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China Blocks WhatsApp (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: China has blocked WhatsApp, security experts confirmed today to The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled). Over the past few months, WhatsApp has experienced brief disruptions to service, with users unable to send video chats or photos. Now, even text messages are completely blocked, according to Nadim Kobeissi, an applied cryptographer at Symbolic Software, a Paris-based research firm that also monitors digital censorship in China. Kobeissi found that China may have recently upgraded its firewall to detect and block the NoiseSocket protocol that WhatsApp uses to send texts, in addition to already blocking the HTTPS/TLS that WhatsApp uses to send photos and videos. He said, "I think it took time for the Chinese firewall to adapt to this new protocol so that it could also target text messages." His company noticed the app disruptions beginning last Wednesday.
ONLY apps can app apps, and LUDDITE China can't figure out how to app AppsApp!
Apps!
We're seeing it now, with China's firewall and the DoJ's increasingly irate court filings against Microsoft and Google. The Internet will have borders, and data will not be able to cross them.
So what can be used instead if you need end to end encryption? Signal might work, but I'd be surprised if it isn't blocked. Tor has a chat client now, but I don't think it works on iOS or Android. Keybase.io has a nice client that might work.
to protect us against hackers and people like Snowden and Wikileaks
There were only two expected outcomes here: either WhatsApp folds and gives China's government backdoor access to their application or they get blocked. The only thing this means is that they have opted for the highroad and got themselves blocked. I would be far more concerned about the applications that China's government acknowledges that they allow.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I block China! So there! :-D
While i think the removal of the repressive Chinese Government from power is the only real solution to all this. One way is to support additional protocols to support libpurple (the library responsible for Pidgin) and the XMPP Application Spectrum 2. This allows Android XMPP Clients to talk XMPP to a jabber instance, and the XMPP host to use libpurple for the other protocol.
But there are no technical solutions around bad governments. The Chinese should push for a Secular Humanist Democratic reform of China.
What is Whatsapp, and who really gives a shit?
Make your network and do not worry about locks. Your internet pager http://helpsetup.ru/internet/b...
Using a unique protocol (noise socket) makes it simple to detect, intercept, and destroy!
Shouldn't "the Internet" defend against this blatant violation its basic principles? In the past, egregious misbehavior was eventually punished with the IDP, Internet Death Penalty: Play nice or be cut off.
...will be blocked at the border ...until we get our own satellite, balloon, and solar-powered-drone internet using hard-to-jam ultra-wide-band communications
(or something along those lines.)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Is that possible without needed a central server for initial connecting?
Soon, only governments will have secrets. I use the plural because one day, China will be a road-map for other countries.
China's 'rulers' are trying to go the same route that Hitler thought would work. The biggest problem with trying to control the masses is how do you keep control once you have it? It's an ultimately un-winnable game that they're playing. Same game as others in this world are going for.
Would you care for a nice game of chess instead?
He has been suppressing all forms of criticism and descent, of which this is just a small part. He is aggressively using technology to control people. And they even recently released a document recently denouncing civil society and democratic values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The US fears them because the US owes China too much money. (Clinton talked about upsetting one's banker. Trump just doesn't know where China is.)
The Australians fear China because China owes Australia too much money. They are by far our largest trading partner.
The Europeans are incapable of any action at all without the US leading the way.
The North Korea crisis (I use the word carefully) is all about China. Yet nobody dares to say so. That could end very badly.
But the real fear is that China now has a large middle class. They cannot go back to the cultural revolution of th 1960s. When their economy stops growing at a fantastic rate (which it must) people will demand reform. Totalitarianism results in incompetence, nepotism and corruption. If Xi et. al. push back, there will eventually be trouble. Big trouble. By which time it will be too late for us to have any influence.
Incidentally, Chinese students are a major Australian export to China. But the Chinese recently warned that those undertaking an Australian education would become "incompatible with Chinese values". Chilling stuff.
I hope someone nukes them back into the stoneage.. they are a huge risk to the rest of the world with their dictator 1984 bs
Everythung they make is legal spyware.
...which will be declared illegal and shot down (or up, out of orbit).
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
IIRC regular folks originally did word-of-mouth marketing for Whatsapp as an SMS-replacer in the third world. Like other proprietary TCP IP services, it can do much more, but I hate the confusion of insituating that web streams and messengers ARE texts and phonecalls. One crucial factor in the confusion is the growing association of accounts with address books and phone numbers (though the system doesn't use phone lines and is a veiled trick to gain marketing data in the guise of simplicity)
Web companies intentionally muddling the waters to sell something as a functional equivalent of a familiar classic tech often contribute to very confused users. Web giants don't usually have to deal with phone or email tech support.
The result is that when something goes wrong, *we* are the ones stuck figuring out how to help friends find missing messages... or explaining in non-technical terms why a [direct] call to someone via their OS's address book did get charged as pricey long distance call by their ISP instead of connecting through the intended TCP Whatsapp or Facebok "call"
These "texts" are not SMS
"Internet-based messaging services" offered by Facebook, Wechat, Whatsapp and other services should legally be prevented from being called "texting". Before shooting me down, consider why technical users today never call Slack messages (or IRC, or ICQ, or AOL chats) "texts." Android 6+ now allow awareness and blocking of attempts by Facebook and the like to provide one-stop-shop communication, but the accumulated damage to the popular understanding of telco communications vs. proprietary smartphone offerings is already extensive, and likely irreversible.
No surprise when something like this comes from China, but here in Croatia our traffic minister wanted to ban the Uber app (because just banning the Uber service isn't enough when you're a clueless luddite moron). He didn't gave any info how he's going to enforce the ban - even if local ISPs were forced to block the app everyone would be able to download it through VPNs.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
I think very few people realize their way of seeing elections isn't the only one.
The Chinese party is just the Chinese way of running elections IMHO. Anyone can enter it then must prove one's capacities, like you must convince too in occident...