jsn

> Zen shinkanzen

You probably meant to say "shikantaza", I don't think "shinkanzen" is a word.

Huh, what a blast from the past. About 30 years ago, in Russia, I hacked up cyrillics keyboard support for Coherent by extending the line discipline layer in its kernel. It was probably still Coherent 3.0 though (which IIRC was based on Unix V6?), and the one on github seems to be 4.2.x.

Apparently there's no support for smarthost / relayhost (or I can't find any traces of it in the documentation). Running your own low traffic mail exchanger without it is often not a pleasant experience.

You can just `openssl s_client en.wikipedia.org:443`.

^ This. I have narcolepsy and it's really similar to what OP describes. And Sodium Oxybate is seriously life changing stuff if you have narcolepsy.

Hmm, interesting. Are you speaking from experience? Because I definitely am. I watched my mother die a very slow, very painful death from cancer several years ago. I can assure you she would be absolutely genuinely happy to get that cellophane hood and that nitrogen cannula. And, having seen what I've seen, I will also take the hood over some very real alternatives in a heartbeat. Playing dress up with this ridiculously futuristic glass coffin toy instead seems somewhat preposterous when you are facing death.

Yeah, this is seriously overengineered. A cellophane hood with elastic collar and a nitrogen nasal cannula is all it takes.

No, it (again) doesn't work like this at all. 1) DNS blocking of cloudflare is useless, you can receive IPs, or names in non-cloudflare zones, 2) IP blocking of the whole cloudflare will bring so much collateral damage (unrelated services going down) that it's a non-starter, politically speaking, 3) cloudflare is far from the only mass frontend / cdn available, there are hundreds high-collateral services out there.

They don't have to be strictly unique per user. You can send out different sets of URLs to different cohorts of users, then correlate new URL blockings with client IDs to detect rogue app installations and excommunicate them. Telegram did that when Russia tried (unsuccessfully) block it.

Not as of yet. Actually, if you use tor (with out-of-Russia exit nodes, which I think is the default when using it from Russia?), you can already freely access all the sites blocked in Russia, non-onion ones. But, obviously, tor and VPNs are good solutions only for people willing to go an extra mile to get to the prohibited content.

Not really. You can use whatever you like, the possibilities are endless. AFAIU, the most straightforward approach would be to use Android / IOS push notifications (which can't be easily blocked) to regularly push a constantly changing (to avoid censorship) URL of your backend API servers to the mobile apps.

Yes, you can re-host, but propagating the new URL to your users will take days, and the authorities reaction time is, for high profile cases, measured in hours. Another interesting question is how will you propagate the new URL? To do that, you need some way to reach your users when your website is down. And if you have such a way, do you really need a website?

> In this case there's not many reasons for it to be a native app instead of a Progressive Web App. This would simplify distribution.

The opposite of this is true. Blocking a web application is very easy for Russian authorities, there are well-established legal and technical protocols for that, it's a routine, it happens every day. The opposition uses apps precisely because they are more difficult to censor.

It now has the option to avoid (laggy) Android media service framework, and to use its own scanner to detect media changes instead. That should be immediate.