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.

Comments

Huh

[wanderung]

Apparently you can stop the signal.

Federation

[corychristison]

If Marlinspike would stop being such a prick, and embrace Federation, this issue would be solved so easily.

It is possible for anyone to use the Signal Server and set one up for themselves. Unfortunately, Marlinspike is refusing to Federate and proclaims the centralized approach is much, much better for everyone..

I'm seriously considering forking it and removing the dependence of a telephone number and moving to an e-mail address instead. Having to set up a Twilio account (though I already have one) to send authentication codes via SMS is cumbersome (and gets expensive) and I have no idea how this trend caught on. People looking to use IM don't always want to use their phone number as their account identifier. Not to mention Signal piggybacks incoming message signalling over Google's Cloud Messaging platform.... there are other ways to do this without Google.

Re: Federation

[corychristison]

I understand the case for using phone numbers, but for privacy reasons alone should rule it out for an encrypted, private, secure messenger.

Signal already rules out Spam by using public/private cryptography as a whitelist, essentially. If you don't have a key to communicate with someone, you can't send them anything.

Being able to use an anonymized email address to communicate in a war torn area is a good thing.

Going the email address route would also make it really easy to integrate with other communication services (eg authenticate against an LDAP or IMAP server for a quick, company wide deployment).

E-mail addresses for authentication, plus federation would make it a better alternative to Jabber/XMPP, which does not natively support secure communications. OMEMO is great, but isn't widely supported by servers and clients.

Re:Federation

[grcumb]

Here's a good discussion of his rationale for not federating.

Actually not. The fucking link tag didn't get closed. Here: https://lwn.net/Articles/687294/

Problem solved already with Signal 3.25.2 release

[johanw]

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.