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Comment by kombucha2 | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't they ask people to donate their AWS instances or a portion of their webserver (or domain) resources to running a small outward facing webserver as a dummy, making the domain look like its a real website (eCommerce etc) and then passing Signal data through a Shadowsocks (or something similar) proxy? Couldn't they develop an AMI that they hold the keys to that people could deploy with ease?

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Those who wish to suppress Signal would just play whack-a-mole. They'd login to Signal, find what domains it was connecting to and then block those. To update Signal with new addresses constantly, you'd need a server hosting those updates- which would in turn be blocked immediately.

The idea of using Souq.com or Google.com as the domain name in the TLS header was that even oppressive regimes won't block Google or Souq for their entire country.

oh derrr

>The idea of using Souq.com or Google.com as the domain name in the TLS header was that even oppressive regimes won't block Google or Souq for their entire country.

Which, at least in the case of Russia, seems to be false.

This has been explored by Tor, through a design sometimes called "flash proxy" and "snowflake".

They used websockets and webrtc datachannels so that all you have to do to volunteer yourself as a relay is visit a webpage with JS enabled. The idea is to have many short-lived proxies on residential connections, paired with an announce mechanism.

Amusing idea: use Bitcoin's blockchain as a peer announce mechanism. Does your country want to be involved in cryptocurrencies less than they want to censor?

On second thought, the countries most interested in censoring are probably also the countries most interested in blocking people from using Bitcoin? :)

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