Wouldn't a federated system be much more robust where you would only need to access one of the nodes and this would send it through a chain of nodes to the receiver?
Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
161–170 of 519 posts
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#162wouldn't it be possible to actually allow "signal" customers create an appengine account via the signal app? i.e. every customer can just add their google account as a setup to setup an appengine proxy to signal. this would mean that iran would either need to block appengine or they would need to find out all customers.
it could be even implemented with a shuffle so that you can shuffle your app id.
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it may depend on how well distributed would a service be: having several big servers would not help but if every family and company had their own mini server, located in a non-censoring country then the censors would be unable to do anything easily. These servers, in turn, would be able to easily connect to the broader network. Of course that wouldn't be as easy to setup as a simple installation of the Signal…
An aspiring censor could also "easily connect to the broader network" and masquerade as a federated server in order to discover others. This process could even be automated. Federated services also require an identifier, and this identifier usually indicates where the user's account is located and how to connect with them (e.g. user@domain.com). As people share these identifiers, the aspiring censor can just keep add…
In XMPP you cannot easily enumarete other servers s2s connections. If the censor connects as a client he can only see their own contacts.
As for sharing IDs if you post them publicly then of course they are revealed and can be blocked.
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#164Wouldn't it make more sense to build TOR or something like it into signal for these use cases?
Bundling Tor in an app is quite an engineering hurdle and latency increase, but yes. Pluggable transports allow the public to find solutions that work for specific countries faster than an in-house development team as well. Delegating censorship circumvention to the Tor Project as an opt-in option for users could save a lot of engineering hours.
Tackling it yourself does get you some easy press opportunities though, as this upvoted article proves.
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or it forces oppressive regimes to realize that they are being an oppressive regime. Want to censor the internet, fine, send your citizens back to the dark ages; see how long it is until they protest or move.
I'm guessing you haven't spent much time looking into how oppressive regimes work. They aren't going "to realize that they are being an oppressive regime" and have an epiphany where they realize, "Hey maybe I'm an evil dictator?" If you are up for reading, I highly recommend Michael Malice's book, Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il . After reading that you will completely understand why "see h…
We don't need oppressive regimes to "realize" they're oppressive. We simply need to shift the incentives by making it financially expensive to censor. This is known as "collateral freedom"[1], and has been used to publish censored content in China.
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#166Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or it forces oppressive regimes to realize that they are being an oppressive regime. Want to censor the internet, fine, send your citizens back to the dark ages; see how long it is until they protest or move.
You think oppressive regimes don't already realize what they are? They simply don't care.
They would care if there are financial consequences.
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing you haven't spent much time looking into how oppressive regimes work. They aren't going "to realize that they are being an oppressive regime" and have an epiphany where they realize, "Hey maybe I'm an evil dictator?" If you are up for reading, I highly recommend Michael Malice's book, Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il . After reading that you will completely understand why "see h…
> I'm guessing you haven't spent much time looking into how oppressive regimes work. > They aren't going "to realize that they are being an oppressive regime" and have an epiphone where they realize, "Hey maybe I'm an evil dictator?" Not to mention that, in a truly oppressive regime, people don't have the liberty to either move or protest.
They might not have reasonable freedom to move or protest, but people will always have the radical freedom to oppose an oppressive regime. It is just much more costly and requires the knowledge that you live in an oppressive regime and access to information in order to break it.
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
The loss of domain fronting as a viable strategy means that it will be possible to censor Signal in areas where the service was previously working.
It's a warning to not break terms of service. The strategy still works, but it's against TOS of most hosts so it was never really viable. Time to look for another option then, like any other technical challenge. I support Signal's work here but unfortunately we can't just enlist every other business to help (otherwise censorship wouldn't be much of a problem in the first place).
> "unfortunately we can't just enlist every other business to help"
But we should! Telex[1] and other solutions based on collateral freedom[2] have huge potential to disrupt censorship from the outside.
[1] https://telex.cc
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#170This is nothing to do with censorship. AWS has many clients and does not want its network to be blocked because of a single customer. Tough for Signal but that's how it is when dealing with businesses (especially one that so many others rely on). The same thing just happened with Telegram in Russia which explains the preemptive messages: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/04/in-ef...
Capitulating to foreign censors for business reasons has something to do with censorship.
Amazon has a ton of customers, at least a few of which like https://preemptivelove.org/ are also doing good things in these countries. It's not just Amazon that suffers, but Amazon's customers and everyone else downstream.