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Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

signal.org

21–30 of 417 posts

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#21
post #20
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tor is is blocked in Iran.

if they block can block tor what makes you think they can't block these proxies? furthermore if you use tor you can use the existing network of bridges/relays as well as their pluggable transports protocol to avoid DPI/traffic analysis.

They can block these proxies. Thats why in the #IRanASignalProxy section they say to share in more discrete ways if you can.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#22

How would you let users know about this proxy without letting their government know about it? Instead of platforms like twitter, how about randomly giving out random proxies in some header that the app could query on cloudflare or google or akamai? Does Signal already make use of any CDN's for out-of-band signalling and fail-over? If the Signal proxy could expose an obfuscated load metric, then the CDN could pick ano…

I think Signal is clearly recognising that nearly sny server or system they create will be blocked, which is why they recommended this being done on an individual layer. From the article: > A more discrete approach would be to only send the link via a DM or a non-public message. You can post something like this on your favorite social network: > * #IRanASignalProxy Reply to this thread if you want the connection deta…

[deleted]

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the purpose of signal? Is it taking over the world or providing a service to people that care about their privacy and free (as in freedom) communication?

There are lots of purposes but dismantling mass surveillance is a major one. This requires 'taking over the world'.

... Creating a central point of failure / censorship?

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#24
this is fine and dandy but when you have a state actor operating with such offensive tactics like india is currently engaged in kashmir, there isnt much these "proxies" can do. sorry. the idea of these proxies is all fun and nice but when a government can just whitelist the entire fucking internet and none of these nonsense works

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/15/internet-parti...

https://thewire.in/rights/kashmir-internet-white-list-net-ne...

https://thewire.in/rights/modis-thought-control-firewall-in-...

>The reason the government wants to keep blocking full access to the internet in the Valley is its fear of civil disobedience.

and the ban is still in place although it is on high speed mobile internet today.

https://thekashmirwalla.com/2020/12/high-speed-internet-ban-...

not to forget there were reports of CISCO being brought in to build this fucking firewall

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#25
post #5

Or they could just let people host their own server instances. Would be considerably more censorship resistant from the start.

Or just use Element/Matrix which already lets you do that.

I feel like this answer to "how to make government censorship of private communications over the internet impossible" is more complex though than just "use element/matrix"

It seems like both signal and matrix choose "Human-meaningful" over "distributed" on Zooko's Triangle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle

Matrix is federated which I'd argue is pretty different than "distributed". Certainly the fact that federation is built-in makes matrix more resistant to lazy censors who are slow to block popular homeservers, but a concerted check-any-IP-and-if-it-seems-like-it-might-be-a-homeserver-then-block-it action by a censor would be harder to deal with.

Wouldn't a truly distributed/secure/really-super-hard-to-block protocol rely on non-meaningful addresses (i.e. public-key-derived like a tor hidden service) and some kind of interesting mesh setup (i.e. like tor) to route and deliver messages?

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#26
post #20
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tor is is blocked in Iran.

if they block can block tor what makes you think they can't block these proxies? furthermore if you use tor you can use the existing network of bridges/relays as well as their pluggable transports protocol to avoid DPI/traffic analysis.

Iran is already blocking Tor. In general, if Signal provides some central way to use Tor together with Signal, the Iranian government can just run it on their machine, and block every IP address that it tries to connect to.

Iran can block these proxies, too, but this way there isn't any centralized listing of proxies. This proxy setup is simple enough that a single person could run a proxy for a few dozen of their friends, and the Iranian government might just never find out about it.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#27
post #20
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tor is is blocked in Iran.

if they block can block tor what makes you think they can't block these proxies? furthermore if you use tor you can use the existing network of bridges/relays as well as their pluggable transports protocol to avoid DPI/traffic analysis.

Tor has a very similar proxy setup that can be used to get around blocks like this.

https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en#Pluggab...

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#28
post #8
post #5

Or they could just let people host their own server instances. Would be considerably more censorship resistant from the start.

Too bad, the Signal devs love centralization. One day people will realize Signal is just not the right solution for what they actually need.

The problem with this is that Signal is a huge success right now where other federated chat platforms have fallen. Sure, something like Matrix might win the war eventually but by being centralized Signal shipped and is providing a useful service to millions of people today.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#29
What is the state of the art on censorship resistance right now? This cat-and-mouse proxy fight never seems to go great for the good guys.

My last in-depth reading on it was the excellent 2016 SoK paper “Towards grounding censorship circumvention in empiricism” (http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2018/cmsc818O/papers/sok-cen...)

The high level takeaway then seemed to be that researchers were not focusing efforts on measures that can actually help more people resist censors. Have we made progress since then?

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#30
post #3

I'm a big fan of the idea of independently-run proxy servers. Caddy has a secure forward proxy plugin born out of a research project at Google that does something similar, but works with any clients that let you configure HTTP proxies, and doesn't terminate TLS: instead it tunnels it over TLS. The proxy server itself can also be probe-resistant, i.e. difficult to detect that a website is acting as a proxy. I'm hoping…

how does something like this work against DPI? i guess not great?

>Don't use this in situations where your personal safety or freedom could be at risk

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/06/kashmir-social-media-pol... https://thewire.in/media/kashmir-journalist-auqib-javeed-pol...

reason why i have a general disregard for technologies that are based on some sort of "link" AFK, phone number or the stupid facebook real name policy. this is as of today being used to crack down on dissent. what you are saying is true but https://thenextweb.com/in/2020/01/08/kashmirs-police-want-pe... when you have your govt do this, how can you keep your signal account private? your phone is already listed. isnt it? cant the police see if you are on signal and if online means you are bypassing them somehow regardless of what you might be saying?

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