On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 8:03 PM, Jason Hellenthal <jhellenthal@dataix.net> wrote:
Simply put… if the data that is hosted on the sites aforementioned then cough up the damn space and host it. Data space is cheap as hell these days, parse it and get the hell on with it already.
*Disclaimer* not meant to single out any one party in this conversation but the whole subject all together. Need someone to help mirror the data ? I may or may not be able to assist with that. Provide the space to upload it to and the direction to the data you want. But beyond all that. This subject is plainly just off topic.
Jason, understood. I clearly should have updated the subject line of the thread, as you're not the first to continue to respond to the subject line, instead of what I've been recently saying. :) My most recent reply was about some operational aspects of country-wide Signal blocking, not the OP topic. I would almost consider updating the subject accordingly ... but at this point, it's clear that transcendence of the amygdala will continue to elude us, and this thread would apparently rather die than suffer my attempts to beat it into a plowshare. :) Royce
On Dec 21, 2016, at 22:16, Royce Williams <royce@techsolvency.com> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 7:08 AM, Royce Williams <royce@techsolvency.com> wrote:
[snip]
IMO, *operational, politics-free* discussion of items like these would also be on topic for NANOG:
- Some *operational* workarounds for country-wide blocking of Facebook, Whatsapp, and Twitter [1], or Signal [2]
[snip]
2. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/12/20/world/middleeast/ap-ml-egypt-app-...
Steering things back towards the operational, the makers of Signal announced today [1] an update to Signal with a workaround for the blocking that I noted earlier. Support in iOS is still in beta.
The technique (which was new to me) is called 'domain fronting' [2]. It works by distributing TLS-based components among domains for which blocking would cause wide-sweeping collateral damage if blocked (such as Google, Amazon S3, Akamai, etc.), making blocking less attractive. Since it's TLS, the Signal connections cannot be differentiated from other services in those domains.
Signal's implementation of domain fronting is currently limited to countries where the blocking has been observed, but their post says that they're ramping up to make it available more broadly, and to automatically enable the feature when non-local phone numbers travel into areas subject to blocking.
The cited domain-fronting paper [2] was co-authored by David Fifield, who has worked on nmap and Tor.
Royce
1. https://whispersystems.org/blog/doodles-stickers-censorship/ 2. http://www.icir.org/vern/papers/meek-PETS-2015.pdf