Hacker News Reader

Thanks. So, according to WaPo, Telegram uses something akin to domain fronting [0]. Then again, VPNs tunnel encrypted traffic (Tor esp makes it difficult to trace source and destination), how were WhatsApp and other apps not unblocked?

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/def-con-new-tool-brings-back-d...

View on HN

Am not well informed on these topics, but I think they were shut down. So Whatsapp, facebook, etc maybe refused traffic from Belarus numbers to comply with government orders?

Or maybe they just don't accept TOR traffic for security purposes

Yeah, that's likely, thanks.

I stumbled upon another article which confirmed VPNs (like Psiphon and Lantern) effectively bypass Chinese and Iranian censorship, whilst Telegram (as a standalone app) can't [0]. So, by extension, other apps like WhatsApp should have worked too with VPNs unless of course WhatsApp (and others) disallow VPN traffic.

Among other things, it looks like telegram, on its own (without VPNs) was able to evade the Russian censorship apparatus owing to sheer number of Russian volunteers running proxy servers to relay telegram traffic [1].

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/22/telegram-anti-censorship-c...

[1] https://t.me/durov/77

fwiw ,except for election day, viber has been up continuously--used it every day to communicate with family

Reply on news.ycombinator.com