Is this something that CloudFlare could help with? They tend to have an idealistic bend, and they serve content for enough sites that they could conceivably disguise traffic in the crowd for altruistic purposes. I could be misunderstanding the mechanism in question, though.
Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
271–280 of 519 posts
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, free countries (or those who consider themselves as such) should make it fully illegal for private companies to aid in any kind of censorship in behalf of oppressive countries. But what we see in reality is the opposite, all companies trying to make it as cheap and as simple as possible to censor anything every government dislikes; meaning the liberal fantasy of allowing every private company to do as it ple…
> the liberal fantasy of allowing every private company to do as it pleases How is that a liberal fantasy? I thought the standard liberal belief is in heavy regulation of business? Or do you mean "liberal" in the general "lots of liberty" sense and not "in the liberal political camp"?
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Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#273They're spoofing identity of non-consenting parties. The cause is noble, but it isn't what the headline would imply. Amazon isn't saying "You can't host encrypted services on our platform", they are saying "You can't use TLS and load balancing hacks to pretend to be us in oppresive countries". And >The idea behind domain fronting was that to block a single site, you’d have to block the rest of the internet as well. I…
But effectively that is the case. If major providers like AWS and Google ban domain fronting, it is effectively dead - nobody needs domain fronting when you have three domains, three domains can be banned the same way as one. AWS and Google could throw their considerable weight on the side of anti-censorship and openness. They instead chose - as businesses frequently do - to play along with oppressive dictatorial reg…
AWS and Google are companies. It's not their job to push for societal changes really. In fact, I hope they don't push for those. I'd prefer them to steer clear of pushing for any higher objectives, that's best left to governments and lawmakers.
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#274Amazon isn't targeting Signal, this is their new policy based on (mostly) abusers (though I doubt Signal was intentionally trying to abuse the system for malicious reasons). Hopefully this doesn't get spun out of control, but the title of this post seems to be spinning it.
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You can't use TLS and load balancing hacks to pretend to be us in oppresive countries They're not pretending to be Amazon, they're pretending to initiate a connection to an Amazon domain. The "conversation" goes like so: Clear text request: "Hello, I would like to speak TLS with souq.com" Clear text response: "Why yes, let us do that with these parameters" Encrypted request: "Please give me the page for signal.org/a…
This important description of the actual implementation of domain fronting — namely that it’s implemented on the client side, and only as a cover for initializing the TLS channel — I think is very important and unfortunately missing from TFA. There is nothing on the server side which is masquerading as Amazon or Google. There is no impersonation or spoofing whatsoever. This is akin to making a DNS lookup for a differ…
Since Signal is open source, presumably anybody can fork it with a version that implements domain fronting.
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the liberal fantasy of allowing every private company to do as it pleases How is that a liberal fantasy? I thought the standard liberal belief is in heavy regulation of business? Or do you mean "liberal" in the general "lots of liberty" sense and not "in the liberal political camp"?
Why do you say that the standard liberal belief is in heavy regulation of business? Liberal economics emphasize minimal regulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism
I was thinking more along the lines of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_Unite...
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#277Based on the story Amazon has no problem with you circumventing censorship, it is not the subject of the topic at all, do not lie please because you only hurt your own reputation and trustfulness - which in a highly sensitive area that you are working in is paramount!
The technique that Signal was using to circumvent censorship (domain fronting) will no longer be possible on Amazon: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/enhanced-domain-protec...
This is not waht's in the title of the article!
The title says the account is threatened to be closed on the grounds of circumventing censorship!
Big fat lie!
The account suspension threat is based on using something that is not permitted! Knowingly not permitted, illegitimate use!
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, free countries (or those who consider themselves as such) should make it fully illegal for private companies to aid in any kind of censorship in behalf of oppressive countries. But what we see in reality is the opposite, all companies trying to make it as cheap and as simple as possible to censor anything every government dislikes; meaning the liberal fantasy of allowing every private company to do as it ple…
> the liberal fantasy of allowing every private company to do as it pleases How is that a liberal fantasy? I thought the standard liberal belief is in heavy regulation of business? Or do you mean "liberal" in the general "lots of liberty" sense and not "in the liberal political camp"?
A liberal fantasy isn't heavy regulation of business, it's regulations to prevent/punish corporate robbers from exploiting the public. It's only a fantasy because corporations are buying politicians to let them further chain the populace and siphon their money in as many ways as they can get away with (and no, just not buying their product is often not a good enough solution or is hardly even a choice, like private prisons or the electrical grid).
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
The beauty of this is they are not doing anything on the server side to impersonate or spoof Amazon.
Right, it’s the _client_ side that’s tricking Amazon’s servers. It seems to me Amazon should just close their loophole rather than threaten to kick signal out of the server side.
According to the article, that's exactly what they're doing.
Re: Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I realized I glossed over the fact that this would put other AWS/GAE customers's money at risk too. This complicates matters somewhat, and some (I believe a negligible number of) customers might switch to an unblocked competitor. Personally this weakens my view a little, but is not enough to change it substantially.
The ethical choice is for AWS and Google to collude and both allow signal to continue to using domain fronting.
Russia had no problem whatsoever blocking both of them when blocking Tether a couple weeks ago.