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Signal not in compliance with new rules, say officials
- pkphilip 5y agoThe government of India is turning fully fascist and wants to have tight control over every narrative. Signal shouldn't yield
- jeswin 5y agoThey're going to get banned from the AppStore then. The end result will be Signal being forced underground with far fewer users. There's nothing Signal can do, really. Add: and Signal's centralized server IPs banned. Signal is really weak here; shouldn't have been centralized to begin with.
- Ugohcet 5y agoSignal can pull a Durov and start hopping popular cloud hostings and CDNs, pushing latest server IPs via FCM. This worked for a year in Russia - they banned several large subnets of AWS and DigitalOcean, millions of IPs and smaller subnets, temporarily banned Google, but in the end still gave up after a year.
- bubblethink 5y agoSignal has already tried similar approaches (domain fronting), and had to stop because the cloud providers do not want any of it.
- ajconway 5y agoThe decentralization argument comes up fairly often in similar discussions. Assuming it was Matrix and not Signal, what advantage would there be in the current situation?
- turminal 5y agoIt'd be harder to ban existing installations I suppose.
- tomjen3 5y agoThen people will sideload it. Those who care, anyway, I don't know how many do.
- consumer451 5y ago> Add: and Signal's centralized server IPs banned. Signal is really weak here; shouldn't have been centralized to begin with. Here is Moxie's talk about this very subject, and why he thinks that decentralized products can be much weaker products. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8
- sremani 5y agoIndia has banned gazillion apps - they were mostly of Chinese origin, so no problem, right? Well, sooner or later 'Swadeshi' will come to many of the apps in App Store. Indian had "draconian" terrorist laws under INC, remember TADA ? No one called Indian Government FACIST then.. i wonder why ?
- sremani 5y agoI thought Modi and RSS were already fascists according their detractors but 'turning fully fascist' is a thing for me. Indian government from 1950 to this day has been ham fisted, this won't be the last time.. and this has more or less nothing to do with party in power. All this useless 'fascist' talk is useless talking points and assigned opinions.
- pkphilip 5y ago>Wonder why? Well, clearly you haven't been paying attention to the absolute assault on free speech happening in India and the sheer number of journalists who have been killed in India, the number of people being illegally detained etc. India is now listed as one of the most dangerous places in the world to be journalist - along with countries like Afghanistan, Iraq etc! https://indianexpress.com/article/world/2020-dozens-of-journalists-killed-targeted-attacks-7124984/ https://indianexpress.com/article/world/2020-dozens-of-journ... India also leads the world in Internet shutdowns - with more shutdowns than the rest of the world combined! https://www.accessnow.org/keepiton-report-india-shuts-down-internet-more-than-any-other-nation-on-earth/ https://www.accessnow.org/keepiton-report-india-shuts-down-i... What about the number of people being arrested for just criticizing the Modi govt's criminally pathetic handling of the covid crisis which is estimated to have killed at least a million people? https://indianexpress.com/article/india/anti-pm-posters-arrest-delhi-police-modis-criticism-covid-vaccination-drive-7316779/ https://indianexpress.com/article/india/anti-pm-posters-arre...
- tweaktastic 5y agoThis false fear mongering is something that I really hate. I have been living in India and an ascertain the fact that quality of life has gone up in the past 10 years. People keep talking about Fascist Government and not having freedom to express thrir opinions but whole media is completely filled with nothing but hate for the current Government. People post on Twitter Facebook Instagram left and right against the Government in power and then call them Fascist. What kind of a Fascist Government allows this? How is the freedom of speech violated if you are contact ranting against Government? Also, do your due diligence and read about other journalists who have lost their lives due to unnatural reasons over the past 20 years. And also pay attention to the fact that why only handful of them make the news while others are given no importance. Also, just to give you a reality check, at the ground level the Government's approval rating has gone up specially due to their handling of the pandemic.
- vages 5y ago> “Signal has not complied with the guidelines. Services like iMessage do not fall under the traceability clause since the significant social media intermediaries in the nature of messaging services have to comply,” said an official, requesting anonymity. What does “Services like iMessage do not fall under the traceability clause since the significant social media intermediaries in the nature of messaging services have to comply” mean?
- mananvaghasiya 5y agoIt probably means that usage of iMessage is not significant enough.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tmp538394722 5y agoI would be amazed if less than 5 million people in India used iMessage.
- _wldu 5y agoThey probably have a method to trace message metadata using the application provider's infrastructure. It's sort of like a home phone. Law enforcement officials can contact Verizon to learn who you called and who called you, what time, duration of the call, etc.
- jbluepolarbear 5y agoYou mean with a warrant right?
- pdpi 5y agoHopefully yes, but that's a separate matter. The important part is that it's technically feasible and you can then use whatever legal (or otherwise) mechanisms to get the metadata.
- swiley 5y ago>The new guidelines also mandate companies such as Signal and WhatsApp to share the details of the first originator of a message. Well that seems pretty idiotic. It should be interesting to see how all this works out.
- zentiggr 5y agoIdiotic, yes. Autocratic is just as applicable.
- clipradiowallet 5y agoThis is a quick way to further increase Signal's user base. If someone in India does not know about Signal, this type of "don't use it! it's noncompliant!" government behavior will drive more users to the platform.
- thepete2 5y agoCouldn't the Government ban Signal relatively easily? A simple dns ban should suffice, no?
- viraptor 5y agoSignal responds to dns banning with their own tricks. Previously it was domain fronting https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-on-the-front/ https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-on-the-front/ I'm sure they wouldn't leave India without a similar fight.
- Anunayj 5y agoDNS injection can be relatively easily bypassed by using DNS over HTTPS/TLS. ISPs usually block websites by terminating the connection on seeing a blacklisted SNI which is part of the TLS handshake (So the server can respond with the appropriate TLS certificate). The only way to bypass is either to use domain-fronting (aka using different SNI/Host, not standard-compliant, doesn't work with most CDNs), or use a different protocol. (Not that practical) ECH/eSNI plan [1] to make the SNI encrypted, and therefore uncensorable in future. (The draft is now in it's later stages). Ofcourse this can end up with government potentially blocking all ECH traffic. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-tls-esni https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-tls-esni
- 0x5FC3 5y agoMany have tried Signal in the past few months here in India because of WhatsApp's privacy policy changes which managed to create quite a buzz. None of my friends stuck around though. Everyone is back to WhatsApp.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- walrus01 5y agoIt's well known that the Indian government is no friend of an uncensored Internet. Look at the great many well documented instances of them messing around with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India
- blocked_again 5y agoIndian government is just the reflection of the majority in India. They can do these things because they know that the majority don't care about these issues. Take the same bunch of people in the government and put them in Germany and they would be making pro privacy laws left and right all day.
- alimbada 5y agoA "reflection of the majority in India" assumes that everyone in India votes or can vote which I find to be extremely unlikely given most of the population live in rural areas and are uneducated.
- sp332 5y agoThe voting process in India has excellent coverage of rural areas.
- blocked_again 5y agoYeah. Vox made a very good video about it during the last elections. https://youtube.com/watch?v=RWldvqO4AIY https://youtube.com/watch?v=RWldvqO4AIY
- blocked_again 5y agoIndia's literacy rate is around 70%. So the majority is not uneducated. The voter turnout for 2019 Indian election was 67% compared to 66.7% of 2020 US election. So your rural areas and uneducated theory leads to less votes doesn't hold much essence :)
- bubblethink 5y agoThis is the major downside of centralised app stores. On the plain old internet, nobody had to care about the whims of regressive governments. Worst case, the government would try to block the website and often fail and/or face public backlash. Now, the government can just tell google or apple that they don't like the app, and the problem is solved. This is quite tragic for an app like signal because it really does not deal with the country's currency in any shape nor does it have any presence in the country, but because google/apple have to do business in the country, signal takes the fall.
- swiley 5y agoAnd before you say "just buy a different device" my understanding is that Indian customs have blocked the PinePhone.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoWell, and even if they weren't, it costs a lot of money and means you loose access to your existing apps and ecosystem.
- sudosysgen 5y agoThe pinephone is very cheap, but yes you lose your ecosystem.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoCheap for us or cheap for people in India?
- joshuaissac 5y agoThe cheapest Pinephone ($150) costs about the same as the average smartphone in India.
- 5y ago
- Arnt 5y agoIt sounds as if Signal could comply with this by removing the "forward" button in India, right? Then there is no "first originator" as seen by Signal. There still is, of course. Cut and paste works, and android's share works, but both of those send the message out of Signal (and perhaps back into Signal).
- jl2718 5y agoThey say that honest and nonviolent people have no need for self-keyed cryptography, that using it just enables criminals. This is true, but nobody is self-encrypting to help others to prey upon them. They are doing it to prevent becoming a victim. Guess who the predator is…. The cipherpunk future is fundamentally a dystopia. Trust in authority would be a wonderful thing. I actually thought the authoritarian future would be more subtle and well-tolerated, like “Brave New World”, but it’s shaping up a lot like “1984”, and I can’t understand why a central-authority would self-destruct like that, under no force of occupation.
- egberts1 5y agoOn whitepapes, I surmised that WhatsApp is supposedly meta-connection secured (unless reconstruction is being done by WhatsApp backend). All the while with Signal app, I’m fairly certain that message content is most secured (than Whatsapp) but is operationally resistant to providing meta-connection info. Interestingly enough, I find that Matrix (Element iOS app) to be strongest in both aspect of connection metadata and secured message content.