Any one of these federated servers could use whatever tricks they like to circumvent censorship, and yes they'd risk getting banned themselves if their circumvention measures are violating TOS of where they're hosted, but they wouldn't have to demand special treatment in the light of that, like Moxie Marlinspike did, because it doesn't happen to block the entire Signal network at once.
Their lack of federation is their censorship weak spot. I haven't heard a single reason for holding off federation from Moxie (and the "best" reason I currently can come up with is that he has issues letting go of "his baby", other reasons being more nefarious). There's a lot of strongly principled wording about why Signal should or should not do certain things, because Signal doesn't want to rely on anything but the protocol itself to guarantee its security, privacy and censorship resistance.
But really, what are these principles worth if Signal is in fact reliant on a third party (Amazon) closing their eyes to violation of their own TOS? They shouldn't be, and federation allows for that property.
And to add one more reason, it's not entirely fair to Amazon. By using the load balancing trick, the only thing that Signal risks is getting banned from Amazon, they can rent another server from someone else and set up shop there. However, by allowing Signal to continue to use their load balancing service in this manner, Amazon is risking having their entire service banned by an oppressive regime. It's not really cool of Signal/Moxie to ask Amazon to take this risk for them.
I mean, there's no need to speculate here. There's an entire blog post on signal written about why they chose not to federate just a quick google search for 'signal federation' away, and the reasons, whether you agree with them or not, are pretty solid and sound.
Your argument is that Signal should erase its differences and become like other open source crypto tools. But as you pointed out, the tool you're asking for already exists! If Matrix is already doing it right, then what's the problem? Surely everyone will switch over to the superior infrastructure and not look back.
I have a different explanation: Signal is successful specifically because of controversial decisions like refusing federation, and the reason other tools do not enjoy the same success is because of the usability compromises they have made.
The more interesting question is, how does this influence our engagement with Amazon, as members of the tech community and the business community? From hackers to founders to dev leads to CEOs we're all individuals with some degree of influence. Most of us hopefully value the idea of a free society to a great degree, because without one our industry wouldn't exist.
I have no problem with saying that the business I own will think twice about making further investments in AWS because of this. I'm less likely to recommend AWS to our customers because of it.
Businesses which host hate speech get punished by advertisers who don't want to be associated with that kind of drivel. I'd like to see businesses which enable dictators be punished in a similar way.
By the market and this community. I'd like to see more hackers and founders say hey, this company enables dictators so we are re-evaluating/freezing/reducing our investment in their products. (Pick whatever level presents an acceptable cost to you.)
The good news is that that's a myth, apparently: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
Isn't it begging the question to parent's point?
Slavery?[1] Fine. Assisting with genocide?[2] Ok. Human trafficking. Sure, as long as we’re making money. Now consider the likes of Facebook or Google. If Iran wanted to purge an ethnic minority from their country and offered a government contract to Facebook to help identify said minority, how is it in the interests of Facebook stockholders to prevent genocide in countries ruled by dictatorial regimes?
Finally, if what you say is correct - that in the current system the wealth of the shareholders is what matters most - I think the broader question becomes: “Why should western democracies continue to permit Laisser-faire capitalism if it refuses to impose any ethical or moral boundaries on itself?”
[1] https://www.quora.com/To-what-degree-has-Dubai-been-built-by...
"How is it the interest of Github stockholders to not censor certain projects when China starts DDoSing the whole site?"
or even
"How is it in the interest of Cloudflare to raise the prices for all of its customers, just to protect a site Russia doesn't like?"
It can't all be about money. Companies that think only about money fail in the long term. If you don't believe that, then I urge you to watch this Simon Sinek video:
Google was ballsy to exit from China, but I doubt others are the same.
Wall Street judges a company by how much money it makes. GDP is how countries and govts are judged. The metric is delivering the result.
What does that have to do with other nations and their laws? The censoring issue here is in a foreign state and not caused by capitalism but a lack of it. AWS is not international police so you should focus on government if you want to see political changes.
I'm not saying Amazon is evil or anything, but if a bunch of hugely important customers started getting their traffic blocked by huge geographic segments due to another unrelated customer.... business is business.
This is a real shame and I wish there was a viable option open to Signal, it's an important app that provides a valuable service, but they really should have seen this coming.
Wow. Is this not but a new form of political asylum[1]?
Amazon's general stance seems to be "spoofing is bad and makes the internet less reliable, so we're opposing it even here". It's understandable, but I think also thoroughly unjustified. If the objection is "Signal plans to impersonate us without our permission for a good cause", one obvious response is "so let's give them permission".
(Not coincidentally, this is a reasonable alternative to a lot of corporate heavy-handedness. Fighting trademark erosion by slapping down small businesses falls into much the same category - an alternative to coercing harmless-but-unauthorized users is to authorize them.)
Not always. For example, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prohibits U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials, even if the practice is accepted or prevalent in a foreign nation.[1] Just because another country has a particular policy does not mean we have to allow our companies to play along.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act
Er, no; in every "free" country, trade/export restrictions are still a thing. US corporations can't sell to North Korean citizens, or even Cuban citizens, despite not being in a state of war against either. And "munitions" (e.g. what encryption algorithms used to be) can be traded hardly anywhere. Just call censorship-enabling technologies "munitions" and it neatly solves the problem of who exactly US corporations can give them to.
That regulation is only in place to protect the established players ... and to ensure the CIA decides who gets the weapons.
Nonetheless, among such regulations, designed to make private companies somewhat work for the general public interest, we can include not aiding censorship.
I guess you meant "duty" instead of "right"; and respecting the sovereignty of other nations means they can block any site they like or even internet itself if they desire, but it doesn't mean we have to allow local companies to comply with laws from those countries.
>As you note, private companies are typically free to do as they please in free countries...that's kinda the point.
That's not the point at all; lets put it this way, companies are NOT free to poison the water we drink or even poison the water of other countries drink just because their governments tell them to do so.
This nearly made me cough my lunch over my keyboard.
Countries tend to have the habit of respecting other countries sovereignty right up until they don’t, at which point they will invade and occupy the other. Or carry out a proxy war, etc.
Even that is too generous. Which country of any influence doesn’t at least a few spies getting about doing their spying. Which major players aren’t subverting the course of things in at least a handful of regions at any time.
Except Google isn't in China, and least I heard important events still happen there...the world isn't as FANG centric as western media would want us to believe.
Stands for Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, apparently.
> nearly
So you do use it for search.
And two of these companies are probably hosting some of the websites you visit.
Perhaps some of the sites I visit are hosted on Google, but since I stopped visiting reddit (the awful redesign was the last straw), I see very little traffic hitting AWS or GCP IP ranges. Part of that is probably uBlock Origin doing its thing though!
where did you hear about this? :)
Not sure what you mean, I didn't see Napster fighting for censorship nor Craigslist fighting for FOSTA.
How is that a liberal fantasy? I thought the standard liberal belief is in heavy regulation of business?
Or do you mean "liberal" in the general "lots of liberty" sense and not "in the liberal political camp"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_Unite...
This is a difficult bit. There are many different ideas about conflicting rights. Without going into these ongoing debates it is enough to say that liberalism is a big tent philosophy. It encompasses "left wingers" in one end where the state has many responsibilities to uphold individual liberties. At the other end are libertarians who say there is no need for government intervention for individuals to pursue their own ends. People can argue about rights and still be correct in calling themselves liberals.
It is the dominant overarching ideology in America (the American “founding fathers” were mostly devoted liberals) and Western Europe, and there are many disagreements among different sorts of liberals.
Edit for the downvoters: I'm not saying I agree with how Libertarians are seen, just reporting what I've observed. I tend to lean Libertarian on a lot of issues (freedom of movement, freedom of and from religion, live and let live, the right to be left alone, and so on), while also being a socially progressive liberal.
Terms like "liberal" and "conservative" are virtually meaningless.
That's the entire point. By making it impossible for censors to distinguish Signal traffic from other web traffic going to AWS, domain fronting forces the government censors to either 1) stop censoring, or 2) censor many important websites that people rely upon. The associated economic cost has the tendency to discourage censors, and as shown by Signal, is actually quite an effective deterrent against many oppressive regimes. This concept is known as collateral freedom.[1]
Instead of shutting this down, Amazon could have let Signal continue. In fact, all companies should collaborate to make censorship as expensive as possible. Someone here at HN pointed out that it is very difficult for someone under an oppressive regimes to speak out; this makes it all the more important for those of us who can to assist dissidents and support freedom of expression.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom