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> 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

by 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.
cyphar 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. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8&t=1027

by 2cb 6y ago

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.

cyphar 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. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8&t=1027