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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

How flippant.

“Almost everyone in these comments is asking questions of various degrees of pedantry or outright dissing hospitals/insurance/medical bankruptcy/whatever...

Just donate to a charity if you can spare the expense and help some people out.

Action > inaction.”

Healthcare and communication aren’t comparable. But my point is that you can criticise institutions for their (contested) faults.

If you place yourself on the mantle of non-federation, then availability and censorship resistance are your cross to bear, frankly.

The notion that I should help them workaround their architectural failure when it’s been widely criticised (and criticism openly dismissed) multiple times is a little wild.

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Your neighbor asks you to drive them to the hospital. Do you lecture them on the failures of privatized healthcare? No, you defer your opinion to the relevant place and time.

This right now is about people having their access to uncensored communication cut off, and moxie asking people to help out. If you think their architecture is doomed, you're free to codify your opinion somewhere in a pull request or comment under an article about signal's protocol philosophy.

The analogy falls a bit flat because this forum contains, mostly, the arbiter of the root problem- namely that signal is not censorship resistant by itself. And we should criticise them for that because it was a warning delivered in a timely manner and never heeded.

Helping my neighbour in this case means allowing them to use my social insurance. Namely by using xmpp/matrix. It is low/no cost to them (unlike moving countries for socialised medicine.)

> signal is not censorship resistant by itself. And we should criticise them for that because it was a warning delivered in a timely manner and never heeded.

I don’t believe Signal ever claimed to be censorship resistant to begin with. I just looked at their description on the App Store and nothing there mentions bypassing censorship.

Signal in fact did used to be censorship resistant before they were prevented from using domain fronting by third parties outside of their control.

Now the Iranian people need help and Signal has made it extremely easy for anyone who visits sites like this to kick in and provide that help. It’s likely proxies are a stopgap solution but that’s okay. Iranians are having their messages blocked now and Signal has managed to release a working fix rapidly.

You write this as if I contested anything you said. Maybe signal didn't _claim_ to be censorship resistant but it's _essentially_ marketed as such by well meaning people. It's "the secure messenger", what is it secure against if not governments? Your ISP?

Or does security of access not get covered by this definition?

If people had chosen a federated system instead, then instead of _needing_ this very quick solution to be hacked together, the system would have dynamically moved around it.

But, it's a future we'll never know now. Signal has the mindshare (and certainly the favour!) of the people, so the ship has sailed and I'm tilting at windmills.

I think it's ridiculous that we have to patchwork _their_ broken system that _we_ warned them of, but that's the reality and I am not one to put principles before people.

> > signal is not censorship resistant by itself. And we should criticise them for that because it was a warning delivered in a timely manner and never heeded.

> I don’t believe Signal ever claimed to be censorship resistant to begin with. I just looked at their description on the App Store and nothing there mentions bypassing censorship.

Moxie's talk on Signal's centralisation and how (in his view) that makes it better than decentised systems explicitly claims that Signal is better at censorship resistance than "decentralised systems" (his comparison was basically limited to email and the argument was primarily that you cannot move email accounts easily -- in my view that's a pretty colossal strawman of distributed systems, but you can be the judge)[1].

This argument was based on the fact they do domain fronting (whoops) and that they can move their servers and update all clients simultaneously. I think it's more than fair to bring up that this argument is not true in practice and that other decentralised systems (such as Tor) are clearly far more censorship resistant than Signal. That doesn't mean you shouldn't help them solve the immediate problem though.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8&t=1027

It is not. Healthcare and communications are very much comparable if your life and livelihood are on the line. If the downside risk for both is a dead person then they are very much morally equivalent.

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