Signal: refuses federation, refuses sign up without phone numbers
Iran: blocks internet usage of signals, and blocks sms account verification
China: Does the same
Signal: surprised pikachu face (pika pika)
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2021
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US will also take Signal down in a second if they start seeing it as a threat. Centralized model is fundamentally fragile in this regard.
I don't think that they are surprised. Also: their model worked quite well until recently
Because until recently they didn't achieve mass adoption.
I bet many more countries will fellow suit (maybe Brazil, Turkey, the middle east, some African countries, Russia, .... ) or try and throttle connection to push people to give-up!
I mean that would obviously be bad if more countries did that, but that's not signals fault btw
Not their fault, they can nevertheless make it sensorship resistant if they:
1 - stopped working on gimmicks and started rolling out usernames
2- Integrated a tor service for use when needed, or just route requests through Tor while Orbot takes care of the rest.
Turkey doesn't really care about this stuff. Even if they did it wouldn't matter as even the shittiest VPN on the market can circumvent their ban.
What do you mean Turkey doesn't care? Are we talking about the same Nation State that censors much of the Internet (including blocking access to Wikipedia), imprisons and/or executes journalists, mayors, union members, school/university teachers and ethnic minorities?
Of course they care about this stuff because Turkey is, like many other countries (including France), back on a path to national imperialism. They are rewriting history (omitting genocides) in order to promote turkish nationalism and expansion, and aggressively promoting military interventions to overthrow elected representatives in some parts of Turkey, as well as in kurdish regions in Irak and Syria.
See Censorship in Turkey on Wikipedia for detailed sources on how the government is trying to control the narrative. I'm just sad we don't have such detailed pages for all countries.
Yes. They don't bother censoring stuff like Signal because over here nobody uses them. Even if they blocked it as I said even the shittiest vpn you can find on the Play Store can circumvent their page blocking. It's not like the Great Firefall where you have to jump through numerous hoops to get around it. It is much easier to just keep people ignorant with a non functional education system that teaches nothing and promote blind patriotism by talking about the "good old days" when Turkey was the most powerful state in the world.
From my very limited understanding of the situation there, i believe their strategy is not to try and censor as much as they can, but rather to let people cross lines then imprison them on sight.
I heard stories (can't find link) where apparently political police knew people were using a VPN for quite some time and let them (to map their social network), until they were arrested and charged with the craziest accusations.
To my knowladge no they don't. However for example if you Tweet stuff they don't like for example they will kick your ass into the jail. Limited freedom of speech is pretty bad however Turkey also has more serious problems.
I was surprised that it wasn't blocked earlier.
What isn't blocked there?
XMPP, most Matrix servers, Delta Chat ( it is just email :D ), etc.
I hope it stays that way then. If/when Matrix is more popular, I hope it remains usable.
Lemmy
If China were to block it would you still be able to access it through your own instance?
I assume that they block by domain, so if you start your own instance with a different domain, it should work fine.
Unless they start automatically scanning for Lemmy instances and adding to the block list.
…not yet
Forgive me if this is poorly phrased, I'm very much a noob, but if they wanted to block XMPP, is it possible to identify all traffic to any XMPP server/from any XMPP client?
Yes, with deep packet inspection they can identify when a certain protocol is used and then block that traffic. Works the same way as blocking torrents.
Edit: That is harder though than just blocking a couple of IPs that signal uses.
True, but you can also try set up an xmpp server inside the country and sort of fly under the radar as country internal communication is usually less restricted. Of course hosting inside the country also puts the server in reach of the authorities, so better be careful not to collect any data they could get their hands on that way.
thanks!
np :)
Is there a way to circumvent such a block?
Tor or I2P would be my guess
Edit: for Tor you will need to use meek-azure because it's also blocked. idk about I2P, probably also blocked
That is not entirely correct. It would be trivial to block requests on port 5222/5269, though as you said actually blocking the protocol itself would require deep-packet inspection (because you could run it on port 443 for example).
Then you can of course run on top of Tor/I2P (or equivalent) for federation. It's not exactly game over when a protocol is blocked, but the stakes are high. You'll end up in prison for defying state censorship.
Doesn't that sound familiar?