Encrypted messaging app Signal has stopped working in China and is now only accessible by users of a virtual private network (VPN).
    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
      7·
      4 years ago

      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.

          • southerntofu
            3·
            4 years ago

            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.

              • southerntofu
                2·
                4 years ago

                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.

  • priy
    3·
    4 years ago

    Doesn’t that sound familiar?

    • fidibus@lemmy.161.social
      6·
      4 years ago

      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.

      • poVoq
        51·
        2 years ago

        deleted by creator

      • southerntofu
        2·
        4 years ago

        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.