In Signal for Android’s blog post about their latest update, the headline didn’t really bring much fanfare to an important new thing that they are bringing to their users in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. And for good reason of course. They first talked about stickers and doodles and text for images, but the body of the post is really more about censorship circumvention in the aforementioned countries to stop these states that can’t snoop, from censoring the app altogether.
The makers of Signal became aware of reports that the app, which has become famous for its strong encryption powers, was not functioning properly in Egypt and the UAE because several ISPs, probably at the instigation of the governments, have bee blocking the communication between the Signal service and their website. So they have come up with a workaround where the only chance for the app to be censored is if they block all Internet access in their country.
What they’re using is domain fronting, where they use really popular apps and services like Google, Amazon, etc, to access Signal. In this way, it will be indistinguishable from other uncensored traffic. So if they want to block Signal, then they would have to block the whole Google services for example, and of course in this day and age, that is an absolute no-no. If your phone number sports a country code from either of those two countries, it will look like a normal https request to google.com.
For now it will only be available for Egypt and United Arab Emirates but they’re also working on a beta release, but that’s for the iOS devices for now. Oh, and yes, this update also brings support for doodles, stickers, and adding text to the images.
SOURCE: Signal
