I sympathize with the developers. Mobile OS push notifications are a huge barrier to the adoption of p2p technology. Also, it's hard to do anything novel in the chat space and get anyone to care because there's a million chat apps.
I don't use it though, since the only notifications I care about on my degoogled lineageos are calls, SMS and XMPP messages. This work just fine by letting the app run in the background and maintain its TCP connection to my server. Interestingly, my XMPP client can both "distribute and receive" unifiedpush notifications.
Unified push is cool, yeah. I think the present reality is that mobile devices have to be one layer removed from a p2p system. They need a relay that is their proxy to an otherwise p2p system. That relay could also provide push notifications.
$ curl briarproject.org
The website has been blocked as per order of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under IT Act, 2000.
I’ve lived in India for the last two years and spent a fair bit of time in India over the past twenty. Until a few months ago, I’m not sure I’d seen any, or maybe one; but for recently this is at least the fifth.
(In such cases, HTTPS connections get aborted early, since the host can’t get a certificate for the domain name. In Firefox, this comes through as a neterror page with code PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR. I have come to presume this means such a block, which I can then verify with curl.)
Perhaps the blocking is done at DNS level? In that case you can set DNS to 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9 or another public DNS on your system or on your router. Or, even, use Adguard Home or Pihole, to have your own actually useful DNS level blocks rather than the government blocks ;-)
It is done at the DNS level, by intercepting DNS queries regardless of destination IP.
DNS over TLS or DNS over HTTPS fix this. Flipping that on out of curiosity, I’m actually mildly surprised to find Cloudflare DoH not blocking it—I expected they’d have to comply with these orders too.
Are there any mesh networking protocols that go the other way with crypto? Personally end-to-end cryptography is just a bothersome bottleneck for communication. I'd much rather have signed messages. That way I can legally use amateur radio bands and way more broadcasting power.
The only major downsides are key distribution and the need to spend precious bits on signatures.
depens on jurisdiction, but e.g. in Poland you can transmit encrypted messages using amateur bands as long as they're within the country (but IIRC it's unclear if messages have to be intended for domestic communication or the message cannot leave the country)
Here in Norway the only times it's ok to encrypt on amateur radio bands is for satellite control and when the mode doesn't support unencrypted signals but people use a default password.
flockofbirbs | a day ago
I sympathize with the developers. Mobile OS push notifications are a huge barrier to the adoption of p2p technology. Also, it's hard to do anything novel in the chat space and get anyone to care because there's a million chat apps.
nicoco | a day ago
I think https://unifiedpush.org/ is a step in the right direction.
I don't use it though, since the only notifications I care about on my degoogled lineageos are calls, SMS and XMPP messages. This work just fine by letting the app run in the background and maintain its TCP connection to my server. Interestingly, my XMPP client can both "distribute and receive" unifiedpush notifications.
toastal | 20 hours ago
But at which point, you could just use XMPP for chat in most instances
flockofbirbs | 18 hours ago
Unified push is cool, yeah. I think the present reality is that mobile devices have to be one layer removed from a p2p system. They need a relay that is their proxy to an otherwise p2p system. That relay could also provide push notifications.
chrismorgan | a day ago
Blocked in India:
I’ve lived in India for the last two years and spent a fair bit of time in India over the past twenty. Until a few months ago, I’m not sure I’d seen any, or maybe one; but for recently this is at least the fifth.
(In such cases, HTTPS connections get aborted early, since the host can’t get a certificate for the domain name. In Firefox, this comes through as a neterror page with code PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR. I have come to presume this means such a block, which I can then verify with
curl.)cuu508 | 12 hours ago
Perhaps the blocking is done at DNS level? In that case you can set DNS to 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9 or another public DNS on your system or on your router. Or, even, use Adguard Home or Pihole, to have your own actually useful DNS level blocks rather than the government blocks ;-)
chrismorgan | 10 hours ago
It is done at the DNS level, by intercepting DNS queries regardless of destination IP.
DNS over TLS or DNS over HTTPS fix this. Flipping that on out of curiosity, I’m actually mildly surprised to find Cloudflare DoH not blocking it—I expected they’d have to comply with these orders too.
JulianSildenLanglo | 7 hours ago
Cloudflare's DNS over HTTPS doesn't comply with norwegian authorities either.
JulianSildenLanglo | a day ago
Are there any mesh networking protocols that go the other way with crypto? Personally end-to-end cryptography is just a bothersome bottleneck for communication. I'd much rather have signed messages. That way I can legally use amateur radio bands and way more broadcasting power.
The only major downsides are key distribution and the need to spend precious bits on signatures.
patryk | a day ago
depens on jurisdiction, but e.g. in Poland you can transmit encrypted messages using amateur bands as long as they're within the country (but IIRC it's unclear if messages have to be intended for domestic communication or the message cannot leave the country)
JulianSildenLanglo | 10 hours ago
Here in Norway the only times it's ok to encrypt on amateur radio bands is for satellite control and when the mode doesn't support unencrypted signals but people use a default password.