“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…”
So signel proxy for the win?
they figured it out that it’s CIA :)
Would peer to peer apps be resistant to this sort of thing?
It depends. Somehow it has to discover the peers. Other than that, they could block traffic between residential IP addresses and there goes large part of the P2P network
Yes, but you’ll have to install them from sources other than what governments deem official. Like F-droid.
Now, if they block p2p traffic that’s a different story
matrix stays winning
Matrix isn’t secure depending on how you use it. It also doesn’t protect individual identities terribly well.
Simplex Chat would be the better option however the main Simplex Chat server and matrix server could end up blocked as well.
Matrix is entirely self-hostable, and you can turn off both federation, and the requirements for any linkable identifiers.
Signal by contrast requires your phone number, isn’t self-hostable, and is based in a five-eyes country.
Matrix doesn’t protect metadata, which is arguably just as (if not more) important than message data. Signal by contrast does protect metadata and proper implements Perfect Forward Secrecy for all chats. I do think Signal’s centralized design and phone number requirements problematic, but Signal still has many merits. Such as its massive user base for a AGPL-only project.
The overwhelming majority of users are on the main servers. It also impacts self hosted Matrix servers that use the matrox.org identity server.
Couldn’t they block them too? Monitor the domains people connect to, check if it’s a Matrix server and block it if it is.
Honestly I would’ve expected it to be blocked much earlier
