Ask HN: Secure Chat with Someone in China? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Secure Chat with Someone in China?

I'm in Europe. They've suggested WeChat but I'm concerned about censorship/monitoring.

Looking for options with text chat and video/audio calls. Ideally with minimal technical setup required at their end.

I looked into setting up a Matrix instance and giving them a link to a self-hosted version of the Element web client but it doesn't look like that would work [0].

Not sure yet if a VPN is an option for them (I don't know if I'd be suggesting something that they'd feel uncomfortable with).

What are my options?

If WeChat is the only route, any advice on how to minimise risk when using it?

(Also curious to hear from anyone from China about your experiences with messaging and censorship)

[0] there are reports from some that this doesn't work in China due to the element client still needing to talk to matrix.org which is blocked.

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Sorry, i'm chiming in a few days late @throwaway09380 ...but my buddy in China would always tell me how people in China are quite comfortable leveraging VPNs. They're used to the blocks to many services so folks have skills trying VPNs. Also as mentioned by @Canada, maybe try tailscale. I don't have experience myself, but have heard great things about tailscale!

That being said, separate of the vpn approach, i would encourage you to give matrix a try. And, if its true that the Element client gets blocked, there are plenty of other decent clients. True, that none of the other clients are as feature-riuch as Element currently...but for the basics, the other clients might be ok enough. I like SchildiChat and Fluffychat myself, but I've heard good buzz around Cinny. Here's a list of clients for web, desktop, mobile, etc.: https://matrix.org/clients/

Oh, and if Element is in fact getting blocked, and it has to do with some connections to matrix.org...then self-hosting a matrix homeserver, but using a different client (not Element), should most assuredly circumvent that issue...though i remain unconvinced that this is a factual issue. Good luck!

You actually could setup your own matrix server and have them connect to that. Should be fine, as long as this person is not in some part of China where freedoms are extra restricted.

You could probably also get them to join tailscale. It's a VPN technically but I doubt it's blocked since it's not marketed as a mass market service.

Edit: you could also setup a web chat that's outside of China, like one of those customer support chat widgets. It won't be e2e, but the TLS connection should protect against China's traffic inspection while also being incoquious.

Whatever you say on Wechat is logged forever for sure, so you might want to put it like "hey try my chat thing out" or "dave doesnt have wechat try this thing" so you're not asking them to evade big brother on the record.

Thanks for the ideas!

you might be able to make session[0] work for texting, you could also do chats over irc in an ubuntu server not sure how secure that would be.

If you're going to use WeChat treat it as its been completely compromised because it is

[0]: https://getsession.org/

Thanks! I haven't come across Session before...

Signal?

Thanks, I think Signal is blocked unfortunately

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