I take that as a compelling recommendation for Signal.
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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Agreed. Clearly it must do simply what is said on the tin, otherwise why ban it?
Legitimate countries don't need to ban communications platforms.
Is tiktok ok?
He said "communications platforms" not "misinformation, social engineering, and mass data collection platform masquerading as a social media platform"
you can just say "social media."
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I'd say social media platforms are an entire different beast.
Facebook is not the same as Facebook Messenger for instance.
Does ByteDance publish TikTok’s transmission protocol to demonstrate transparency?
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tiktok is a platform to share information and communicate, yes
which is why the french government banned it in Kanaky ("new caledonia") during the protests there, as it was a tool of communication used by the protesters
I kinda disagree - that's not to say that they don't usually do so for illegitimate reasons (or that these bans are legitimate), but there's plenty of valid reasons why a government would want/need to ban a platform
X, for example, has been giving the UK a whole lot of good reasons why they may wish to consider it (restoring the accounts of people like Tommy Robinson, allowing misinformation, the owner of the platform himself actively spreading that misinformation)
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We should allow the US surveillance giants into all countries, and let US companies control all world social media and communications platforms. Signal too, since it's a US-hosted centralized service that must follow its NSL laws /s
Worth highlighting that Telegram in Russia and WhatsApp in Venezuela - both with vastly larger user bases than Signal - are not blocked...
The session keys for WhatsApp are stored on Meta servers, so the encryption is meaningless. Meta can read everything everyone types. Yet all of the eastern hemisphere seem to worship it like it's pure platinum.
I don't think anyone took those seriously as private messengers. On another note, I think Maduro cracked down on WhatsApp as well, and called Venezuelans to cancel Meta altogether. Or something.
WhatsApp is the most popular messenger in Russia, not Telegram.
That's a glowing recommendation of Signal. And a good reminder to donate. I'm doing it right now.
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Thankfully there are Signal proxies, VPNs and Tor (which can be used on mobile devices through Orbot.
This means it's working.
Client/Server apps will do that in hostile countries, that's why people are moving to decentralized messaging platforms such as Matrix
Matrix has the unfortunate problem right now where all the big clients have matrix.org set as the default homeserver. Yes, it is a decentralized and federated protocol, but I wonder how many users are registered on matrix.org vs other servers.
You can just as easily identify servers of a decentralized platform and block them. The disadvantage of a central service would come into play if say the US were to intervene, though Signal has already said they would move abroad if that was the case. For network level blockage it makes no difference if the service is central or not
It makes a difference in that you have to play perpetual whack-a-mole not only with VPN's but with hosting servers.
That is true for both cases as well. One thign to add though is that signals own cencorship circumvention makes it even better at resisting this kind of blockage then an arbitrary decentralized protocol, though for an objective comparison it would take some research.
I wasn't just talking about blockage but also servers being taken down physically or via ISP. I don't think I'm nearly as well versed in Signal as you are to go into depth of how it circumvents blockage via protocols but I assume they don't decentralize their hosts.
Signal Servers are using AWS and are spread throught the world. The entire protocl is build to remove any need for trust in those servers, so they migth as well be places in the datacenter of the NSA. So in the end it will be the same result. With decentralized protocls like Matrix you may get lucky and not have your small server taken down because it only hosts a few users, but if we are using the number of users as a metric, Signal would fare better against server takedowns, since all users are replicated throght the world, while my matrix server is the only place where my user data is stored. Then again both can deal fairly well against takedown ins single countries.
Glad it at least seems easy to circumvent with a VPN
Their own solution is actually better than a VPN for this use case. It's an encrypted proxy which anyone can download and run, so it's much harder to block.
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Time to run some proxies for these oppressed people.
There are already many signal proxies available, plus an unlimited number of VPNs to choose from (or self-host yourself on a VPS)
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Show me what Stalinism looks like
This is what Stalinism looks like
How is that Stalinist? Censorship isn't some unique rare policy, even 5EYES countries regularly challenge the legality of E2EE.
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Threema still works.
IIRC, Threema's crypto algo is a patchwork cluster of copypasta and prayers.
When choosing a crypto algorithm the answer is almost never "roll your own".
I wonder why these 2 countries specifically.
Some time ago it was reported that Russian Wagner groups have been spotted in Venezuela.
Now these 2 countries have banned Signal.
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