When I was buying mine, 9s weren’t out yet - even now, the 8s are around $400 where I bought, while 7s are at an already crazy $300.

I didn’t get the impression that the plastic was easily breakable - seems relatively soft. While the base and pro have glass.

Pixel 7a is the absolute biggest I can semi-comfortably type one-handed on. I can’t imagine why bigger ones are more popular - don’t people ever use their phone while on a bus and holding onto a handle?? I guess you could use a “one-handed mode” on the keyboard, but I never use it because it makes the keys waaay too small.

a) Pixel 9’s are still new and completely unaffordable; b) I personally got an “a” because it has a plastic back instead of glass.

Yeah, I know that - I am myself in a situation where we need increasingly obfuscated evasion solutions. However, my issue is not in that it developed such a proxy - but rather, that it doesn’t give an option to use a different one. For example, I have my proxy set up - so why does Signal need its own separate proxy rather than using the one everything else already uses? Why can’t it use Tor without torifying the whole device’s traffic?

Not to mention that dedicated solutions (XRay and such) are focused on censorship evasion while for Signal stealthy proxies are comparatively more of an afterthought. So there is a chance it wouldn’t be able to evolve fast enough to keep up with the censors.

P.S. I think in Iran, there was also a bigger issue - the SMS codes for registration just didn’t arrive.

Yes! Because unlike stock Signal (which, last time I tried, restricts you to their own proxy implementation), you can use whatever Socks proxy you want. Including Tor. Yeah, sure, you could use a VPN with Signal - but for people who want a persistent connection, having a VPN on 24/7 would be inconvenient. Such a frustrating part of the official app…

It would be very weird if it was - when a “ban” happens, at least here, they block the website. I doubt Sweden would fight even basic Wireguard/OpenVPN tho, so I don’t see it as a big problem. The bigger problem would be carriers denying registration confirmation SMS, which is yet another downside of the phone number requirement.

Bridges are trivial to use tho. And even if they get blocked too actively, a lot of people in such censored regions have a VPN anyway (although I still don’t have an understanding whether a VPN decreases Tor’s security if used like this.

It can be blocked, but blocking bridges is a constant whack-a-mole (especially now that they have Webtunnel which, while apparently not as robust as some dedicated obfuscation solutions, is still a noticeable improvement). My bigger problem with Briar is that both recipients have to be online to message, or you have to set up a “mailbox”.

I am pretty sure that if asked, the serverside protections can be circumvented - I think in one Github issue they even confessed that Sealed Sender is not bulletproof and is “best effort”. I prefer to assume that if everything goes through a single server, and they know what and when each account does upon connecting - they can correlate the identities if they want to.

“Harder to spin up”? Hard disagree. Matrix’s main server implementation is very resource-heavy, and alternatives like Conduit are not full-featured (and broke in some ways for me when interacting with mateix dot org). Meanwhile Simplex servers are pretty light and aside from a couple errors in the documentation that took a while to figure out, it has been easier than Conduit. And unlike Matrix, it has never broken for me so far.

Well-to-do? That is weird, because here not having a washing machine in the apartment would be weird even for a poor person.

The more insane thing here for me is the fact that there isn’t a washing machine inside your apartment.

(btw lived in such once, apparently the owner wasn’t very wealthy. We washed everything by hand)

I am experiencing such banning of providers right now. It is a whack-a-mole, seems futile. Not to mention that most people use sketchy free noname VPNs that are just too numerous. Or apparently some people set up basic XRay/VLESS/whatever and sell it via a Telegram bot…