31–40 of 417 posts
this is looking like a zero sum game unless signal account is delinked from phone numbers because the govt can play cat and mouse game indefinitely
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…
That's the trick isn't it: having an entire population know something an oppressive government doesn't. Even if you teach everyone how to deploy their own servers, then that's the knowledge the government will start targeting. You can make blocks expensive, i.e. blocking other major, useful services that would disrupt society too much for them to want to deal with, but this of course has its own costs. It's censorshi…
Damn, I've read the code. This won't work against an active probe. Censors just use signal domains and non-signal domains to test your proxy. If signal domains get passed and non-signal domains got denied, you are fucked. Besides, TLS in TLS is highly identifiable by simple packet length dpi. I'd hope there's better plan.
If the censor already knows about your proxy they would have no reason to test it... The whole point is that there isn't a central list of proxies for them to easily block.
Or they could just let people host their own server instances. Would be considerably more censorship resistant from the start.
You're welcome to either use such a decentralised service or fork signal and add decentralisation / federation. Centralised services get more users by having a lower threshold of adoption.
And if you're the mouse, you really don't want to be hobbled by not having an auto-update mechanism in your proxy servers...
At the very least they could have made it load the config from https://signal.org on startup, or made an apt package that sysadmins can easily update with everything else.