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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

What does it mean that they aren't banning Signal? I think they banned Telegram in Russia also.

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surreal wrote

it's not widespread used yet?

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

I suppose. It's just weird because if Telegram were banned I'd assume everyone using it would just move to Signal.

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surreal wrote

They will probably do. If the law bans the Telegram app by name, i dont think law makers have any idea how any of this work. I expect new apps coming up with the same codebase and just different names or servers just to bypass the laws. That's until they come up with an all inclusive law prohibiting end to end encrypted comms and such.

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sudo wrote

I assume that's what will happen, and then they'll decide to ban Signal.

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throwaway38yyzew wrote

No, the problem with Signal is that it's actually Google that blocks traffic from Iran, hence the domain fronting that was put up that relied on google.com as a front didn't work in it, all of this because of some fetishist interpretation of US law (necessary “Death to America” vow here),

Direct access to Signal has also been blocked in Iran for the past 3+ years, but it was not possible to use the same domain fronting technique there. In an apparently unique interpretation of US sanction law, Google does not allow any requests from Iran to be processed by Google App Engine. Requests would get past Iranian censors, but then Google themselves would block them.

In early 2018, a number of policy organizations increased pressure on Google to change their position on how they were interpreting US sanction law so that domain fronting would be possible from Iran. Sadly, these lobbying efforts seem to have had the opposite effect. When Google’s leadership became more aware of domain fronting, it generated internal conversations about whether they wanted to put themselves in the situation of providing cover for sites that entire countries wished to block.

A month later, we received 30-day advance notice from Google that they would be making internal changes to stop domain fronting from working entirely.

https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-on-the-front/

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sudo wrote

Huh, interesting. Hopefully they can find another method to circumvent the censorship.

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