7 ms·

Almost everyone in these comments is asking questions of various degrees of pedantry or outright dissing signal/moxie/no federation/whatever... Just spin up a

Almost everyone in these comments is asking questions of various degrees of pedantry or outright dissing signal/moxie/no federation/whatever... Just spin up a server if you can spare the expense and help some people out. Action > inaction. edit: you can get the connection details via @appliedlambdas on twitter!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dijit 6y ago
How flippant. “Almost everyone in these comments is asking questions of various degrees of pedantry or outright dissing hospitals/insurance/medical bankruptcy/whatever... Just donate to a charity if you can spare the expense and help some people out. Action > inaction.” Healthcare and communication aren’t comparable. But my point is that you can criticise institutions for their (contested) faults. If you place yourself on the mantle of non-federation, then availability and censorship resistance are your cross to bear, frankly. The notion that I should help them workaround their architectural failure when it’s been widely criticised (and criticism openly dismissed) multiple times is a little wild.
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  It is not. Healthcare and communications are very much comparable if your life and livelihood are on the line. If the downside risk for both is a dead person then they are very much morally equivalent.
- isoprophlex 6y ago
  Your neighbor asks you to drive them to the hospital. Do you lecture them on the failures of privatized healthcare? No, you defer your opinion to the relevant place and time. This right now is about people having their access to uncensored communication cut off, and moxie asking people to help out. If you think their architecture is doomed, you're free to codify your opinion somewhere in a pull request or comment under an article about signal's protocol philosophy.
  - dijit 6y ago
    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 countries for socialised medicine.)
    - 2cb 6y ago
      > 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 using domain fronting by third parties outside of their control. Now the Iranian people need help and Signal has made it extremely easy for anyone who visits sites like this to kick in and provide that help. It’s likely proxies are a stopgap solution but that’s okay. Iranians are having their messages blocked now and Signal has managed to release a working fix rapidly.
      - dijit 6y ago
        You write this as if I contested anything you said. Maybe signal didn't _claim_ to be censorship resistant but it's _essentially_ marketed as such by well meaning people. It's "the secure messenger", what is it secure against if not governments? Your ISP? Or does security of access not get covered by this definition? If people had chosen a federated system instead, then instead of _needing_ this very quick solution to be hacked together, the system would have dynamically moved around it. But, it's a future we'll never know now. Signal has the mindshare (and certainly the favour!) of the people, so the ship has sailed and I'm tilting at windmills. I think it's ridiculous that we have to patchwork _their_ broken system that _we_ warned them of, but that's the reality and I am not one to put principles before people.
      - 6y ago
koheripbal 6y ago
Talk is cheap.
2cb 6y ago
You can literally spin this up on a $5 a month VPS as well, not like you need to break the bank. And with so many TLDs there’s plenty of dirt cheap domains too. I just spun one up in 15 mins and if it gets blocked I’ll happily spin up more.
isoprophlex 6y ago
Considering that there's plenty of people also sharing these on Twitter I've decided to openly share mine as a canary..: https://signal.tube/#instafax.nl https://signal.tube/#instafax.nl
mzs 6y ago
Whoa whoa whoa… there can be legal consequences for spinning-up a proxy in countries sanctioning Iran. This is a case where action can in fact be way worse for someone than inaction. I still can't find any discussion about that and it's worth investigating.
- thefifthsetpin 6y ago
  I imagine that you're right, but it feels like a really weird case to choose to prosecute.
  - stonesweep 6y ago
    During the EFF "run a tor node" challenge a few years back, I learned that many cloud providers (a) hold you responsible for any traffic transgressing your proxy, and (b) generally were OK with running a relay node but not an exit node. Responses varied provider by provider, some have written rules some do not. Point being there are already discussions about the relay topic with cloud providers and it's not a weird edge case to me (and the law in your jurisdiction may have a strong opinion on this), I imagine there are legal things about where you live vs. where the server lives which also matter.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    Sure. But then one day they come and "ask" you to backdoor your employers platform. And when you say "WTF???" they start talking about terrorism charges for the VPS/proxy you ran back in 2021 in violation of Iranian sanctions. Chilling effects are real. Laws they can "choose to prosecute" or not, just means they have more ways to coerce you if they want...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dijit 6y ago

How flippant. “Almost everyone in these comments is asking questions of various degrees of pedantry or outright dissing hospitals/insurance/medical bankruptcy/whatever... Just donate to a charity if you can spare the expense and help some people out. Action > inaction.” Healthcare and communication aren’t comparable. But my point is that you can criticise institutions for their (contested) faults. If you place yourself on the mantle of non-federation, then availability and censorship resistance are your cross to bear, frankly. The notion that I should help them workaround their architectural failure when it’s been widely criticised (and criticism openly dismissed) multiple times is a little wild.

ampdepolymerase 6y ago
It is not. Healthcare and communications are very much comparable if your life and livelihood are on the line. If the downside risk for both is a dead person then they are very much morally equivalent.
isoprophlex 6y ago
Your neighbor asks you to drive them to the hospital. Do you lecture them on the failures of privatized healthcare? No, you defer your opinion to the relevant place and time. This right now is about people having their access to uncensored communication cut off, and moxie asking people to help out. If you think their architecture is doomed, you're free to codify your opinion somewhere in a pull request or comment under an article about signal's protocol philosophy.
- dijit 6y ago
  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 countries for socialised medicine.)
  - 2cb 6y ago
    > 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 using domain fronting by third parties outside of their control. Now the Iranian people need help and Signal has made it extremely easy for anyone who visits sites like this to kick in and provide that help. It’s likely proxies are a stopgap solution but that’s okay. Iranians are having their messages blocked now and Signal has managed to release a working fix rapidly.
    - dijit 6y ago
      You write this as if I contested anything you said. Maybe signal didn't _claim_ to be censorship resistant but it's _essentially_ marketed as such by well meaning people. It's "the secure messenger", what is it secure against if not governments? Your ISP? Or does security of access not get covered by this definition? If people had chosen a federated system instead, then instead of _needing_ this very quick solution to be hacked together, the system would have dynamically moved around it. But, it's a future we'll never know now. Signal has the mindshare (and certainly the favour!) of the people, so the ship has sailed and I'm tilting at windmills. I think it's ridiculous that we have to patchwork _their_ broken system that _we_ warned them of, but that's the reality and I am not one to put principles before people.
    - 6y ago

koheripbal 6y ago

Talk is cheap.

2cb 6y ago

You can literally spin this up on a $5 a month VPS as well, not like you need to break the bank. And with so many TLDs there’s plenty of dirt cheap domains too. I just spun one up in 15 mins and if it gets blocked I’ll happily spin up more.

isoprophlex 6y ago

Considering that there's plenty of people also sharing these on Twitter I've decided to openly share mine as a canary..: https://signal.tube/#instafax.nl https://signal.tube/#instafax.nl

mzs 6y ago

Whoa whoa whoa… there can be legal consequences for spinning-up a proxy in countries sanctioning Iran. This is a case where action can in fact be way worse for someone than inaction. I still can't find any discussion about that and it's worth investigating.

thefifthsetpin 6y ago
I imagine that you're right, but it feels like a really weird case to choose to prosecute.
- stonesweep 6y ago
  During the EFF "run a tor node" challenge a few years back, I learned that many cloud providers (a) hold you responsible for any traffic transgressing your proxy, and (b) generally were OK with running a relay node but not an exit node. Responses varied provider by provider, some have written rules some do not. Point being there are already discussions about the relay topic with cloud providers and it's not a weird edge case to me (and the law in your jurisdiction may have a strong opinion on this), I imagine there are legal things about where you live vs. where the server lives which also matter.
- bigiain 6y ago
  Sure. But then one day they come and "ask" you to backdoor your employers platform. And when you say "WTF???" they start talking about terrorism charges for the VPS/proxy you ran back in 2021 in violation of Iranian sanctions. Chilling effects are real. Laws they can "choose to prosecute" or not, just means they have more ways to coerce you if they want...