cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11349801
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The federal government of Canada will help to fund “a sovereign broadband backbone that connects Canadians from coast to coast to coast, with more direct and secure links to Europe and Asia,” Prime Minister Mark Carney announced.
A “broadband backbone” is the high-capacity core of the internet network that carries traffic between cities and countries. Speaking with reporters later, Mr. Carney said the backbone would also include connections to the Arctic.
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Representatives for Canada’s major telecom companies supported Mr. Carney’s announcement … As Mr. Carney’s government continues to seek alternatives to reduce dependence on the United States, calls have grown to develop more networking infrastructure that would avoid routing Canadian data through U.S. internet exchanges, thereby exposing that data to potential surveillance.
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Researchers at the University of Toronto and York University studying the journey taken by data between two points in Canada have found that, among their data sets, about a quarter of those journeys routed through American interchanges, exposing that information to access by the U.S. National Security Agency.
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Mr. Carney did not provide further details about the broadband project. However, discussions about the ownership and financing model for the project are currently being held between telecom companies and the Major Projects Office, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.
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Cool, now fix internet and cell prices to match europe and asia. I do not give a shit where my encrypted traffic gets routed if it costs 5x as much as the rest of the world.
Holy fuck I love this
Why?
No really. Unless you are browsing sites that do no use HTTPS or you are running applications that do not encrypt traffic (not very common) it really doesn’t matter where your traffic goes before it reaches the destination. Yes they US could throttle traffic or cut us off but that is several orders of magnitude more nuanced than trump will ever pull off.
Hopefully we can also get sovereign internet services to our entire population. Where I live in NB, 20 minutes outside the capital city, the options are: overloaded and poor reception to Xplore fixed wireless (which was sold to a US company is 2022), strangled and under-invested DSL circa 1995 from Bell, or Starlink.
I love this guy!
Don’t love him too much, he is still a banker and banks will fuck you for a dollar then charge you a few and interest.
Awesome! Don’t a few undersea cables already route through Canada? That should make it easier!
Big if true. Some pretty important details still need to be decided.
Canada stepping up to fill the void the tea USA leaves would be so cool
Given that we don’t know exactly what they’re building, how it will be financed, or who will own it, I guess we’re all free to imagine that it will involve something other than just giving lots of money to the Canadian telecom cartel.
And three years ago, after the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said it would require some large telecom companies to share access to their fibre networks with competitors …
Three years! How much progress have they made since then in restoring competition to the market for home Internet service? Any at all? At a glance it looks like the rate for TPIA is still prohibitively high, leading to retail prices from Teksavvy — the only independent ISP I know of which still exists — which are roughly double what I’m currently paying through Bell’s flanker brand. It’s looking like the promised repair of the once-great system will never happen. Not under a Liberal government, anyway. It will continue to be left to rot. Go on Carney, prove me wrong.
Edit to add: Here is Teksavvy once again pointing out that the wholesale rates set by the CRTC, like the ones Bell was complaining about 3 years ago, are still higher than the retail prices charged by the dominant providers.
I don’t think it takes away from the value of what Carney is proposing here - kind of two very different problems really - but you’re absolutely right that more competition in our telecoms sector is something we desperately need.
More? More than what, zero? Where I live there is Bell, Rogers, Cogego, or Teksavvy (who is forced to pay inflated prices and can not compete).
Canada is 3 telecos and an oil company in a trench coat.
Excellent. gO Canada!
is there a backdoor in https? I get resilience to preventing US from blocking Canadian packets, but back to first question.
If you don’t trust TLS you are out of luck. Maybe rent a server in the country you wish to talk to and tunnel over SSH with the new eliptic curve keys.
How a “Backdoor” in HTTPS Can Occur
Because HTTPS relies on the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol to encrypt data, any backdoor must target the underlying cryptography, implementation, or trust infrastructure:
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Weakened Cryptographic Standards: The US National Security Agency (NSA) has a documented history of attempting to introduce subtle flaws into global encryption standards. A prime historical example is the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator. The NSA pushed for its inclusion in NIST standards in the mid-2000s, which later revealed a mathematical backdoor allowing anyone with the correct key to decrypt the resulting traffic.
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Compromised Certificate Authorities (CAs): HTTPS relies on a chain of trust managed by Certificate Authorities. These entities issue the digital certificates that verify a website’s identity. If a US-based CA were legally coerced (via classified directives like National Security Letters) to hand over its root keys or issue fraudulent certificates, an agency could execute a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack to decrypt HTTPS traffic seamlessly.
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Imposed Implementation Flaws:
Backdoors are often engineered directly into commercial hardware or software rather than the open-source protocol. Government agencies can exploit or intentionally plant vulnerabilities in proprietary routers, firewalls, and operating systems that handle HTTPS termination, allowing them to capture data right before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted.
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Key Interception (PRISM): Revelations from 2013 leaked documents showed that under programs like PRISM, the US government bypassed the need to break HTTPS encryption entirely by compelling major tech companies to hand over data directly from their servers (at rest), rendering transit encryption irrelevant.
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I’m pessimistic. I don’t think this will happen.
If it does happen it will pump another billion into bell’s pocket so they can lay off 50% of their employees.
