The one thing people miss when they recommend Signal

I keep seeing people tell activists in restrictive countries to just use Signal and they'll be fine. But I've been talking to a contact in Bangladesh who says Signal gets throttled hard there after protests this summer. Encryption doesn't matter if the app can't even send a message. Has anyone else run into a specific country where Signal just doesn't work well?

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jackson.jenny3mo ago

Actually Nancy it's a bit more than just throttling. In Bangladesh they've been known to use deep packet inspection to specifically target Signal's handshake servers, so the app can't even establish a connection during peak hours. Even with a VPN, sometimes the whole auth process times out because the ISP is intentionally dropping those packets. That's different from just a slow pipe, that's active blocking of the protocol itself. Have you heard if Iran is doing the same specific targeting or is it more general network slowdown?

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nancy_davis3mo ago

Wait, they're actually throttling Signal over there? That's wild. I figured encryption would at least let the messages sneak through, but I guess if the whole network is lagging bad enough the app just times out. I had a buddy in Iran say the same thing last year - he could send texts at 3am but during the day it was basically dead. So much for all those "just use Signal" tutorials huh, they forget the ISP can just choke the pipe before the encryption even matters.

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