Egypt has blocked encrypted messaging app Signal

With XMPP and federated messaging servers they would have at least working infrastructure within their country.<p>But ...<p>What exactly happened that XMPP lost on mobile phones? What did they do wrong? XMPP was there before smartphones came, had working clients, and had (for that time) pretty decent encryption.<p>While I understand that big players like WhatsApp want to bind all users to their own infrastructure, I don&#x27;t understand why even the niche instant messangers go through the burden of creating their own infrastructure (or relying on Google&#x27;s) instead of just concentrating on the client side to provide better XMPP clients.<p>Is XMPP so bad that nobody wants to do that? If so, why?

And this is why in <i>western</i> countries the politics of encryption should be regarded as a stopgap only. It&#x27;s better than allowing the police to opportunistically go fishing in your data, but it&#x27;s no substitute for sound democratic rule-of-law culture.<p>If politics gets to the point of having to rely on encryption as your only protection then it&#x27;s simply going to get banned and&#x2F;or blocked.

Isn&#x27;t it &quot;weird&quot; that they chose to block Signal app and not the signal-protocol based Whatsapp?<p>If Whatsapp really implements the same kind of security and privacy measures that Signal does, why is Whatsapp allowed to continue operating?<p>If signal is preventing them spy on users and they ban it, is in&#x27;t it safe to assume that Whatsapp is NOT preventing them spy on users, so they let it operate? Wouldn&#x27;t you expect Whatsapp to be also targeted, especially considering the broad user-base it has compared to Signal?<p>Yes, I know they had blocked Whatsapp in the past, but they didn&#x27;t block it now. Which means that something has changed in the relationship of the Egyptian gov and Whatsapp since 2015.

Due to cutting ties with Google and Facebook as much as possible I don&#x27;t use Signal nor WhatsApp. What alternatives are there?<p>I have been using Tox (qTox on Desktop and Antox on phone) and XMPP (Conversations on phone). I also tried Ring (Desktop and phone)<p>My observation is that there is a lot of user inertia to make people use another chat app, and none of which I tried is in good shape to compete right now with WhatsApp&#x2F;Signal.<p>XMPP and Ring share the problem that encryption was an afterthought. That alone is enough to stop widespread adoption. There must not be unencrypted chats nor different security levels. Encryption must be transparent to the user.<p>Tox doesn&#x27;t share that problem, and is what I have the highest hopes for. The clients are not yet able to compete with WhatsApp. Antox crashes sometimes, gets reaaaal slow, and doesn&#x27;t send pseudo-offline messages reliably. Multi-Device support and real offline messaging is still lacking in the protocol. Multi-Device support is not needed, see WhatsApp, but real offline messaging is a must-have. Also, messages must be reliably delivered and in the order they are intended. Tests of mine between qTox and Antox showed problems in that regard.

It&#x27;s not clear to me why Signal was blocked, though. Other governments have blocked messaging and chat applications before, but not for the reasons you&#x27;d think. For example, UAE blocks access to voice and video chat applications to protect the commercial interests of the telecoms companies who offer similar services. I&#x27;d be curious to know if other messaging applications were blocked in Egypt too, and why.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thenational.ae&#x2F;uae&#x2F;uae-telecoms-companies-told-to-free-up-internet-calling" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thenational.ae&#x2F;uae&#x2F;uae-telecoms-companies-told-to...</a>

What do people think about Telegram&#x27;s (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;telegram.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;telegram.org</a>) security vs Signal?

I can&#x27;t say this is surprising, I was talking about the potential of Signal to be blocked by regimes with my friends a few weeks back (both the initial verification text, and client to server communication), and here we are with Egypt being the first to block it.

I&#x27;m curious as to how they intend to circumvent the censorship from their end.

This wouldn&#x27;t be such a problem if Moxie hadn&#x27;t removed the ability to communicate using SMS.<p>SMS is federated and very difficult to block without disrupting essential services.<p>See: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WhisperSystems&#x2F;Signal-Android&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2818" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WhisperSystems&#x2F;Signal-Android&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2818</a><p>Of course going the route of using centralized services allows later monetization my Moxie and his brogrammers.

Geez, if only there were a protocol with as good encryption but federated so that everybody could host their own server which would make it way harder to block…<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xmpp.org&#x2F;extensions&#x2F;xep-0384.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xmpp.org&#x2F;extensions&#x2F;xep-0384.html</a>