Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

signal.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 417 posts

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#291

Post by hayalci »

2cb wrote: post #247
aftbit wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Session has: 1. An associated crypto-currency (not outright bad but weird smell IMO) [1] 2. Abandoned perfect forward secrecy and deniability [2] 3. Never completed an audit (though supposedly one is in progress) [3] There are a million and one encrypted chat programs out there. Why should I use this one? [1]: https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-mobile-wallet [2]: https://getsession.org/session-protocol-technical-informa…

I mentioned it because it has a seamlessly built in onion routing protocol. I read further down the thread that Tor is blocked in Iran, but I’m guessing the same is unlikely to be true of Loki/Oxen simply because it isn’t nearly as well known. The lack of metadata is also quite a unique selling point in my eyes. There’s a million encrypted messengers now sure. How many automatically connect through an onion router wi…

Jami and Tox are completely decentralized messaging systems. They are not directly associated with "blockchain" buzzword as well so they have that going for them, too.

https://jami.net/

https://tox.chat/

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#292

Post by cyphar »

2cb wrote: post #197
dijit wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> > 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.

Moxie's talk on Signal's centralisation and how (in his view) that makes it better than decentised systems explicitly claims that Signal is better at censorship resistance than "decentralised systems" (his comparison was basically limited to email and the argument was primarily that you cannot move email accounts easily -- in my view that's a pretty colossal strawman of distributed systems, but you can be the judge)[1].

This argument was based on the fact they do domain fronting (whoops) and that they can move their servers and update all clients simultaneously. I think it's more than fair to bring up that this argument is not true in practice and that other decentralised systems (such as Tor) are clearly far more censorship resistant than Signal. That doesn't mean you shouldn't help them solve the immediate problem though.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8&t=1027

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#293

Post by mariojv »

hanniabu wrote: post #289
2cb wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true. Reproducible builds for mobile apps would be far superior. You can build Signal from source for Android if you wish, although obviously this is a massive pain to do for each update, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from doing it. On iOS it's a lot more difficult to get the required certificates from Apple but you can run your own build in Xcode and deploy it to your personal device if you ar…

Are there any instructions to build the app yourself for signal?

Yes, they have some docs on GitHub for how to do it: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/wiki/How-to-buil...

You can build the iOS version too for development: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/blob/master/BUILDING...

I haven't done it before but you should even be able to deploy that build to your phone in theory: https://codewithchris.com/deploy-your-app-on-an-iphone/

It's unclear to me if there are any restrictions on iOS that would prevent you from doing that.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#296

Post by Sunspark »

amir734jj wrote: post #267
stunt wrote: post #238

So their government is blocking Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Telegram, Signal, BBC, CNN, Netflix, and probably many other social and media platforms. Meanwhile we are blocking Iranians to access Docker, Slack, Gitlab, Google Code, Github(Github until recently), Paypal, Apple Store, Play Store, AWS, Coursera, Adobe, Nvidia, AVG, Avast, Symantec, McAfee, Matlab!!, Oracle and many more. It should be really fun to use Int…

It is not fun. Trust me. I am an Iranian and I used to sell VPN back in Iran when I was in high school. I had hundreds of users and I was threatened with prosecution and I left the country. Literally everything is blocked except government or university websites. On the positive side, you can Torrent as much as you want or download any music or hack websites and it is completely fine :)

I never see Iranian IPs on torrents. Is that because they are all on VPNs?

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#297

Post by cyphar »

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...

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#298

Post by kovac »

k3j45hkj34hkj wrote: post #157
toyg wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can they break whatsapp encryption They don’t have to, they just need Facebook to cooperate.

I think you mean the phone vendors, as they are the ones holding the unencrypted chat history in the users cloud storage. Facebook themselves do not have access to the chat logs (unless they are compelled to inject keys).

Well, WhatsApp client does have access to the unencrypted chats.

Not saying this happens, one possibility can always be to send encrypted traffic to WhatsApp servers while opening a second unencrypted channel to govt servers if a govt asks for it.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#299

Post by throwaway19937 »

doublestandard2 wrote: post #236

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…

> I would like to see your supportive reaction if an Iranian company offers hosting to Parler. I imagine you would call it foreign intervention!

It's fine with me if an Iranian company offers to host Parler.

Having said that, I'm also in favor of prosecuting US companies that violate any sanctions we have against Iran.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#300

Post by amir734jj »

Sunspark wrote: post #296
amir734jj wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not fun. Trust me. I am an Iranian and I used to sell VPN back in Iran when I was in high school. I had hundreds of users and I was threatened with prosecution and I left the country. Literally everything is blocked except government or university websites. On the positive side, you can Torrent as much as you want or download any music or hack websites and it is completely fine :)

I never see Iranian IPs on torrents. Is that because they are all on VPNs?

I am not sure. I never had any problem downloading Torrent back then without VPN. I have been living in the U.S. for 12+ years. Things may have changed.
Post reply on HN