if they block can block tor what makes you think they can't block these proxies? furthermore if you use tor you can use the existing network of bridges/relays as well as their pluggable transports protocol to avoid DPI/traffic analysis.

Iran is already blocking Tor. In general, if Signal provides some central way to use Tor together with Signal, the Iranian government can just run it on their machine, and block every IP address that it tries to connect to.

Iran can block these proxies, too, but this way there isn't any centralized listing of proxies. This proxy setup is simple enough that a single person could run a proxy for a few dozen of their friends, and the Iranian government might just never find out about it.

there are public and private bridges.

If I remember correctly from what my Iranian friends told me not long ago, there are indeed working bridges in Iran.

exactly, this article is exceptionally egregious at estimating state actor's tools agumented by HUMINT capabilities to hunt down anybody trying to subvert their iron curtain.

I fear that some naive Western expat will participate and find themselves in a hostage. Many countries in this don't have any treaties with Western nations, they dont have high regard for human rights either.

Signal is taking a leaf out of Telegram's book here in crowd-sourcing censorship circumvention which has worked so well for Telegram in Russia, especially.

One could use censorship evading VPNs like Tor, Lantern, Shadowsocks, Psiphon in addition to using these proxies. They all have different evasion mechanisms.

The thing that works for user-run proxies is, it is like a hydra, you censor one proxy another crops up.

I'm worried that Iran is less concerned about collateral damage. Russia gave up because successfully banning Telegram would also ban significant parts of the internet that Russian businesses (etc.) depend on, so that was unworkable. I expect that Iran won't care quite as much.

Regardless, I hope this does actually end up working, and allows Iranians to use Signal without a prolonged cat-and-mouse game.

Tor has a very similar proxy setup that can be used to get around blocks like this.

https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en#Pluggab...

Yup. I just tested ~~the fdroid~~ signal (the non-google-play apk from signal's web site) with orbot (a tor VPN for android) and verified it works correctly for text messaging. As you say, using a bridge should make it difficult for iran to block. I wouldn't be surprised though if voice/video was too high latency or doesn't work at all. https://mobile.twitter.com/sporksmith/status/135738175783478...

They can block these proxies. Thats why in the #IRanASignalProxy section they say to share in more discrete ways if you can.

Which to me is bad. They should run a service like Tor does to get private bridges. I don't know anyone in Iran but I have a server I could use for this. However I know zero people in Iran.

So you use the hashtag on a public tweet etc and say DM me for a proxy.

Tor is very easy to block, and relies on very similar proxies to circumvent that.

You probably haven't followed Tor development in the past years. obfs4 and snowflake a really cool circumvention methods that are orders of magnitude harder to detect and block than these "signal" TLS proxies.

The TLS proxy signal just advertised uses plaintext TLS SNI header to determine where to route the packets, which makes it really trivial to detect and/or block. The same cannot be said about tor.

I’m familiar with obfs4 and snowflake.

Signals TLS proxy is naive compared to obfs4, but at it’s core it’s a similar solution.

Iran isn't able to detect bridges using obfs4 with DPI as of now (as far as I know).

So no, it's not 'blocked'. They're just trying. Mostly by blocking bridges they know of.