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Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention

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Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention

#91

Post by icebraining »

criley2 wrote: post #67
smileysteve wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it forces oppressive regimes to realize that they are being an oppressive regime. Want to censor the internet, fine, send your citizens back to the dark ages; see how long it is until they protest or move.

Amazon isn't in the business of forcing oppressive regimes to realize they are oppressive regimes, they are in the business of selling goods and services regardless of the oppressiveness of the regime governing the region where the currency comes from. If you want Amazon to stop doing business with oppressive regimes, contact your politicians about sanctions.

The problem is deeper than that; even if Amazon doesn't sell stuff to oppressive regimes, they host the sites/services of companies who do.

And if the solution was to force Amazon to block any access from their servers to those oppressive regimes, that wouldn't help Signal at all, because they too would be blocked.

Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention

#92

Post by maxerickson »

manigandham wrote: post #22

This is nothing to do with censorship. AWS has many clients and does not want its network to be blocked because of a single customer. Tough for Signal but that's how it is when dealing with businesses (especially one that so many others rely on). The same thing just happened with Telegram in Russia which explains the preemptive messages: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/04/in-ef...

Capitulating to foreign censors for business reasons has something to do with censorship.

Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention

#93

Post by bscphil »

icebraining wrote: post #78
confounded wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I missing something, or is anyone using a CDN domain fronting?

An HTTPS connection sends the domain it wants to connect to in two layers: first unencrypted in the TLS headers, then encrypted in the HTTP header. In a regular connection (even using a CDN), those two will match. Using domain fronting, you put a popular domain in the unencrypted part, and the real domain in a encrypted HTTP header. Due to how they're implemented, the load balancers at Google and Amazon will ignore t…

What if Signal sent the correct domain by default, but made it user configurable? Users in oppressive regimes would figure it out pretty quickly.

Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention

#94

Post by CodeMage »

freedomben wrote: post #72
smileysteve wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it forces oppressive regimes to realize that they are being an oppressive regime. Want to censor the internet, fine, send your citizens back to the dark ages; see how long it is until they protest or move.

I'm guessing you haven't spent much time looking into how oppressive regimes work. They aren't going "to realize that they are being an oppressive regime" and have an epiphany where they realize, "Hey maybe I'm an evil dictator?" If you are up for reading, I highly recommend Michael Malice's book, Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il . After reading that you will completely understand why "see h…

> I'm guessing you haven't spent much time looking into how oppressive regimes work.

> They aren't going "to realize that they are being an oppressive regime" and have an epiphone where they realize, "Hey maybe I'm an evil dictator?"

Not to mention that, in a truly oppressive regime, people don't have the liberty to either move or protest.

Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention

#95

Post by RIMR »

pm90 wrote: post #59

I'm thinking of a legislative, not technological solution to this, which seems to be pretty straightforward: make it unlawful for US companies to refuse service simply for Domain fronting. That way, none of the big companies could lawfully refuse service to Signal; neither could they be faulted by these other regimes for "letting Signal use their domain".

Good, go ahead and pass those laws and I'll use Cloudfront to impersonate Amazon.com and steal credit card info, and Amazon will be legally unable to stop me.

Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention

#96

Post by insensible »

johnwheeler wrote: post #63
icebraining wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of the post shows they feel entitled to it?

The fact that they posted the e-mail from Amazon, so readers could direct the blame at them. You can’t read that blog post and say it’s the most unbiased and objective way they could have presented this, especially if they want to remain on good terms with Amazon, who has done nothing wrong at all.

I thought it was 100% objective, straight across. I don't see any barbs or negativity toward Amazon whatsoever, just the facts about that situation and an honest discussion of the facts looking forward.

Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention

#98

Post by [deleted] »

johnwheeler wrote: post #63
icebraining wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of the post shows they feel entitled to it?

The fact that they posted the e-mail from Amazon, so readers could direct the blame at them. You can’t read that blog post and say it’s the most unbiased and objective way they could have presented this, especially if they want to remain on good terms with Amazon, who has done nothing wrong at all.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention

#99

Post by onetimemanytime »

>>Direct access to Signal has been censored in Egypt, Oman, Qatar, and UAE for the past 1.5 years.

Yeah but Amazon alone, should not bear the cost of making Signal accessible to these countries--especially without their consent. People underestimate dictators, they will block God's channel to ensure their own survival. How many times has Youtube been blocked by countries? Plenty of time. So Amazon cannot risk being blocked completely because of this.

Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention

#100

Post by Boulth »

dsl wrote: post #48
foobarbazetc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t really stop someone from domain fronting on any CDN. This is like “maybe you should have not talked about this on HN”. :)

Fixing domain fronting is easy. You just match the certificate SANs (or SNI requested domain) to the request Host header. The only problem is it breaks a subset of users who are domain fronting by accident (Think a mobile app that connects to www.app.com but sends api.app.com).

This also breaks non terminating load balancers.
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