Mercury

[paper at tilde.institute]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 06:32:19PM -0400, Sean Conner wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great defdefred once stated:
> > On Thursday 25 June 2020 23:23, <paper at tilde.institute> wrote:
> > > not really, VPN is only moving the problem to a different state/company,
> > > then the traffic would be plain text. The solution would be a VPN to the
> > > gemini server, but basicaly that's called TLS xD
> > 
> > True, but a VPN is created to serve multiple requests.
> 
>   Yes and no.  A VPN is *not* at all like HTTPS or Gemini.  It is *not* used
> for program to program communication (the TCP layer) but computer to
> computer communciation (the IP layer).  Technically, a VPN routes IP (the
> packet of which are encrypted) over IP (the packets of which are regular,
> unencrypted packets) and looks like a router.  Normally, traffic would go:
> 
> 	[program1 -> data -> TCP -> IP -> client] (1st computer)
> 		-> router -> router -> ... router -> 
> 	[server -> IP -> TCP -> data -> program2] (2nd computer)
> 
>   A VPN does this:
> 
> 	[program1 -> data -> TCP -> IP -> VPN endpoint -> client] (1st computer)
> 		-> router -> router ... -> router ->
> 	[VPN endpoint] (2nd computer)
> 		-> router -> router ... -> router ->
> 	[server -> IP -> TCP -> data -> program2] (3rd computer)
> 
> I.E., a VPN is just a fancy router.  The server never knows (nor cares)
> about the VPN.

I know that, I was joking. My point was that defdefred was trying to
invent something like TLS, so I pointed him in the right direction ;)

Paper