to do either job.
But in spite of that, they're very different in what they're used for. Moreover, they don't really interpret the acronym in the same way: "private" is doing very different work in the two cases, and so is "network".
In sense 1, "network" means a specific _area_ of the network – an address space full of clients and servers. And it's private in the sense of "not public": not everyone is allowed to use that network at all.
But in sense 2, "network" doesn't refer to clients and servers at all, but to the transport in between them. And "private" doesn't mean the network _is_ private, it means it preserves _your_ privacy.
This ambiguity can actually confuse! The blog post linked from the quoted toot starts off by saying "the US government is coming down hard on VPNs". I initially assumed it meant sense 2: the spooks want to eavesdrop, so they're against people using tools that make it harder. Seemed very plausible, given the current state of the crypto wars. But in fact it's talking about sense 1: they think you shouldn't be relying on restricted-access address spaces to keep your network resources secure (instead you should secure each one well enough that it would be safe even if an attacker did get in to the private network).
It's too late to say that "VPN" means only one of these two things. But maybe it's not too late to invent a pair of more specific words, to distinguish the two senses without having to write a whole clarifying extra sentence.
@simontatham Why did we drop the word "proxy", anyway? Could we somehow introduce the phrase "VPN proxy" or "Proxy VPN"?
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