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.
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
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 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
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.
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.