Nice try!
It would ultimately have similar effects as when most governments banned The Pirate Bay: it stifled grandma from accessing it, but anyone who has any will to do so, or small amount of technical skill will bypass the ban.
There are plenty of free and open source pgp tools out there. Nothing is stopping you from encrypting your own text and pasting it into messaging apps. Even if you dont trust some tool from the internet, sha2 isnt that hard to understand or implement with a bit of motivation
To do whatever it takes - I certainly will not comply. No, I don’t care that makes me a criminal. If somebody made it legally mandatory to eat babies, I wouldn’t do that either.
I ignore the ban and continue using my applications which are all open source.
i’ve read that many apps can be not just banned but blocked. now i don’t have a source at hand but i heard that russia blocks not just signal but also matrix, meaning that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether the app is open source. similarly i’ve read that deep packet inspection can block things like sslvpn and wireguard.
still, blocking delta chat is really quite difficult, as russia has noticed and got angry about, so there should probably still be a way unless the country also blocks all email communication
They can block Signal because it is centralized. Signal knows this and built proxies into the app for this purpose.
Similarly they can block the main matrix.org server but since it’s decentralized you can still use any of the thousands of servers they may not even know exists.
Russia’s long term plan seems to be blocking Western networks and force the bulk of domestic users to the Max messenger, which implements inspectability a la ChatControl. Apropos: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
You can tunnel through the Great Chinese Firewall fine, if you know what you’re doing.
They block the ip addresses for the server components of those applications. easily circumvented with a proxy outside of russia. most these communication apps have such proxy support builtin.
The only way ‘apps’ can be banned is if they cut of the internet. soon as you have a data pipe from one end to another you can encrypt whatever you send.
This is why i2p and p2p protocols are so important it makes it infinitely harder to control / ban. you end up having to have a directional whitelist (i.e. you need to only allow outgoing connections from home devices to a specific set of ip), and even then once thats in place… if any of those things allow communication we can push data through them.
i see your point, but i worry that deep packet inspection would still be a major pain in the butt in that case since it may detect your encryption and block it, regardless of the ip you’re trying to talk to
not really an issue. DPI just increases costs for enforcement and is fairly easily worked around at the application layer. annoying to implement a workaround but not hard. this is the issue with most enforcement mechanisms people try to come up with when dealing with systems, they try to prevent anything they dont like ™ and it just ends up costing them more.
in fact iirc i2p basically helps with this problem just by existing already since it inherently generates a steady stream of data.
i got my fingers crossed you’re right! thank you for your kind responses :D
Same here, good luck implementing that ban
Can we switch over android to open source operating system easily?
What about windows on laptops?
I don’t know what you mean, e.g. GrapheneOS and AOSP based ROMs are all open source. Linux (or *BSD) on mobile devices is also an option.
Huh thanks I will have to look into that, not computer savvy here.
Get all my money out of the bank in physical and keep living. Since encryption is dead, internet commerce is dead and keeping any sort of money in digital is now unsecured.
That would be really funny if a bunch of other people realized it at the same time
Start speaking a dead language. Or just use genz language. Can you skibidi that for me?
Ah, here we have the sigma rizzler, frfr no cap.
The government banned pirating media. That hasn’t exactly stopped the tech savvy from doing it anyway.
hasn’t even stopped the non-tech savvy lmao
Probably find ways to buy all the advertising profile data I can, sort through it until I find some related to the fools that voted for that, and give it to spammers.
The people that make these laws often have zero idea how anything works beyond “the lobbyist said do this, so I do this.” So they should be educated about their poor decisions.
many people in the comments say that they’d keep using the banned apps, which is a fair thing to say since we said that they’re banned not blocked.
however, i would a assume that banned encryption eventually means blocked encryption. as is the case in russia where matrix and simpleX are blocked too https://merlinux.eu/press/2025-05-14-russia-deltachat.pdf
now, blocked servers can be accessed via vpn as many people pointed out, but a government that really wants to crack down on encryption would use deep packet inspection like the uae. this allows detection and blocking of vpns too, as long as they’re well known enough, just like with the encrypted chat servers. so, vanilla wireguard may be blocked, but the latest obfuscated wireguard mod may not.
with all that in mind, encrypted communication would probably be a constant cat and mouse game, unless everyone built their own very tiny encrypted communication. if the variety was large enough, it would probably be too resource intensive to block it all, but it would also be very resource intensive for everyone trying communicate. also, not everyone is a programmer, capable of creating their own encrypted messaging.
i’d be really curious what people would do unter the described, very restricted circumstances that partially exist in some places of the world. i don’t really have an answer yet.
The only reason the UAE and other nations you’re referring to have success in their ban campaigns is because they have steep consequences for breaking the law by bypassing government restrictions - that is, assuming you’re just some random citizen and not a connected Sheik or family member or political/church leader. They have public whipping, amputation, and death by firing squad (UAE) / decapitation (Saudi Arabia) in the long list of draconian punishments available to their judiciary, and they are known for making examples of people.
What makes you think the UAE uses deep packet inspection on their entire outbound Internet links? That would be very expensive computationally, latency-wise, and of course in hardware and power costs. More likely they just have a team that tracks commercial VPN services server IP addresses and adds them to a block-list. Much cheaper and 99% as effective.
Manual encryption.
I have a few tools in backup and installed on my devices in case that happens.
Use them illegally.
Quit smartphones. Use only air gapped computer, (hoping govt or biz does not send signal to trigger kill switches they are known to have in them.)
I did not have a cell phone for most of my life and I think I was happier without it. Internet was great but the enshitification makes it less and less useful.
At a minimum I want to switch to open source on computers and phone. Maybe the NSA types can still see everything you are doing, but one might be able to prevent the data brokers from getting it, which allows anybody willing to pay for tranches of it to know everything you have done, and that includes every single government agency which buys that data now.
One might think since you weren’t doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear, this information is inherently harmful in the hands of these interests in ways that are not readily apparent. Such as micro targeting on Facebook and such.
