Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Signal has been blocked by Venezuela and Russia (www.theverge.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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"Signal is being blocked in Venezuela and Russia. The app is a popular choice for encrypted messaging and people trying to avoid government censorship, and the blocks appear to be part of a crackdown on internal dissent in both countries..."

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 3 months ago (25 children)

could matrix.org be as easily blocked, since it's decentralized I'm wondering?

At least it means that Signal is working as intended if they are blocking it, I guess that they don't have back doors.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Being decentralized prevents DNS or IP blocks but not blocks through DPI.

Signal has an option to masquerade it's traffic as regular HTTPS, I don't know if Matrix can do such a thing.

https://x.com/signalapp/status/1821979304626155930

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I can answer this! All matrix calls are over https APIs. Ports and addresses are stored in a text file on the base domain or in DNS txt entry.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Thanks, nice to have someone knowledgeable.

Would you say matrix is censorship resistant? I've very limited knowledge of it but given what you said I imagine that if I was trying to block matrix I would just need to query the url of the text file and check the DNS text entry, if either exist just add the domain to the blocklist.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I was trying to block matrix I would just need to query the url of the text file

Ok this raises a question for me. How do you find a url like this which wouldn't be like, "linked on their site" or something? I know it must be possible to like dump a URL list for a site to a textfile, I'm just wondering how.

Like say I want to find all the super secret pages on www.subgenius.com, they link some but say www.subgenius.com/pam1/pamphlet.html wasn't directly linked (it is, but pretend lol) but could be accessed by the URL, how would I find that URL? Can you just run like someprogram -a www.subgenius.com -o subgenius.txt because that would be cool.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Maybe I've misunderstood how it works. I thought that when connecting to a matrix instance you would point to the domain name and the text file would be on a standard location (as with /robots.txt or all the files in /.well-known/) so it would be easily discoverable. In fact I just checked and matrix does use /.well-known/ so one should be able to identify matrix servers by querying these URLs. Unless their is a way to use a non-standard location, but that would require further configuration on the client I guess.

And just to answer your question, the only way to find some hidden file would be to brute force. This could obviously be extremely time consuming if the URL is long and random enough, especially if you add rate limiting (this last thing could be circumvented by using multiple IPs to scan, which would be easy for a state actor).

Edit: I've just realized I wasn't answering to the same person, the first part of the message was more for @[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah the main thing is that the ports and addresses can change and it's nbd. From a firewall perspective, it's impossible to block them all. Especially when the clients are doing mundane https requests. Even if the server goes down or partial connectivity, the channel can still be used.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

But this seems easy to automatically block, no? If a client is querying an unknown domain check for some Matrix related data in /.well-known/ and add it to the block list if there is. And since the servers are publicly advertising the port used you just need to periodically check the list of known matrix domains you are creating in the first step.

Russia is already doing DPI and blocking ESNI so that seems easy. A more widespread usage of ECH would help everyone, as is Signal advocating, but that's not the case yet.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Ah maybe I've misunderstood then, lol. I didn't know any of that. Oh well!

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