[HN Gopher] Show HN: Babble - Communicate privately on state-spo...
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Show HN: Babble - Communicate privately on state-sponsored social
media
Thanks for checking out Babble! You might wonder why this app is
even useful and why not just use Signal/PGP. This app's target
audience is actually ordinary people in China or similar countries
who are under severe government surveillance and censorship, where
access to Signal and similar E2EE messaging software is blocked by
nationwide firewalls, such as the Great Firewall of China (GFW).
Chinese people have been deprived of freedom of speech even before
the COVID-19 pandemic. Li Wenliang, who was among the first to
notice the spread of the virus and warned his colleagues about it
in a _private_ WeChat group, was admonished by the police for
"spreading rumors"; his punishment was then aired on the national
TV channel. After Wenliang passed away due to getting COVID-19
himself, discussions about it on China's public Internet were
highly restricted; most discussions will be deleted upon being
posted, which was done by some automatic keyword detection
mechanism. Things got even worse over the years and especially
during the Shanghai lockdown in early 2022. Everything related to
questioning the public health policy is banned. Many people posted
articles about how bad Shanghai's economic and social situation is
on their WeChat public accounts. None of these articles, not even
their accounts, can survive for longer than a few hours. Even
articles crying for help, because people were starving, got
deleted. A video called Voice from Shanghai Lockdown
(https://youtu.be/38_thLXNHY8), which contains audio recordings of
desperate Shanghai people during the lockdown, went viral on
Chinese social media at the end of this April. Unsurprisingly, this
video was immediately censored. People got angry and tried to
spread this video as much as possible by re-posting it again and
again, racing against the detection algorithm. But it was futile.
It's just like 1984, where the number of words available to say
"legally" is decreasing. There are no tools available for people to
speak out. Public social media and private messaging apps are all
monitored by the government. Foreign tools such as Telegram,
Signal, or anything similar are blocked by the GFW. PGP is too
technical for normal people. The goal of Babble is to provide those
people with a cryptographic and steganographic tool that's easy
enough to use but secure enough against a censorship system. It's
not perfect as of now, but we are making an effort to make it
better. Yes, Babble might get removed from the App Store in China
if the Chinese government asks, but it's fundamentally different
from Signal being blocked - there are a considerable number of
people in China who has an overseas Apple ID so that they can
download apps not on Chinese App Store, but to use Signal, you have
to bypass GFW, which fewer people know how to. One of the real
challenges for this project though, is how to get people aware of
the situation, because our education is brainwashing and people are
starting to take surveillance and censorship for granted. And it's
very hard for the app to reach its intended audience because the
surveillance system is designed to prevent them from accessing this
kind of tool.
Author : yvbbrjdr
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-07-18 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (babble.landrop.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (babble.landrop.app)
| [deleted]
| yorwba wrote:
| I thought I had heard about this app before, but turns out that
| it was a similar app named Boom:
| https://qz.com/1822127/encryption-app-to-avoid-coronavirus-c...
| yvbbrjdr wrote:
| Wow! This project seems to do exactly what ours does right
| now.. with an even better UI/UX.. but they don't seem to
| support any kind of nonce'ed and key'ed encryption?
|
| For some reason it's no longer on the App Store anywhere.
| upofadown wrote:
| >Hina protects your images posted online or sent to others by
| encrypting them with a password...
|
| Like just a single word? Why wouldn't that be trivially brute
| forceable? Since you don't care exactly where the content comes
| from, why not just use some sort of public key system? There
| wouldn't be much chance of a MITM in this particular instance and
| it would simplify things for the user.
| yvbbrjdr wrote:
| Under the hood, we used Argon2i algorithm to derive the secret
| key from an arbitrary-long password string. We used the term
| "password" because that's what ordinary people will understand
| (like, zip uses the same term for their secret keys). In
| practice, people should choose password that's long enough to
| prevent brute forcing, just like picking a password for your
| online accounts.
|
| It's a good idea to use a public key system. But it really
| confuses new users who has never used PKI before. Nevertheless,
| we have a key exchange feature built into the app that allows 2
| parties to negotiate a shared secret using X25519, for advanced
| users.
| rob_c wrote:
| Or, matrix, mattermost or any self hosted platform where you can
| control the keys and host yourself...
|
| Biggest issue as you highlight is userbase which frankly, if
| you're serious about going against state media you should be
| talking about avoiding devices locking you down to app stores
| etc. People on those platforms (as unfortunate as it is) have
| decided that pretty asthetics are worth personal freedom so
| ultimately will never support true freedom of thought or opinion.
| yvbbrjdr wrote:
| Thanks for your advice! However, there are several problems
| with self hosted platforms in China.
|
| 1. People are unaware of their existence due to those projects
| being very technical and hard to deploy/join. They also don't
| have a good client on mobile platforms. People will trade their
| privacy for all the convenience, say, WeChat brings, because
| all of their contacts are already using WeChat. It's hard to
| convince people to change to use your matrix server. 2. Cloud
| services are also monitored by the government. There are
| programs running in the background inside VPSes that monitors
| all processes in your server. 3. If you want to host a website,
| you have to register it with a state agency, so if there are
| any contents on your website that the government doesn't like,
| your website will be shut down and you'll be held responsible.
|
| As of the walled garden Apple created, I heard that EU has
| passed a law mandating Apple to allow third-party app stores.
| It'll be very interesting to see what'll happen in the future.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I thought about building something like this as a browser
| extension that would work on Facebook. It would not only make
| censorship more difficult, it would also make it harder for the
| algorithm to know what you're interested in.
|
| Of course, any platform can try to ban all such posts outright.
|
| Glad to see someone working on this!
| jpalomaki wrote:
| Maybe with the text generating models (GPT-3 etc) we can soon
| create steganography solution, which hides your real message
| inside innocent looking casual messages generated from selected
| topic.
|
| Add a suitable browser extension, enter the shared secret and
| "read between the lines".
| popcalc wrote:
| Reminds me of this very cool zero width steg project:
| https://github.com/vedhavyas/zwfp
|
| I used the go code to develop an iOS app that, while I and my
| friends thought was very cool, Apple didn't think had enough
| features to publish :(
|
| Edit: Obviously this isn't going to fly under the radar when a
| state actor is concerned.
| yvbbrjdr wrote:
| Interesting project! But yeah it requires little effort to
| detect
| yvbbrjdr wrote:
| Yes! I'm right now creating a steganography scheme with an NLP
| model.
|
| We've actually tried implementing a browser extension before.
| The problem is ordinary people just don't use browser
| extensions..
| gnicholas wrote:
| Ordinary people can use browser extensions OK on desktop, but
| on mobile it's a mess. Chrome for Android doesn't support
| extensions, and no one uses the Android browsers that do.
| Installing an extension for Safari on iOS requires following
| many unintuitive steps. I hope mobile extensions become
| easier to install/use with time!
| keurrr wrote:
| The original version was a browser extension. It was very
| painful to maintain support for all the different types of
| input fields. Most large social media sites do not use
| standard text areas.
|
| https://github.com/XCF-Babble/babble
| [deleted]
| MitPitt wrote:
| Just add "in minecraft" to every sentence
| fariszr wrote:
| Something similar using random spaces is here. But its possible
| to decrypted by anyone since there is no password
|
| https://neatnik.net/steganographr/
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(page generated 2022-07-18 23:01 UTC)