“Signal is being blocked in Venezuela and Russia. The app is a popular choice for encrypted messaging and people trying to avoid government censorship, and the blocks appear to be part of a crackdown on internal dissent in both countries…”
could matrix.org be as easily blocked, since it’s decentralized I’m wondering?
At least it means that Signal is working as intended if they are blocking it, I guess that they don’t have back doors.
Being decentralized prevents DNS or IP blocks but not blocks through DPI.
Signal has an option to masquerade it’s traffic as regular HTTPS, I don’t know if Matrix can do such a thing.
I can answer this! All matrix calls are over https APIs. Ports and addresses are stored in a text file on the base domain or in DNS txt entry.
Thanks, nice to have someone knowledgeable.
Would you say matrix is censorship resistant? I’ve very limited knowledge of it but given what you said I imagine that if I was trying to block matrix I would just need to query the url of the text file and check the DNS text entry, if either exist just add the domain to the blocklist.
Matrix is in fact decentralized but in reality it is not so much, I don’t know the number exactly but the majority of users use the matrix.org server
could matrix.org be as easily blocked, since it’s decentralized I’m wondering?>
Or SimpleX?
To be devils advocate in a sense, this may mean that it doesn’t have any backdoors that Russia or Venezuela can use, but the NSA or something still could have one of their own.
Matrix doesn’t have encryption as the default
Also Signal doesn’t have any backdoors. I can say that with high certainty as it has been audited more than any other messager.
It doesn’t matter if it is a business entity operating under a government then you can never really know because gag orders. Centralized servers can be blocked. Telegram and Signal apps could have a back door. This is why open stack is important. And not just the code. Also encryption is default for p2p one on one conversations. It’s not in channels by default because it can complicate public use.
