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Amazon Tells Signal's Creators To Stop Using Anti-Censorship Tool (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The team behind secure messaging app Signal says Amazon has threatened to kick the app off its CloudFront web service unless Signal drops the anti-censorship practice known as domain-fronting. Google recently banned the practice, which lets developers disguise web traffic to look like it's coming from a different source, allowing apps like Signal to evade country-level bans. As a result, Signal moved from Google to the Amazon-owned Souq content delivery network. But Amazon implemented its own ban on Friday. In an email that Moxie Marlinspike -- founder of Signal developer Open Whisper Systems -- posted today, Amazon orders the organization to immediately stop using domain-fronting or find another web services provider. Signal used the system to provide service in Egypt, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where it's officially banned. It got around filters by making traffic appear to come from a huge platform, since countries weren't willing to ban the entirety of a site like Google to shut down Signal. "The idea behind domain fronting was that to block a single site, you'd have to block the rest of the internet as well. In the end, the rest of the internet didn't like that plan," Marlinspike writes. "We are considering ideas for a more robust system, but these ecosystem changes have happened very suddenly. [...] In the meantime, the censors in these countries will have (at least temporarily) achieved their goals. Sadly, they didn't have to do anything but wait."
This just in: fascist corporate America doesn’t give a shit about protecting your rights if it doesn’t have a way to monetize that.
Just call it what it is, spoofing.
Marlinspike writes. "We are considering ideas for a more robust system, but these ecosystem changes have happened very suddenly. [...]
While you consider and implement these "ideas for a more robust system", move to azure to buy yourselves more time.
AFAIK, Azure still supports domain fronting. Granted, is a little different than Google's and Amazon's (in that both the fronted domain and the final destination have to be azure hosted), but still, is better than the alternatie of having your app censored while a new solution arrives, which can take, weeks, months or even years...
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Nice application you have there, would be a shame if someone were to pull it offline.
It's simple, company (Amazon, Google) are making billions in pure profit. Locals want a piece of it. Companies are paying little to no taxes.
Said this before, it started with TPB, Wikileaks, etc. and I'm going to laugh all the way to the bank as people realize how fucked they've become by depending on these companies to the point you've outsourced everything. What exactly did you expect to happen.
If they gave two shits about you or me, they would put as much effort into making a stink about this as they do bashing Trump.
...the actual reason for the changes has to do with another country telling Amazon and Google to quit enabling Signal, or else?
Finding God in a Dog
Russia doesn't seem to have a problem with blocking Google, Youtube and Amazon and even their own propaganda domains in it's ham-fisted censorship attempt to shut down Telegram.
Before they follow Russia's lead and just outright ban Amazon and Google.
Note to posters: You don't have to submit everything. Sometimes shutting up is an option too.
So we heard about *one* legitimate noble use of domain fronting.
Amazon and Google are banning probably to improve their tracking and their own bottom line. Fine.
Now are there illegitimate uses for domain fronting? Is it used by scammers? Is it used by malware hawkers? Can we have some balance in reporting and mention the dark underbelly of domain fronting? Or has slash dot is PR fronting for some scammers and spammers?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How many thousands of political dissidents have Google and Amazon enabled totalitarian dictatorships to murder?
Fuck Bezos!
Billions in profit
Locals want a piece of it
Firms pay little tax
It's not as though the server is pretending to be Amazon. As far as the legitimate observers (i.e., the server and client) are concerned, the client requests a URL from xyzzy.cloudfront.net, and the xyzzy.cloudfront.net server sends back its response. There's no deception going on at the application layer. Amazon's "branding" is not involved in any way.
The only people who are potentially deceived are people who are sticking their noses where they don't belong.
It was defined by Mussolini but now everything is Fascist.
You are referring to a famous quote that may or may not have been said by Benito. But at best it was just the PR version of fascism.
If you want a short definition, go to a high-quality dictionary:
An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.
The term Fascism was first used of the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime of Mussolini in Italy (1922–43), and the regimes of the Nazis in Germany and Franco in Spain were also Fascist. Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, a contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach.
Oxford Reference: Fascism
If you want a more complete definition, well you are on the internet, ain't nothing stopping you from spending a few minutes to educate yourself.
Err... I live in the You Aye Eee. Signal never worked here and still doesn't. So, no change.
> ... anti-censorship practice ...
How do we get authentication and privacy? Someone suggested every netizen using multiple avatars, each with a trustworthiness rating but corporations hate that idea: They want to sell the data of a real person. With the increased tracking technology and every government outsourcing surveillance tasks to ISPs, there's no ability to be truly anonymous, making the plan worthless.
What is fascism?
That's a highly contested question. Here is my answer:
Fascism was an anti-socialist movement and then what has been called an "extra-ordinary form of the capitalist state" which flourished primarily in interbellum Europe where, as in the prototypical cases of Italy and Germany, there was the wide-spread perception of a real threat of imminent socialist revolution. It is characterised as the movement by copying then extant (extra-parliamentary) socialist forms of organisation (party structure, paramilitary, forms of propaganda etc.) and in government by something not too dissimilar from a Soviet-style dictatorship. Indeed, clearly in the case of Italy (where it originally emerged as a pro-war break-away from the PSI), and arguably Germany (where the pre-Hitler NSDAP espoused some socialistic economic ideas), it had originally emerged from socialism. This relationship can no longer be maintained for fascist organisations such as the Spanish Falangists or the Romanian Legion of the Archangel of St Micheal (Iron Guard), which especially arose from religious groundings.
Superficially it differs from socialism in its adherence to vehement nationalistic and often racist principles,* as opposed to the internationalism of socialism. However, it is radically to be distinguished from socialism is in it's approach to economics where historically it provided the bulwark of protection of the private ownership of industry as opposed to socialist "nationalisation" of the "means of production." Hitler famously protected the large German industrial concerns (realising perhaps on what side his bread was buttered) which remained probably the only institution of German civil society not to be subjected to Gleichschaltung, (as opposed the family, education, the army, the churches etc.). [*While any account of Nazism specifically which failed to account for the genocidal anti-semitism could not be maintained, it remains the anti-socialism which binds 'fascisms' together and accounts for their political success.]
Inasmuch as fascist movements began as nominally anti-capitalist almost all abandoned this position over the course of their maturation. This was in part due to the fact that the ranks of fascist movements were swelled by precisely those who felt most threatened by the inroads being made by socialism (as in the case of the upper strata of the rural population in Italy) and that their votes (esp. in the case of Germany) came largely at the expense of the smaller bürgerliche (business oriented) parties. Thus the two other main founders (beside Mussolini) of Italian fascism, the syndicalist Alceste De Ambris and the futurist Filippo Marinetti quit once they had realised how far to the right the nascent membership had taken their movement, notwithstanding that it was Marinetti who had instigated the violence against the PSI and invented such methods as tying rural socialist officials to telegraph poles and forcing them to drink castor oil, which so attracted said members. Certainly these movements came to be understood at the time as being of the right, and as a matter of practical politics where often in alliance or near alliance with the traditional conservative parties in their respective nations (for which see the troubled relationship between the NSDAP and the DNVP.
If 'fascism' can be used outside the limited historical context (and that is itself disputable) it cannot, I would submit, be accurately used in a situation where there is no realistic threat of socialist takeover, (or at least the perception of such a threat), Thus its contemporary use is by extension or by analogy. Certainly to describe modern politicians, however pro big industry and/or anti-socialist they may be, who can be voted out of office, as "fascists," is to misunderstand the 'extra-ordinary form of the capitalist state' (to use the Marxists' own termino
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I am not advertising and selling a "cloud" service to other people to pay me to run their communications through my computers. Google and Amazon are making money off this. And now they are being picky about who does what with that service.
Censorship ungood, Malware double plus ungood
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/cloud/amazon-follows-google-in-banning-domain-fronting/
Yes I do ... I runa TOR relay torproject.org
I notice that you only mention "relay" and not entrance or exit node. So brave.
[Spy-funded privacy tools (like Signal and Tor) are not going to protect us from President Trump | Surveillance Valley — Yasha Levine](https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/government-backed-privacy-tools-are-not-going-to-protect-us-from-president-trump)