Swedish government wants a back door in signal for police and âSĂ€poâ (Swedish federation that checks for spies)
Letâs say that this becomes a law and Signal decides to withdraw from Sweden as they clearly state that they wonât implement a back door; would a citizen within the country still be able to use and access Signals services? Assuming that google play services probably would remove the Signal app within Sweden (which I also donât use)
I just want the government to go f*ck themselves, yâknow?
letâs say that signal is magically blocked in Sweden, can you still use Molly?
https://droidify.eu.org/app/?id=im.molly.app or https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android
No, probably not. They both speak the same protocol and talk to the same servers.
Unless the block was a app store distribution restriction only
It probably is/was/will be just the app store.
Even if itâs not Molly could implement Tor or any sort of bridge to bypass these restrictions (such as Signal themselves)
Yes! Because unlike stock Signal (which, last time I tried, restricts you to their own proxy implementation), you can use whatever Socks proxy you want. Including Tor. Yeah, sure, you could use a VPN with Signal - but for people who want a persistent connection, having a VPN on 24/7 would be inconvenient. Such a frustrating part of the official appâŠ
I think Signal made it so Iranian could use the app when their government blocked it through proxy. https://signal.org/blog/help-iran-reconnect/
Yeah, I know that - I am myself in a situation where we need increasingly obfuscated evasion solutions. However, my issue is not in that it developed such a proxy - but rather, that it doesnât give an option to use a different one. For example, I have my proxy set up - so why does Signal need its own separate proxy rather than using the one everything else already uses? Why canât it use Tor without torifying the whole deviceâs traffic?
Not to mention that dedicated solutions (XRay and such) are focused on censorship evasion while for Signal stealthy proxies are comparatively more of an afterthought. So there is a chance it wouldnât be able to evolve fast enough to keep up with the censors.
P.S. I think in Iran, there was also a bigger issue - the SMS codes for registration just didnât arrive.
It would be very weird if it was - when a âbanâ happens, at least here, they block the website. I doubt Sweden would fight even basic Wireguard/OpenVPN tho, so I donât see it as a big problem. The bigger problem would be carriers denying registration confirmation SMS, which is yet another downside of the phone number requirement.