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.
Found the PM
Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal
51–60 of 417 posts
Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal
#52What 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 me…
There are relatively good solutions like dns fronting on Amazon or Google, but they frown upon being used that way.
Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal
#53Earlier 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.
Signal is taking a leaf out of Telegram's book here in crowd-sourcing censorship circumvention which has worked so well for Telegram in Russia, especially.
One could use censorship evading VPNs like Tor, Lantern, Shadowsocks, Psiphon in addition to using these proxies. They all have different evasion mechanisms.
The thing that works for user-run proxies is, it is like a hydra, you censor one proxy another crops up.
Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal
#54How 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…
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Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal
#55Why can't they just ship signal with a Tor client? This is precisely what Tor was built for. They can donate some money to charities running Tor nodes while they're at it, or run some themselves. Iran tried to censor Tor too, but it's pretty much impossible to do so fully. At least the Tor devs are usually on top of it, while Signal is inexperienced dealing with things like this.
Tor is is blocked in Iran.
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Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal
#56Why can't they just ship signal with a Tor client? This is precisely what Tor was built for. They can donate some money to charities running Tor nodes while they're at it, or run some themselves. Iran tried to censor Tor too, but it's pretty much impossible to do so fully. At least the Tor devs are usually on top of it, while Signal is inexperienced dealing with things like this.
What makes you think that it’s hard to block Tor? Even Kazakhstan blocked Tor many years ago. They’re using DPI: connection opens, client can write data, but can’t read anything which is frustrating from user PoV.
Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal
#57[deleted]
Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal
#58What 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 me…
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Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal
#59In the long run, starlink will make it even harder for autocrat regimes to censor the internet. Russian authorities already try to ban connections to Starlink.
Yes I'm sure Starlink would never do something like censor traffic at some regime's behest. Elon Musk is famously independent and not at all beholden to funding from the U.S. and China.
Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal
#60Everyone complaining this is just a cat-and-mouse game, it’s not a game these people choose to play.
They either play it or their movement dies.