Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal • Hacker News Board

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#191

Post by 2cb » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 8:30 PM UTC

isoprophlex wrote: post #104

Almost everyone in these comments is asking questions of various degrees of pedantry or outright dissing signal/moxie/no federation/whatever... Just spin up a server if you can spare the expense and help some people out. Action > inaction. edit: you can get the connection details via @appliedlambdas on twitter!

You can literally spin this up on a $5 a month VPS as well, not like you need to break the bank. And with so many TLDs there’s plenty of dirt cheap domains too. I just spun one up in 15 mins and if it gets blocked I’ll happily spin up more.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#192

Post by whalesalad » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 8:31 PM UTC

Where is the 'deploy to heroku' button when you need it

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#193

Post by mike_d » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 8:32 PM UTC

shervin01 wrote: post #134

Hi, from Iran with love! First of all, thank you moxie and signal team for this proxy. Until 2018, many Iranians used telegram but Iran's regime after Russia blocked this messenger. telegram released mtproxy and this proxy was helpful. Russia lifted the ban on telegram but this app is still blocked on my country. but with VPNs, many iranians still use this app. after 2018, second most popular messaging app in iran wa…

I have a proxy up at https://signal.tube/#s.bpj.net

If you can help share more proxies to people who need them, please send me an email (in my HN profile).

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#194

Post by upofadown » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 8:33 PM UTC

aendruk wrote: post #47

dunefox wrote: post #36

Wouldn't Briar be a good choice? https://briarproject.org/

Not yet. https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445

Apple devices are fairly rare in Iran.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#195

Post by rzz3 » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 8:33 PM UTC

windthrown wrote: post #150

sigmar wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article notes that Signal has been domain fronting since 2016. I think google has cracked down on it more recently though, and hence Signal has had to circumvent censors in a new way

Correct, both Google and Amazon told Signal not to use them for domain fronting: https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-on-the-front/

What about Cloudflare?

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#196

Post by xtracto » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 8:33 PM UTC

leptoniscool wrote: post #84

Is there a similar project to help Trump reconnect to twitter? /s

You say it as a joke but I get sad at seeing all these efforts to circumvent a government policy while another government is allowed to obliterate a same type of service (parcel).

As I have said before. I'm not in the US and I don't care about its politics. But I'm scared and hiw easily they can define Good and Bad and then manipulate the internet

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#197

Post by 2cb » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 8:37 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #158

isoprophlex wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your neighbor asks you to drive them to the hospital. Do you lecture them on the failures of privatized healthcare? No, you defer your opinion to the relevant place and time. This right now is about people having their access to uncensored communication cut off, and moxie asking people to help out. If you think their architecture is doomed, you're free to codify your opinion somewhere in a pull request or comment und…

The analogy falls a bit flat because this forum contains, mostly, the arbiter of the root problem- namely that signal is not censorship resistant by itself. And we should criticise them for that because it was a warning delivered in a timely manner and never heeded. Helping my neighbour in this case means allowing them to use my social insurance. Namely by using xmpp/matrix. It is low/no cost to them (unlike moving c…

> signal is not censorship resistant by itself. And we should criticise them for that because it was a warning delivered in a timely manner and never heeded.

I don’t believe Signal ever claimed to be censorship resistant to begin with. I just looked at their description on the App Store and nothing there mentions bypassing censorship.

Signal in fact did used to be censorship resistant before they were prevented from using domain fronting by third parties outside of their control.

Now the Iranian people need help and Signal has made it extremely easy for anyone who visits sites like this to kick in and provide that help. It’s likely proxies are a stopgap solution but that’s okay. Iranians are having their messages blocked now and Signal has managed to release a working fix rapidly.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#198

Post by emptybits » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 8:40 PM UTC

nrvn wrote: post #95

Signal could learn a lot from Telegram in this regard. Russian govt had tried to block Telegram but telegram servers just keep jumping over various cidrs and users got the ip addresses for connecting over push updates and the only thing the govt succeeded in was blocking a wide range of subnets including AWS ranges and GCP ranges thus disrupting a whole lot of businesses and even some government services. They gave u…

Thank you. It's heartwarming to read about successes like this.

Immediate recalling John Gilmore (GNU/EFF/etc.) in 1993:

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#199

Post by derefr » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 8:45 PM UTC

nrvn wrote: post #95

Signal could learn a lot from Telegram in this regard. Russian govt had tried to block Telegram but telegram servers just keep jumping over various cidrs and users got the ip addresses for connecting over push updates and the only thing the govt succeeded in was blocking a wide range of subnets including AWS ranges and GCP ranges thus disrupting a whole lot of businesses and even some government services. They gave u…

Feels like there could be a good business in providing this CIDR-hopping push-updating proxy as a service other apps could embed. Like what CloudFlare does for DDoS protection, but as a forward-proxy + client middleware, instead of a reverse-proxy.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#200

Post by 2cb » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 8:45 PM UTC

jlund wrote: post #177

remram wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their proxy seems to just be nginx, I'm surprised they didn't just share nginx or apache configurations. Most people with a box suitable for running this are probably already running a web server, so there's no reason they should be proxying from their existing web server to this dockerized server which just proxies to Signal. Looking into their repo, they also appear to be building an nginx image from docker.io/ubun…

The Nginx configs use modules that are not compiled by default, so most preexisting Nginx binaries in mainstream distros won't work.

This is correct, just set one of these up and it uses extra Nginx plugins.

Also the way they’ve done it makes it incredibly easy for anyone who isn’t a tech expert with a web server to still help out with a $5 domain and a $5 VPS. You literally run three commands and it’s done.

They want as many people as possible running these so blocking them all is as difficult as possible. It’s the smartest approach to have a low barrier to entry for something like this.