Just days after Open Whisper Systems concluded the Egyptian government had blocked access to its encrypted messaging service, Signal, the company rolled out an update that circumvents large-scale censorship systems across Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. The update also adds the ability to apply stickers, text and doodles to images, but that’s just icing on the censorship-evading cake. “Over the weekend, we heard reports that Signal was not functioning reliably in Egypt or the United Arab Emirates, ” Open Whisper Systems writes . “We investigated with the help of Signal users in those areas, and found that several ISPs were blocking communication with the Signal service and our website. It turns out that when some states can’t snoop, they censor.” Open Whisper Systems circumvents filtering systems with domain fronting, a technique that routes all messages through a popular domain name — in this case, Google. All Signal messages sent from an Egypt or UAE country code will look like a normal HTTPS request to the Google homepage. In order to block Signal in these countries, the governments would have to disable Google. “The goal for an app like Signal is to make disabling internet access the only way a government can disable Signal, ” the company says. The blog post continues, “With enough large-scale services acting as domain fronts, disabling Signal starts to look like disabling the internet.” Source: Signal
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Encrypted chat app Signal circumvents government censorship
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The French postal service is beginning an experimental drone delivery program to deliver parcels on a nine mile route once a week. After the program gets approval from the French aviation regulatory authority, the federal postal service will be the first to ever use drone delivery on a regular route. The drones used in the French postal service experiment have the capacity to fly up to 12 miles carrying about two pounds maximum, going around 19 miles per hour. They are also equipped with parachutes for safe emergency landing in case something disrupts the flight. The eventual goal is to reach rural or mountainous regions that are otherwise difficult and expensive to get to using cars. The drone mail delivery program has been a project of the DPDgroup, Europe’s second largest international parcel delivery network, operating as a subsidiary under the French national postal service. The DPDgroup had been working on this program with Atechsys, a French drone company, since 2014 in the south of France. “The first commercial line represents a new step in the program, ” DPDgroup said in a press release. With the testing phase now over, the experimentation phase is all set to begin. Currently, those participating in the experiment to receive parcels are non-residential, including over ten tech companies. The done routes stretch over the southeastern region of Provence, going between Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Beaume and Pourrieres. Read more of this story at Slashdot.