I feel like modern technological development has become a comic tragedy: we develop AI so we can develop AI tools to hack so we can develop more AI to combat that AI.

Seems to me like a self-perpetuating broken-window fallacy taken to its logical extreme.

Ok now this is quite interesting, particularly when it comes to “messing with” netflow analysis, which is what’s referred to (the data provided by Team Cymru to the FBI, etc).

It’s certainly looks to be a step above prior efforts to inject noise that I’ve seen such as having an instrumented browser “randomly browse the web” to add noise.

This is all very interesting. No disrespect to Mullvad but will there be any effort towards attempting to get such functionality standardized? In the past there was a XOR scrambling patch for OpenVPN[1] to attempt to circumvent certain government firewalls and the OpenVPN developers had concerns about unaudited changes to the wire protocol.

[1]: https://proprivacy.com/vpn/guides/openvpn-scramble-xor-obfus...

I'm sure it's not that new, but first saw this kind of anti-analysis behaviour in action in Nullsoft's WASTE (the Winamp guys).

Unfortunately with symmetrical consumer internet services still being rare in many countries, fully masking your traffic when trying to download a large amount of content is made more difficult or time consuming.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE

Mullvad fake traffic is going to be lightweight, because they'll won't mess with metered connections. It'll be relatively easy to tell the fake traffic from the real one over time.