61–70 of 417 posts
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.
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.
In the long run, starlink will make it even harder for autocrat regimes to censor the internet. Russian authorities already try to ban connections to Starlink.
Damn, I've read the code. This won't work against an active probe. Censors just use signal domains and non-signal domains to test your proxy. If signal domains get passed and non-signal domains got denied, you are fucked. Besides, TLS in TLS is highly identifiable by simple packet length dpi. I'd hope there's better plan.
> Censors just use signal domains and non-signal domains to test your proxy. If the censor already knows about your proxy they would have no reason to test it... The whole point is that there isn't a central list of proxies for them to easily block.
YET. I wonder if someone will find a simple way to map these with shodan.
What is the state of the art on censorship resistance right now? This cat-and-mouse proxy fight never seems to go great for the good guys. My last in-depth reading on it was the excellent 2016 SoK paper “Towards grounding censorship circumvention in empiricism” ( http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2018/cmsc818O/papers/sok-cen... ) The high level takeaway then seemed to be that researchers were not focusing efforts on me…
Tor, Jigsaw's Outline, and V2RayNG are worth keeping tabs on as they're FOSS projects and do much of their development in the open.
Lantern's development whilst it was still open source was fascinating to see as well. Since 2016 (I believe) they stopped doing so out of security concerns: https://twitter.com/adamfisk/status/1316569766832869377
What happens when Iran's government itself runs a bunch of these proxies?
RUN wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.18.0.tar.gz
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-TLS-Proxy/blob/master/ng...
Installing via HTTP, with no verification of installer seems like a reallyyyyy bad idea.
Or they could just let people host their own server instances. Would be considerably more censorship resistant from the start.
You're welcome to either use such a decentralised service or fork signal and add decentralisation / federation. Centralised services get more users by having a lower threshold of adoption.
It's called XMPP. It predates Signal by ~15 years.
I'd heavily advise instead to run as many xmpp servers* as possible, and let people/friends use them.
*not matrix, unless one configures it to forget the data and only act as a message broker, like XMPP. For this specific use, it's better.
I fully expect the US govt to have access to fb/whatsapp data (at least the metadata), but it's a bit surprising to me that Iran would too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
if they block can block tor what makes you think they can't block these proxies? furthermore if you use tor you can use the existing network of bridges/relays as well as their pluggable transports protocol to avoid DPI/traffic analysis.
Iran is already blocking Tor. In general, if Signal provides some central way to use Tor together with Signal, the Iranian government can just run it on their machine, and block every IP address that it tries to connect to. Iran can block these proxies, too, but this way there isn't any centralized listing of proxies. This proxy setup is simple enough that a single person could run a proxy for a few dozen of their fr…