[illumin8]

A couple important things to note:

- This most definitely is against the CloudFront terms of service. See the linked article if you disagree - the ToS is quoted there.

- One direct impact to the owners of the SOUQ.COM domain is that their DNS query volume will increase drastically. They have to pay for those queries. Would you like it if your side project all of a sudden got a 6 figure DNS bill because Signal decided they want to piggy back on your domain to route around censorship?

[ForHackernews]

> Would you like it if your side project all of a sudden got a 6 figure DNS bill because Signal decided they want to piggy back on your domain to route around censorship?

In this hypothetical example, is my side project doing $178,000,000,000 of annual revenue like Amazon.com? If so, I'd like to think I'd be honored help subvert censorship by oppressive regimes.

[Matt3o12_]

Except that amazon is not the one paying, it is quad.com (or some other domain they’re piggybacking on) who has to pay for the DNS traffic. If my $3 side project suddenly became a $1000 side project I’d be pissed too. I like what signal is doing but that should not be making others pay for it. Ideally amazon would help them do that but that don’t.

[ForHackernews]

> Except that amazon is not the one paying, it is quad.com

It's souq.com, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souq.com It's an e-commerce site targeted at the middle east that Amazon bought as their play for that market.

Signal deliberately chose it because it's an Amazon domain, so governments would be reluctant to block it.

[edaemon]

That may be true but Signal is purposely using high-profile domains, not someone's small side project.

[Dylan16807]

Nothing stops the signal app from looking up that domain anyway. It's not abuse to genuinely look up an IP. It's the job of resolver caches to keep the traffic under control.