Signal president Meredith Whittaker is prepared to withdraw the privacy-focused messaging app from Australia — saying she hopes it doesn’t become a “gangrenous foot” by poisoning its entire platform by forcing it to hand over its users’ encrypted data to authorities.
Ms Whittaker says Signal would take the “drastic step” of leaving any market where a government compelled it to create a “backdoor” to access its data, saying it would create a vulnerability that hackers and authoritative regimes could exploit, undermining Signals’ “reason for existing”.
Pressure has been mounting on Signal and other secure messaging platforms. ASIO director general Mike Burgess has urged tech companies to unlock encrypted messages to assist terrorism and national security investigations, saying offshore extremists use such platforms to communicate.
I’ve been using Signal for almost a decade. If Australia tries to force their hand, I don’t know what alternatives I’ll have to use.
Signal?
Just download the .apk directly from the signal website.
Or from the github repo
Or download it through f-droid
Or install Obtainium
There are a number of good alternatives. Signal wins because it’s well known, easy to use and install. Governments are targetting private communications, not a specific app so their entire class is under threat and alternatives that can be backdoored will be.
It’s all very short sighted. If you really want to stop private communications you have to outlaw all people with technical knowledge and access to general purpose computers. I can cobble something together that is secure enough for a criminal or terrorist to communicate with freely available software but it won’t be full featured or nice to use.
Taken to the extreme this thinking ends with sending all the people with glasses to “work” some fields in the country because intellectuals challenge the security of the regime. That makes no fucking sense in a liberal democracy. So why even start down this path. Get a warrant and surveill people at the end points. It’s the only acceptable solution.
Threema is a good option. Not an easy option, but a good one. It uses the Signal protocol, but your private key stays on your device, and you manaage which users you trust to save their public key for communicating with them yourself, including giving three levels of verification for (1) if it’s a random person and you have no way of verifying who they are, (2) if it’s a person whose ID matches someone in your address book, and (3) if it’s someone you’ve met in person and scanned a verifying QR code.
Is it available for both smartphone ecosystems?
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/threema-the-secure-messenger/id578665578
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.threema.app
Turn on your vpn or buy server space and routing all traffic through that’s my plan b here.
So you can talk to… yourself?
I’m using signal right now for a family group, so complex solutions won’t work
A VPN should have been my first thought. Rookie error on my part.
As someone who has toyed with using one to get around my state’s porn ban a little, sometimes it just routes me other states with porn bans. So it’s not necessarily a magic fix. It’s better than nothing but if everyone starts banning something you will have trouble.
Any good VPN will let you choose the jurisdiction of the endpoint.
Yes, but typically not for free.
It’s just a separate part of your ISP costs.
Will Signal block Australian IP addresses, or nix accounts that have a +61 phone number? I’d assume the former but if Signal and other social media platforms go for the latter it will be painful for Australian netizens.
I’m not au fait with this but can you use a raspberry pi for a makeshift vpn or something?
Seems like a thing the tech savvy people do
The raspi still needs to be out of the country for it to work how you want it to. If you have the raspi in the same area then the data is still vulnerable. They may block vpn providers, but they just can’t block wireshark connecting to a off shore server because they would shutdown alot of methods, buissnesses use to transfer data. Well they could but it be some next level stupid.
Ah that’s a shame. I guess it could still be used as an adblocker. Time to go research VPNs
You can but it’s unnecessary. For most people just configuring each device to use a vpn is the path of least resistance.
I’ve just seen a comment about the UK floating vpn bans and am considering the possibility in Australia so I’m probably commenting in the wrong thread.
The UK needs to ban VPNs. To, uh, protect the children.
The problem is everyone you chat with would also have to do this… unless you’re talking with people outside of Australia or can convince everyone else to also get a VPN.
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as with Signal, is not really about what you’ll use, but what alternative gains traction and you can persuade your contacts to use. I hope one of the decentralised alternatives is able to rise to mainstream status.
Persuading enough people I know to use Signal was hard enough already. I only got lucky because I already had some other friends who were already on the platform. It’s much easier to persuade people if you tell them other people are already using it. I just get frustrated that people are too lazy to tap a couple of buttons on their phone to download an app.
One of my friends is just so opposed to using anything else other than Meta Messenger and SMS. He says he doesn’t want app bloat. I get it, but I’d also like to not have corporations spying on our chats. 🙄
App bloat lol. Meta apps are some of the most bloated and resource hungry apps out there.
I use SimpleX.
I had it for a while. Hard to convince people to use it when it has probably less than 10,000 users.
VPN, with an endpoint in a nation where Signal isn’t particularly popular, so nobody thinks to fuck with it.