Skip to main content

Wickr has a new plan for dodging internet blocks

By

As encrypted chat apps grow more popular, they’re also becoming more popular targets for state-level blocks. Whether it’s brief interruptions in Brazil and Egypt or longterm censorship in China and Iran, countries are testing out their ability to block traffic at a national level, and apps are having to get creative to stay online.

Wickr’s latest solution is a partnership with the circumvention service Psiphon, which will be available to enterprise users starting today, rolling out to free users in the weeks to come. Similar to a VPN, Psiphon will disguise Wickr traffic through proxies and other routing protocols designed to make the traffic hard to spot and even harder to block.

Emerging out of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, Psiphon already provides anti-blocking services for a number of digital rights tools, most notably in Iran. “The systems doing network disruptions are very sophisticated,” says Psiphon’s Michael Hull. “So you have to have a smarter kind of VPN to perform under the various kinds of filters and attacks.”

That’s a particularly valuable service now that it’s harder to hide your traffic among larger networks. In recent months, both Amazon and Google have disallowed a practice called domain-fronting, which allowed apps like Wickr to forward their traffic through the larger network as a way of evading censorship. Botnets also sometimes used the technique to avoid detection, which ultimately inspired the broader networks to shut down the practice.

Wickr CEO Joel Wallenstrom put the move in business terms. “People trust very secure stuff to Wickr, and they’re trusting us not only to secure the data but that we’ll get it where it needs to be,” he told The Verge. “It was very apparent that the world is changing, and we need to respond to that.”



from The Verge - Teches https://ift.tt/2w8u03B
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Firefox is testing features that let you customize colors and view two tabs in one

By
Mozilla Firefox is testing out two new experimental extensions that let users further customize their browser and view tabs together more easily. The first one is called Firefox Color and it lets you change the colors of the background, text, icons, and the toolbar. Whatever you change can be saved and you can also choose to share your color schemes with others. Firefox also has a selection of pre-made color themes that you can choose from if you don’t want to customize every single color yourself. The second feature that Firefox is testing is called Side View and it does basically what it sounds like: you can view two browser tabs at once in the same tab and window. Without the feature, you can already line up two windows side by... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2LZWa7h
Post a Comment
Read more

How to install Fortnite on Android

By
Epic Games launched its battle royale hit Fortnite on Android devices last week with a big catch: it was exclusive to Samsung-made phones for a few days as a way to help market the new Samsung Galaxy Note 9. Now, the exclusivity period appears to be over, and beta invite codes are going out to select users of non-Samsung phones like the Google Pixel 2 XL. If you’re itching to dive off the battle bus on mobile, you might have to hold on just a little while longer: there appears to be a waiting list, just like there was when the game launched on iOS. There’s also a bit of trickiness involving exactly how you get the app because Epic announced it would be distributing the Android version of Fortnite on its own terms . Last week, the app was distributed through Samsung’s app store, and Epic is using its own website and a Fortnite Installer program to distribute the game more widely on all compatible Android devices. (Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said this is basically to avoid paying Google...
Post a Comment
Read more