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Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

signal.org

321–330 of 417 posts

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#321

It's an irony how American companies try circumvents another country's law (regardless of whether you call it censorship or not, it is still a law) and boast about it. Yet, in the US these companies help the mainstream narrative to enforce censorship by banning (Google and Apple App market) or simply not offering other point of views basic hosting services (AWS). I am an Iranian and don't agree with all of our govern…

Am honestly not trolling here although it will sound like it: Can someone please explain to me why it's a OK to reconnect Iranians to Signal, but not Trump supporters to Twitter (the ones censored and banned by Twitter)?

Hi, glad to help. The answer is that it depends on what your values are.

If you want to reconnect people to twitter (a publishing platform) who have been banned for racist hate speech or inciting violence, and the laws in your jurisdiction permit you to do that. Then you can do that without going to jail.

If you want to reconnect people to signal (a personal communications tool) who have been disconnected from it due to reasons best understood by the Iranian government, an the laws in your jurisdiction permit you to do that. Then you can do that without going to jail.

It's really just a value judgement whether you consider giving a publishing platform to racists against the will of said publishing platform is a worthwhile activity.

And, again, it's just a value judgement whether you consider giving the right to privately communicate back to Iranians who have been, effectively, deprived of it by connecting them to a service which will willingly have them is a worthwhile activity.

Your values may differ from mine. And both my and your values could differ from the majority of HN users. My experience is that perfect alignments of values rarely, if ever, occur between any two individuals.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#322
post #61

There was an article in 2014: "Imagining a Rebel Firefox" ( https://medium.com/@efrensandoval/imagining-a-rebel-firefox-... ) which played with the idea if every firefox node would become tor(ish) gateway. Is there no way to build this in the Signal clients themselves? Eg. on is on a wifi, try to upnp, ask the user if they'd wish to help.

Similar to the Tor Project's Snowflake[1] Firefox addon? [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/torproject-sn...

Thanks for mentioning this! I’m surprised I hadn’t seen this before.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#323

Signal should be federated. This censorship problem would not exist, or would be organically routed around, were the service federated. Without federation, Signal is just another stepping stone in the long path of eventually abandoned instant messengers, all the way back from ICQ. We will get to an SMTP-like protocol, and email-like service, at some point. If not Signal, some other one.

> organically routed around Do any SMTP servers still allow organic routing? I was under the impression that all modern servers have extremely cumbersome auth/dkim and its hard to not be GMail and still send a real msg and have it arrive

DKIM/SPF really aren't that bad. And you can not be Gmail and still get emails sent. Except Outlook/Hotmail/etc will randomly start blocking your emails, and only unblock your emails after you pester them enough.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am honestly not trolling here although it will sound like it: Can someone please explain to me why it's a OK to reconnect Iranians to Signal, but not Trump supporters to Twitter (the ones censored and banned by Twitter)?

Hi, glad to help. The answer is that it depends on what your values are. If you want to reconnect people to twitter (a publishing platform) who have been banned for racist hate speech or inciting violence, and the laws in your jurisdiction permit you to do that. Then you can do that without going to jail. If you want to reconnect people to signal (a personal communications tool) who have been disconnected from it due…

It goes way way beyond inciting violence. For example, Facebook recently shut down the page of Socialist Workers Party in Britain. Facebook suspended well known libertarian Ron Paul. Timer blocked links to the New York Post Joe and Hunter Biden exposé and locked accounts that shared it.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#326
post #307
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could literally have a hidden function in WhatsApp that scoops up all your chat history and sends it to Facebook if the government ask them to. It’s closed source. No one has a clue what it’s doing. To be clear I’m not suggesting this is absolutely happening. I’m merely pointing out it’s entirely possible from a technological perspective given it’s closed source software owned by Facebook. That’s not a recipe fo…

The same is true of Signal in most practical ways. You can only run it on platforms that are fundamentally closed-source (either iOS or Google Play Services), so there's no reason to believe the RNGs it uses (and therefore all your session keys) are not backdoored. And you can only install it through official app stores where it's difficult or impossible to inspect what binary you have or "pin" a given version. So I…

I run Signal on GrapheneOS and find this comment incorrect and borderline offensive.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#327
> §560.204 Prohibited exportation, reexportation, sale, or supply of goods, technology, or services to Iran.

> Except as otherwise authorized pursuant to this part, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to May 7, 1995, the exportation, reexportation, sale, or supply, directly or indirectly, from the United States, or by a United States person, wherever located, of any goods, technology, or services to Iran or the Government of Iran is prohibited, including the exportation, reexportation, sale, or supply of any goods, technology, or services to a person in a third country undertaken with knowledge or reason to know that:

> (a) Such goods, technology, or services are intended specifically for supply, transshipment, or reexportation, directly or indirectly, to Iran or the Government of Iran; or

> (b) Such goods, technology, or services are intended specifically for use in the production of, for commingling with, or for incorporation into goods, technology, or services to be directly or indirectly supplied, transshipped, or reexported exclusively or predominantly to Iran or the Government of Iran.

For US citizens, does helping folks in Iran in this way with a Signal proxy fall under these terms?

https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=f384a46ec1b04cc7b2...

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#328
post #297

I know it's too late to engineer this at this point, but maybe Signal should consider adding a built-in Tor client. That way they can take advantage of the many thousands of existing Tor bridges, and Tor has been proven to be pretty effective at censorship resistance over the years...

I doubt very much it's too late. Tor can be statically compiled into the apps, and assuming Signal is centralized, they can just run their own onion service and otherwise communicate as though they were using TCP.

I meant that it's too late to solve it for this particular censorship event. You'd need to add a UI for selecting bridges and configuring Tor, all of which is substantially more complicated than just adding support for custom single-hop HTTPS proxies.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#329
post #61

There was an article in 2014: "Imagining a Rebel Firefox" ( https://medium.com/@efrensandoval/imagining-a-rebel-firefox-... ) which played with the idea if every firefox node would become tor(ish) gateway. Is there no way to build this in the Signal clients themselves? Eg. on is on a wifi, try to upnp, ask the user if they'd wish to help.

No because mobile devices suck for P2P. Even on wifi and plugged in you likely couldn't force your app to stay open and the phone on. Easier to tell a bunch of people to run a docker container on a raspberry pi.
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