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Egypt Has Blocked Encrypted Messaging App Signal (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Egypt has blocked its residents from accessing encrypted messaging app Signal, according to the application's developer. Mada Masr, an Egypt-based media organization, reported yesterday that several users took to Twitter over the weekend to report that they could no longer send or receive messages while on Egyptian IP addresses. Open Whisper Systems, the team behind the app, told a user asking about a situation that everything was working just as intended on their end. Now that the company has confirmed that the country is blocking access to Edward Snowden's preferred messaging app, it has begun working on a way to circumvent the ban. They intend to deploy their solution over the next few weeks.
Apparently Egypt (and the UAE) were just blocking the server. Moxie just released 3.25.2 in the beta channel to circumvent this. These changes in build.gradle show it's quite easy to circumvent such a block:
buildConfigField "String", "TEXTSECURE_URL", "\"https://textsecure-service.whispersystems.org\""
+ buildConfigField "String[]", "CENSORED_COUNTRIES", "{\"+20\", \"+971\"}"
+ buildConfigField "String", "UNCENSORED_FRONTING_HOST", "\"https://www.google.com\""
+ buildConfigField "String", "CENSORED_REFLECTOR", "\"signal-reflector-meek.appspot.com\""
In case those countries banned Signal from Google Play I just uploaded 3.25.2 to apkmirror.com (I don't know when they'll publish it though).
If all else fails, you can still use the fork Silence, which uses tghesms/mms encryption that Signal dropped in 2.7.0. Blocking sms will fuck off all kinds of industrial controllers so that's not really an option.