Not clear right now if France thinks he was actively complicit with the four horsemen listed, or if just the act of running Telegram makes him complicit in their eyes, or something in the middle, e.g. they asked for help and Telegram turned them down.
This will be an interesting case to watch -- I don't believe there are any western nations that want non-locally-backdoored messaging of any sort -- but generally my understanding is that harassment on border entry has been the order of the day, rather than arrests.
> I don't believe there are any western nations that want non-locally-backdoored messaging of any sort
But that's what exactly they want no? EU is literally implementing a regulation that will allow to "circumvent end-to-end encryption to address child sexual abuse material". I believe it failed to pass recently, but they will try again - and nothing stops countries to implement it independently. I think France is the one who was pushing for that in the first place.
> Telegram has been used by protesters in places like Hong Kong, Belarus, Kazakhstan, even in Barcelona back in the day. It's been a tool for the opposition to a large extent. But it doesn't really matter whether it's opposition or the ruling party that is using Telegram. For us, we apply the rules equally to all sides. We don't become prejudiced in this way.
> It's not that we are rooting for the opposition or we are rooting for the ruling party. It's not that we don't care, but we think it's important to have this platform that is neutral to all voices because we believe that the competition of different ideas can result in progress and a better world for everyone.. You don't want to be geopolitically aligned. You don't want to select the winners in any of these political fights.
The major state owned Kazakhstan telecom company did peering with Telegram, they say now it is 10ms is better, but the real reason might be to have means to cutoff Telegram if anything wrong happens
He'd have you believe that all messages are welcome on Telegram, that no material is censored, that it's all about free expression, that they're too small to provide moderation.
But when an account is flagged for spam, Telegram rapidly responds and restricts or kills the account. So they can and do moderate content.
It's just that accounts can get flagged for CSAM hundreds of times and Telegram takes no action.
They're making a choice to provide a platform for this material. That's against the law and prison time is absolutely justified.
In cases where there is public evidence of illegal activity, where incidents have been reported to law enforcement, does Telegram provide LE with account information (e.g. phone number) for further investigation? Similar to Apple transparency reports? https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/
> the operators of the messenger app Telegram have released user data to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in several cases. According to SPIEGEL information, this was data from suspects in the areas of child abuse and terrorism. In the case of violations of other criminal offenses, it is still difficult for German investigators to obtain information from Telegram, according to security circles.
> two popular chat services have accused each other of having undisclosed government ties. According to Signal president Meredith Whittaker, Telegram is not only “notoriously insecure” but also “routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.” Telegram founder Pavel Durov, on the other hand, claims that “the US government spent $3 million to build Signal’s encryption” and Signal’s current leaders are “activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad.”
evidently I'm getting downvoted because people have some opinions about these statements but they're also not able to enunciate what those opinions are even though they must be at odds with my opinions. The classiest type of HN downvoter there is!
In my experience, CSAM accounts get flagged many times, channel owners remove the account from their channels, but the account continues to post the material elsewhere.
This wouldn't surprise me in the least. My guess is that Telegram just doesn't put much effort into busting either spam or CSAM. They let channel admins do it.
I suspect that Telegram could put significantly more effort into CSAM suppression and enforcement, but I seriously doubt this is really what's up with the French arrest of Durov.
Spam is very easily defined and identified, no need to read anything or to look at any images. If you message someone for the first time, they can click a report button and bam it's automatic weekly spam ban for you. Do it three times, forever ban.
It's not progressive. It's protectionist. The people they're protecting carry a lot of guilt, and so really like the "progressive" label, it's puts a really nice spin on their particular version of graft and corruption.
Yep. If the Swedish government really cared about children, they would do something to stop the massive underage gang violence problem the country has. 12 year olds being used as hitmen for drug gangs is not normal, yet that's the reality.
You talk as if this is a problem that is easily solved. Of course government wish this could he solved.
A tip is that whenever you reach a ludicrous conclusion "they do nothing to stop underage violence", it's probably your analysis that is ludicrous and not the object being analyzed.
Ignorance is bliss. It literally takes 4 sec to perform a search and find plenty of such cases - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PXZxaKMl9Y (Sky News Investigates: Sweden's deadly gang war)
"How has a peaceful European country ended up the gun murder capital of the EU?"
"Things got so bad that the government called in the army to help the police. And there's a new deadly trend emerging in this battle. Gang members as young as 14 are increasingly using explosives to target rivals as they fight over drug turfs. "
things tend to be relative, hence statistics are a thing. The gun murder capital of Europe without some hard data as to what that means sounds a bit like the radiation poisoning center of Antarctica, gang members as young as 14 can definitely be increasingly doing things if before they started increasing there were zero gang members below 14 using explosives etc.
Another problem is just taking what the police say as being "true", for example the police say there are 62000 people in Stockholm (a city of slightly over 920000) "linked" to criminal gangs - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-has-around-62000...
this article uses the word linked twice, in the title linked to criminal gangs, and later in the article "the authorities have struggled for years to contain violence linked to organised crime." I wonder if they have 62000 people who are violent in their linkage, somehow I doubt it but this seems to be the impression.
Hey, I bet there is a problem, how big of a problem, probably not as big as these news stories imply. Why not? Well because if I had a really big nasty problem I wouldn't just imply it, I would lay it out, plenty of engagement to go around, but if my engagement could benefit from exaggerating the problem then I will imply instead of stating plainly.
At any rate more than 6% of the population of Stockholm is currently not involved in a violent gang war which one might infer from the reportage.
actually in that article from Reuters it says there were 62 deadly shootings in Sweden in the year.
Which is hilarious because it also says there are 62000 gang linked people in Stockholm.
One thing you are always told to watch out for is big round numbers in stats, because it is pretty unlikely it is just 62000 and not 62119 or something (not a big stats guy, just something I've read)
At any rate the article says 62000 linked to gangs, and 62 killings (pretty weird that). So a 0.1% violence among the linked to gangs people (if all the murders were linked to gangs), but out of the full pop of Sweden 10,490,000 this is a 0.000591% rate of murder, the U.S as a whole has 0.0075 murder rate right now.
I love responses like this. Well there is only one way to find out statistically since you love statistics.
If you are not an inmate I will assume that you are a free person living in a western society. Since you are free person you a free to go and live in Stockholm, lets just say for the statistics you are going to live in a slightly not so friendly neighbourhood where the lying police said that it is an area populated with predominantly 14 years old gang members, now since police by your own words cannot be trusted we will assume that their information is not correct and the area is perfectly fine and safe.
Please run the maths and tell me with just 5% probability to get executed by a 14 years old gang member by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times how likely is this event to occur? Of course the question that follow is are you going to take that chance ? I already know the answer.
Now you can choose to deny reality and look away, but the good thing about reality is, that it is just like gravity it just hits you sometimes.
I don't know if your PM have to call in the army to help with gang related crimes the situation seem pretty bad to me, again you are free to prove me wrong statistically, and take your chances.
These kind of responses (yours, zx10rse) are the absolute worst appeals to anecdote and bias I can think of. Someone actually comes along with a logical argument so you just give up and say "yeah well uhhh I'd like to see you try". Sad.
I know we're supposed to think everybody is being honest here, but I don't think you do love responses like this.
>Well there is only one way to find out statistically since you love statistics.
right, to get the rates of deaths by violence, rates of death by gang related violence, compare that to other parts of the world with gang related violence etc. etc. I mean I agree, everybody knows how to do statistics!
>Since you are free person you a free to go and live in Stockholm,
I stand corrected, not everybody knows how to do statistics.
>again you are free to prove me wrong statistically, and take your chances.
but anyway that is not how statistics works.
>Of course the question that follow is are you going to take that chance ? I already know the answer.
You know the answer as to whether I am willing to move to a part of Stockholm the police identify as high crime from "a western society" based on a hacker news argument with someone who evidently doesn't know how statistics work?
Amazing!!
>Please run the maths and tell me with just 5% probability to get executed by a 14 years old gang member by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times how likely is this event to occur?
If "with just 5% probability to get executed" then the answer to "how likely is this event to occur?" is 5%. However as this is "by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times" then that would mean 5 out of every 100 times somebody walks home they get executed.
Given the earlier number of people in the article linked with crime was 62000, and assuming that everybody walks home at least once per day and 5% of people walking home get executed by 14 year olds it follows that in your world 3100 people per day are getting executed by 14 year olds in Stockholm, that seems a lot. I mean in 30 days that would be more than the number of people linked with crime!
If that were true I don't think the EU would just be proposing to help inmates in their prisons but might be sending peace keeping forces in to help.
obviously there are a number of points where I've fudged the numbers here, as I don't care much, for example with 3100 being killed the 5% of 62000 would be decreasing as it would no longer be 62000 - but I will leave that to other people to figure out.
also since only 62 people were violently shot in Sweden during the year I guess that also indicates this 5% thing just doesn't add up, unless these people are getting violently exploded I guess.
"Sky News Investigates" is synonomous with Murdoch Press grossly exaggerates small issues to be world threatening edge of the seat click baiting prequels to the coming apocolypse.
At least in Australia and in the UK. Maybe they're a moderate and balanced presenter of truth on the ground in Sweden.
Seems unlikely.
I'm fully aware this reads as "attacking the source" but there's no rabid attack intended here just a frank pragmatic assessment of what "Sky News Investigates" actually means.
I am curious, is the rise of violent crime somehow linked with migration from Asia and Africa or it is a completely unrelated issue and most of the criminals come from families who have lived in Sweden for many generations?
It's largely second generation immigrants (yes, mostly from Africa and the Middle East, since that's where most immigration - in the shape of refugees - comes from).
And take it from someone who actually lives in the area (as opposed to HN speculators): YES it has gotten significantly worse over the last five years (having already been bad for decades), and YES 14 year old hitmen with explosives and automatic weapons are now an actual thing, not just a couple of incidents.
The politics of this is so inflamed, which makes it harder to discuss, much less solve the problems. I am not against immigration per se, from any given country. But right now, it is obviously causing major problems that need to be handled with extreme prejudice.
Sweden is building now new prison for underage and lacks thousands of seats for inmates. Other countries are talking about renting their spare capacities to them.
Unsure why my comment was flagged. If you want to see how much of the newspapers are censored in Sweden you’re free to go live there for a while, and witness the crime that happens and lack of support from police or media attention when the crime is committed by anyone who isn’t white and Swedish.
Since ppl exaggerate individual cases to a generic form, i remain sceptical about "gang of 12 year old". not to say, it doesnt exists. everything is hyperbole on the internet.
It’s quite common for migrant families to takes a few years off their kids age when they arrive, so they’ll adapt more easily, learnt the language and whatnot.
This makes sense to me, to change the birthdate, to get additional support. A lot of young people looking a tad older. But when crimes are reported, where do officials get the birthdates from? Or do they reporting most likelies?
Ylva Johansson, a "former" Communist who joined the social democratic party when that turned out to be a more sure-fire way to gain power is decidedly not the Swedish government. It it people like her and the policies they implemented which pushed the "Sweden Democrats" (a somewhat conservative nationalist party, their program resembles they of the social democratic party in the 1950's-1960's) to become the second-biggest party in the country.
I think you read my clumsy sentence backwards. They absolutely want to get in the middle of messaging, all of them. This is behind many of the calls for E2E interop as well -- all the proposals I'm aware of call for termination somewhere in the middle; you can imagine who'd like to be at that termination middle point. This is why Apple will not "move over" to RCS, ever, as a first class transport -- it's fundamentally no more secure than OTA plaintext to existing persistent threat actors.
So just give me an apple messaging client on my non-apple devices. It is insanely, practically criminally, anti-social to lock your messaging system into your devices alone. It's like the Joker is running the business decisions over there. Who cares, let's just watch the world burn.
When your threat model is "someone on the network intercepting messages", it doesn't matter if you control the hardware. When your threat model is "someone owns my device", it still doesn't matter if you control the hardware, because, in that scenario, Apple is the bad actor you're trying to protect against.
There's no scenario where a third party has compromised your phone without Apple's collaboration, which is the only scenario where the secure enclave would maybe protect you (and even then, the bad actor would just read your messages off the screen or memory directly).
In principle you can do the same thing of having keys in a secure enclave that can only be accessed if the bootloader and OS were signed with an appropriate key and not revoked. In practice there would certainly be a larger attack surface because you've now got n different hardware secure enclaves, n different bootloaders, and n different OS implementations, and a flaw in any one of them is potentially all that an attacker needs. Would you allow apple to apply a high standard and e.g. blacklist manufacturers who repeatedly had holes in their implementation? Would you trust Huawei's implementation to not have a hidden backdoor accessible only to the Chinese state and not discoverable otherwise? (Do you trust Apple's implementation to not have the same for the US/Israel?)
AFAIK, Signal doesn’t provide any way to prove its application were built from non-modified audited free open source code. Indeed there are evidences it behaves “a bit” differently.
So unless you’ve built application by yourself, you have no guarantee of it’s sequrity.
Apple's marketing buzzword silicon did nothing to shield Apple users against highly motivated and capable adversaries [1]. When the underlying OS is compromised (and with closed source OSes there is no way to ascertain) there is nothing that will save you.
That just means you lack imagination. "special chip specifically designed to increase cryptographic security" means nothing and says nothing. You may as well go ahead and toss in some "military grade" in there too since it's just free words, throw in as many as you want.
It doesn't show how it actually is the only or best way to attain the goal.
And since Apple's implimentation is a black box whos internal workings are not under the users control and not auditable by anyone outside of Apple, it's automatically less secure, in the sense that you should trust it less than some other equivalent that is under the users control and publicly auditable, or just some other mechanism entirely if no other such open platform enclave implimentation exists.
Signal or anything else that doesn't use the secure enclave may indeed be, or may not be less secure than something that does use the secure enclave. The simple existence and use of the enclave does not automatically define superior or inferior security. It also possible that anything else might be less secure, but only on iPhones because or limitations Apple imposes on everything on the platform except for themselves, which I don't think should count.
It's also possible to devise a mechnaism that benefits from the enclave without needing to use the enclave directly. All software on the device can rely on trusting the OS to keep one app from reading another app, because they can trust that the OS itsef can only come from Apple and the bootloader woukld refuse to boot anything else, etc.
There are infinite ways to attain any goal. The way Apple designed their secure enclave and os platform is just one way.
If we are talking about the security of a messaging system, then the only thing that matters to compare, is the security of the messaging system, not any particular implimentation detail.
All messaging systems are "comparable". If one relies on a secure enclave and one does not, it's hardly any more different than if one is painted yellow and one is painted green.
Messaging apps on phones painted blue and with tyre inflators are exactly "comparable" to ones on phones painted yellow with secure enclaves.
To be clear, the legislation in France and in the EU that is most likely behind this arrest is that companies have to at least try to do some moderation. There is an understanding that not everything can be moderated (obviously, the entire Internet would be banned otherwise) but there has to be a genuine attempt.
Which every company does more or less. The fact that Telegram doesn't reach this extremely low, very low bar is quite something.
Telegram is not a behemoth like Facebook so doesn't have their resources to moderate everything. Even Facebook isn't particularly good at it. They mostly rely on software which often produces false positives.
This arrest is completely preposterous and is just an attempt to get Durov to play ball with France's privacy destroying authorities.
Not being a behemot is not an excuse if they are not moderating criminal behavior at all. I dont know if that is the case, just pointing that logic is not sound.
As many people say when Facebook's failures came to light: a tech company cannot pass the buck by blaming their inability to perform their legal obligations on scale.
If a business can't do a thing it is required to do, their CEO's option is "close business" or "break law".
lately when i see arguments like yours one thing keeps popping into my head. i’m not sure how i feel about the following yet but it’s been on my mind a bit for the past couple of years:
if someone is incapable of making good faith genuine attempts to mitigate against atrocious things happening openly in the property they control, then isn’t this fairly solid evidence they’re just not capable of owning that property? if they make such an excuse, it would seem to me they’re either too irresponsible or just plain incompetent.
again, i’m not sure how i feel about the implications of this, but the whole “we just don’t have the resources” feels like a cowards excuse rather than reality—particularly as someone already pointed out, they seem to gather their wits to make a sizable dent when it’s spam.
According to this rule, approximately 100% of officials must be thrown out of their jobs right this second. I think you are mostly correct about irresponsibility, incompetence, and excuses, but I don't see why there should be legal consequences for people who did not take on any obligations. Especially in the situation, when people who take on, like all officials, have no responsibility
it’s still a bit muddy why he was arrested, but it seems like it’s due to his constant dismissal of any responsibility.
i’m not sure of the specifics of what you mean by 100% of officials must be thrown out” but if im understanding what you’re implying, i disagree, most land owners, elected officials, capable owners of organizations take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces . and if they don’t, then yes, why wouldn’t we hold them responsible?
it seems like you’re indicating there should be no
consequences for people who don’t take on obligations…
> i don’t see why there should be legal consequences for people who did not take on any obligations.
of course they take on obligations, it’s partially why we pay executives so much because they’re taking on obligations. this isn’t some pauper struggling to pay rent on his studio apartment—he was arrested after traveling from one country to another in his private jet.
again, i haven’t spent much energy on the implications from effect iteration of this but we have pretty solid evidence of what happens when we allow these wannabe kings to claim they should have nothing but positive personal benefits while externalizing any negatives onto the rest of us.
“you should pay me obscene amounts and treat me like a king while i take no responsibility whatsoever” is absurd. and we’re seeing the cascading effects of this absurdity in real time.
>most land owners, elected officials, capable owners of organizations take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces
And I am saying that zero percent of them do that. And somebody saying that Durov "take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces". My point is that there is no way to verify the degree of "good faith genuinity", so we cant use that parameter in aspect of legal actions.
> My point is that there is no way to verify the degree of "good faith genuinity", so we cant use that parameter in aspect of legal actions.
That's literally a thing that happens during trial, at least for certain crimes and legal systems.
Can't speak to this specific case because (1) IANAL, and (2) my grasp of the French language is so bad that I can't even reliably say the French for "I don't speak French".
> there is no way to verify the degree of "good faith genuinity", so we cant use that parameter in aspect of legal actions.
of course there is…
one of the reasons people justifiably bring up spam in these “my free speech” cases is because it shows definitively that the “free speech absolutists” don’t actually care about free speech—if they truly believed all speech is as valuable as all other speech then spam would have the same weight of priority as non-spam speech for them, yet they have no problem silencing spam.
off the top of my head, we would consider their guard rails against spam and have they implemented those same guard rails against the things they’re being charged for? if not, then obviously they’re not making real attempts.
of course there are multiple ways to determine whether they’ve made meaningful attempts. i think this is all moot though, if my understanding is correct, he’s resisted doing anything at all which is why he’s been charged.
as i said in a different post though, it’s still muddy on the specifics, we’ll know more later—we’re just wildly guessing at this point.
"The property" you mean the council housing where all the ganging, killing, raping and terror plotting occurs, right? Sure, the administration of said council should be jailed ASAP.
It is indeed completely illegal to own a property where illegal activities happen, know it and do nothing about it in France. Reporting the issue to the police is an adequate step. And yes, people have been jailed for owning apartments where terror plotting happened. Thank you for this good exemple.
For the good of the discussion, I would however appreciate if you kept your baseless fantasies about council housing - which is both numerous and very safe in France, a country which tries to do something to mitigate poverty - out of it.
> Captain Damien must team up with Leito, a local insurgent from District 13, to defuse a neutron bomb that has fallen into the hands of a local drug lord, Taha, and rescue Leito's sister Lola.
This "shows" those things in much the same way that First Contact "shows" how one may convert a Titan missile into a 3-person faster-than-light spacecraft in a post-nuclear-war Bozeman, Montana.
if the administration took zero good faith demonstrable attempts to address it, then they should at least be removed from the position, yes.
if they refuse to take steps whatsoever, yes, that’s a problem. why does it feel like you both understand the problem yet are defending the problem at the same time?
>if someone is incapable of making good faith genuine attempts to mitigate against atrocious things happening openly in the property they control, then isn’t this fairly solid evidence they’re just not capable of owning that property?
Even if true, what then? It doesn't follow said property can be ethically transferred to anyone else; otherwise you've just thrown out all semblance of property rights. You've sold off the world to the HOA's, as it were; now anyone who objects to the way you maintain your grounds has a button to push to make sure you are deprived of any grounds you keep. Be they real, or digital.
If I make a platform that shuffles bits around, and a bunch of users start using it for CP and terrorism (lets assume perfect enforcement/investigative capability up until piercing the platform, so probability 1 on the CP/terrorism front); I don't think the choice then is "lets shluff this to someone responsible to admin/make a tap". The only ethically tenable approach would be "well, no more moving bits around by anyone for anyone else anymore". And at that point we've unmade computing essentially.
No one, and I mean "Not One Single Entity, government or otherwise" can be trusted to not to abuse privileged access; and once put into the position to abuse, abstain from doing so. Abuse is probability 1. This is part of why I believe Stallman was right. The concept of the user account has been a disaster for the human species. As it is by the prescribing of unique identifiers to discern one operation on behalf of someone from another that has created a world in which we can even imagine such horrifying concepts as a small group unilaterally managing the entirety of the rest of humanity, for any purpose.
For me it is a sobering thought on the impact of automated business systems. I've practically 180'd on actual character of my own life's work. It's got me in a spot where I'm strongly considering burning my tools. Extreme? Maybe. Sometimes though, you have to accept that there are extremely unpleasant consequences out there that cannot be satisfactorally mitigated.
So I have a return question for you. Are you sure that the question you asked is the one you should be asking, or should you be asking yourself, "how many lives are acceptable casualties in order to continue operating within the bounds of my assumed ethical envelope?" Because there is a counter of people effected; you may not be able to read it or write it, but it's there.
To be fair, anyone that has used Telegram for a while know that this is just a mock option to fool regulators. You can report all you want; zero action is taken. There are dozens of accounts that joined groups I'm in to spam CSAM. We've reported them, kicked/banned them from the group. Months later you can look them up and they're still there and still active. They even post CSAM in their public (visible for everyone on their profile) stories.
Absolutely not. This stuff happens in a lot of technology groups, custom ROM groups, even a small (but public) board game group got overrun with it once; multiple accounts posting dozens of CSAM videos/images in a minute after joining - kept going for a few weeks.
The amount of obviously illegal content on Telegram makes it plain that, for all intents and purposes, it is an un-moderated platform. They sporadically moderate when there's serious pressure, but for the most part do nothing.
Because we saw the same accounts pop up in other groups sometimes weeks later, so we started to keep track of the usernames after banning them. If you check their profile it's easy to see that they are active months later.
What keeps amazing me is that this is supposed to make children's lives better, by helping social services.
Of course, such legislation only has any chance in hell of improving lives if the standard of living for children, the education, the ... IN social services is good. It is very easy to see this WILL put more children into such a situation, and that's about the only thing such legislation will definitely do. It is completely absurd to think this is going to end drugs, abuse or whatever else they're looking for.
Is that the case? Is it the case that the standard of living, education, ... in social services is good?
No. Not at all. There's constant scandals and if a child that gets into a social services institution makes it into university, just one, any given year, that's national news. Prostitution in social services is common, drugs and crime are everywhere.
It seems there is A LOT more work to be done on the other side of social services first. They seem to perform VERY badly once they actually catch someone. So why do this? Because it isn't to help children. At the very best they see this as a cheap way to look like they're improving social services.
They're building the penthouse suite with all the luxuries you could imagine, but the foundation is rotting away and, if anything, becoming more ignored rather than increasingly important.
It lays bare that their motivation is blanket surveillance for their own political ends and nothing to do with protecting children in the slightest.
Social Services are one of the most consistently underfunded and under-resources arms of government.
Australia has recently had to "increase the bar" at which mandatory reporting is required because the resources don't exist to even consider investigation of cases where the child's life isn't in immediate danger.
It's gross, but it seems politics around the world has found it's shared water level, and that level is happy with exploiting exploited children.
It's so disingenuous to say it's just a small requirement. It always starts off small than grows and grows into ever widening topics and unfavourable people. We've seen that plenty of times on the internet and in history. The good intentions in the early days won't make any difference in 20yrs from now.
A handful of EU MEPs keep pushing backdoored encryption and it keeps getting veto’d.
There are two legistive bodies in the EU, one is only allowed to propose law, the other is only allowed to vote on it.
Lots of braindead laws get put to a vote, theres no requirement that they get through.
I understand that raising the alarm is helpful, but it would be helpful if people took a second to understand how the EU works, the politicians involved and how their motions are perceived by the rest of parliament.
In the UK, I have a stormtrooper standing behind me in my bedroom as I type this. He just asked me to explain the context of the message I'm writing to you now.
Using this as a means to manufacture consent to implement-enforce such systems, and then what regulation will be used to counter the tyrannical takeover of these systems - who may be the most vile child predators seeking control-power to be able to do what they want - to pillage, rape, and murder as they please?
But here's the thing. If your app is known to be uses heavily by criminals ranging from Pedo's to drug dealers. You are liable. You run a carrier service. Much like the owner of omegle found out, yes you do have a duty of care. You can't just provide a service that knowingly provides a platform to criminal activity and do jack shit. You live in fairytale land if you think you can.
I upvoted your comment so that it has a bit of visibility because I know some people think this, but I disagree with it, very strongly.
First, your analogy is broken -- roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly.
Second, you propose your preferred moral economy as one that only curtails harms. In fact, you create another harm implementing what you think is right.
Reasonable people disagree about which is worse -- the creation and public support of a technocratic oligarchy in control of how humans communicate or the proliferation of some harms that take advantage of unfettered communication. But please don't be simple minded, pretending to yourself or others that there aren't real costs, social and physical, on both sides of this.
For myself, I think private communications are a human right and a massive good for society, and I don't condone criminal acts undertaken using messaging.
Indeed. NIMBYs in my area claim that we should shut down the train because criminals come from the inter city to commit crimes and then return to the city after. I see the claims against telegram to be the same.
That's not comparable, because there's an actual police service meant to take care of criminal activity, meaning that's the train is not a careless conduit with rampant unchecked lawless activity. And that's ignoring that NIMBYs just make up stuff and exaggerate, but even assuming their rampant fears were based in reality.
>First, your analogy is broken -- roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly.
and they're usually public property and policed. Routine police inspection on a road and in particular control of borders and key nodes in your transportation infrastructure isn't exactly controversial. (unless you're part of some extreme political faction). You know a lot of countries where people can drive without a license plate?
Private communication is important but it has always had limits, this crypto mentality of companies exercising no compliance, having no borders, ignoring the law and national security doesn't have a precedent. Historically people communicated say in the US using an American telecommunications network which without a doubt complied with legal requests. It's not at all self evident that we should tolerate telecoms infrastructure operated by a Russian out of Dubai that is primarily used by an enemy we're effectively at war with.
That's because they are different, police can come with a warrant to check your house for illegal activity but they can't monitor you remotely 24/7 with barely any human intervention and store everything you do indefinitely. With electronic communication you either get full privacy or none.
And no, putting company's in charge of your privacy isn't a solution, if they can be compelled to give away your communication history then they'll abuse it. Have you not learned anything from the Snowden leaks?
Police got a warrant for Durov and arrested him. How is that different? Yet some people are upset anyways.
And it's not true that with electronic communication you either get full privacy or none. You can have end-to-end encrypted messages with unencrypted metadata, so that when police observe a message implicating the sender in a crime (e.g. on an arrested suspect's phone) they can get a search warrant for the IP address or phone number associated with that account and then visit the owner in person to look at the messages on their phone. This doesn't allow police to read everyone's messages all the time undetected, but does allow them to read specific people's messages if they get a warrant.
Since Telegram doesn't only have unencrypted metadata but also plenty of unencrypted messages, there must've been many cases where a search warrant would've yielded lots of useful information. If Telegram didn't properly respond to all warrants, it seems fair to launch an investigation.
According to the Telegram FAQ (https://www.telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests) data on their servers is encrypted and the keys are split and stored in different jurisdictions (and different from the jurisdiction where the data is stored).
With such a setup what does it mean to comply with warrants? Are we saying that Telegram should voluntarily yield all information regardless of jurisdiction?
Ah, this multi-jurisdiction setup explains why Durov himself was targeted. As the presumed controlling entity behind that network of shell companies, serving him with a warrant seems like the most effective legal means to make Telegram comply.
There are entire Telegram groups devoted to publishing CSAM. They're publicly available, not E2E encrypted. Being there in such a channel puts the data on your device, unencrypted. You can report it all you want. Nothing happens. Been there, done it.
It is not just that. Weapons. Drugs. Terrorism [1]. Pornography depicting rape.
[1] Includes accelerationism. France just had a terrorist attack on a synagogue. Germany had one on a city festival. Could be related to either. We don't know!
And yet, with all above being said, as much of a cesspool Telegram is, I much rather have such centralized there than in an application with group E2E encryption. But even then, every once in a while you want to scare the herd to demotivate their (criminal) effort, just be careful not to flock them to a better alternative. Which is a real risk.
I think private communications are a human right as well. But I don’t think every conceivable way of communicating must be private. You can always go outside and talk privately with your neighbour.
To use your analogy: shouldn’t everyone look away when you drive by so that you can have private road usage?
There is tinted windows for that. I agree that not everything is private. But if two or more parties want to be able to communicate privately it most certainly shouldn't be the government making that impossible. It would be like mandating everyone must wear their state issued camera and microphone.
Why stop there? By your logic, the owners of every ISP that provides a pathway for those criminal bits also should be in jail. Every single organization in that pathway would be liable from the registrars to the developers of web libraries or other app services. The governments themselves would be liable in many cases where the government has nationalized internet services.
There is a principle in the free world that one is not criminally liable for the speech of others. This is the principle that allows ISP's, newspapers, web forums, Google, etc. etc. to exist. You demand that the principle be violated and the Internet be destroyed. I disagree.
Because we want to, and we can. I don't get how HN consistently fails to understand the actual social and political process by which regulations are made. I constantly see this argument which effectively boils down to "if you ban a thing, you will also need to ban everything else, which is absurd, so you shouldn't ban anything". But in real life we can choose what we ban. Everything is a trade-off; we can choose to ban something if the harm it creates is considered to outweigh its benefit to society.
It is open to society to decide that Telegram is more proximate to the harm being caused, and less otherwise socially useful, than an ISP, and on that basis punish the former but not the latter. (It is also reasonable to argue that Telegram is not sufficiently proximate to the harm and that it is sufficiently socially useful that it should be allowed to operate, and honestly I sympathise with that argument more. But my point is that it is a matter of weighing social harm vs benefit and not just a technical analysis of "where the bits go".)
If you get caught driving a getaway car for an armed robber, you are going to jail. Arguing "ah, but by that logic you'll also have to jail the guy who sold the robber his breakfast" isn't going to cut it, and rightly so.
Because 'we' want to. Who is this 'we' you are speaking about? Globalist authoritarian elite that you are somehow part of? Democratic voters? Communication application users? Whose this 'we'?
Well in Telegram's case the idea is that they knowingly provide taxi services to those criminals and do supposedly nothing when it's reported to them because they are "too small" to moderate everything
How do they "knowingly" service criminals ? Is there a check box to state that you are a criminal when you message someone ? I just installed Telegram and can't find it.
If we start weighing "social harm vs benefit" and not "where the bits go" - we quickly come to the Third Reich and "social harm vs benefit" of the Jewish people.
> But in real life we can choose what we ban. Everything is a trade-off; we can choose to ban something if the harm it creates is considered to outweigh its benefit to society.
This is the principle behind, and popularize by, Nazism and Soviet-style communism. In short, it is the arbitrary use of force against whichever targets the ruling bureaucrats deem to be "socially harmful". This principle leads inevitably to mass murder and war, as history has shown repeatedly and without exception.
You seem to fantasize that you'll be in the in-group who gets to decide who is harmful. But then one day it will be you who is considered harmful. And the state will sacrifice your life for the "benefit of society".
It is the principle behind all government. In fact it is not much more than a basic description of the concept of a government. Your government bans stuff too, I guarantee it.
No fantasies here, the state does plenty that I disagree with. But the idea that societies can regulate harmful conduct is not really that controversial outside of HN and a few other particularly libertarian bits of the internet.
It's certainly the principle behind most governments. But not all. The one shining exception is the United States of America. That government was founded on an entirely different principle, the principle of individual rights. This principle says that man, due to his nature, has rights that no one else, not even his government, is allowed to violate. These rights are not granted and revoked by government, but protected by it. And if the government violates those rights in a significant way, it is a person's duty to overthrow that government. This was a truly radical position in 1776. Unfortunately, it is still radical today, and little understood.
If you'd like to learn more about this, google the "Declaration of Independence" or "The Rights of Man" by the philosopher John Locke.
> That government was founded on an entirely different principle, the principle of individual rights. This principle says that man, due to his nature, has rights that no one else, not even his government, is allowed to violate.
That's far from a uniquely US principle. See, for example, the European Declaration of Human Rights.
The US places more emphasis on individual rights over the rights of the community, which is its prerogative, but the US is an outlier; most liberal democracies accept a little more restriction on individual rights for the good of the community.
You can argue it either way, but a lot of US commentators seem to get outraged that other countries might have a different viewpoint.
> Why stop there? By your logic, the owners of every ISP that provides a pathway for those criminal bits also should be in jail.
No, that is by your own logic, not GPs. GP clearly said: "You can't just provide a service that knowingly provides a platform to criminal activity and do jack shit.". Considering that ISPs do something about that activity, by GPs logic, owners of ISP should not be in jail. Am I worng?
Yes, you are wrong. Let me explain. GP laid out his principle above: "If your app is known to be uses heavily by criminals ranging from Pedo's to drug dealers. You are liable."
He doesn't say that doing "jack shit" (not exactly a fleshed out legal term) will remove that liability, as you are suggesting.
There are other ways to capture and ensnare criminals. Sacrificing our privacy for the "greater good" is a bridge too far.
As one counter point, think about all of the completely fine human behaviors that instantly become kompromat when the powers have access to your every communication. That is way more dangerous to democracy, freedom, and liberty than a slightly smaller chance of "not protecting the children".
Besides, if we actually cared so much about children, we wouldn't let them not get school lunches, we wouldn't sell them on gambling and gacha games, and we'd do a much better job of educating them.
*sigh* Dude, if it's really that relevant and compelling at least quote it properly. It's 2024, finding and copy-pasting is barely slower than typing a bad paraphrase.
> Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
-- A committee which included Benjamin Franklin
_____________
That said, this quote is typically misused, or at best being used wayyy outside its original context. [0]
The Penn family, the local semi-nobility of Pennsylvania, are offering the government a one-time "donation"... in exchange for getting a perpetual exemption from all taxes.
A committee of elected representatives--among them Franklin--are strongly opposed to it, since they believe the democratic legislature's "essential Liberty" to impose taxes for its citizens is way more important than any "temporary Safety" of a one-time lump sum.
And the key words in this quote are not Liberty and Safety even though they are capitalized - they are "essential" and "a little temporary". As long as these key words remain, the quote can be about anything:
Those who would give up essential Long-Term Economic Stability, to purchase a little temporary Shareholder Profits, deserve neither Long-Term Economic Stability nor Shareholder Profits.
Those who would give up essential Vendor Independence, to purchase a little temporary High-Resolution Retina Display, deserve neither Vendor Independence nor High-Resolution Retina Display.
Those who would give up essential Safety, to purchase a little temporary Liberty, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Those who would give up essential Refrigerator, to purchase a little temporary Stockpile of Peanut Butter, deserve neither Refrigerator nor Stockpile of Peanut Butter.
Not only you're responding with an ad-hominem, which is blatantly bad enough; but you're doing it against Benjamin Franklin? One of the most influential thinkers of his time who has contributed to the liberty of way more people than you ever will?
And I have no idea what you think you're adding to the discussion by adding this 'context'.
That phrase has a life of its own, and has stood the test of time.
When someone says that e=mc2, do you feel a need to make sure everyone knows the 'context' that Einstein took credit for some of his wife's work?
When someone quotes Gandhi to say "Be the change that you wish to see in the world", do you talk about him sleeping in a bed with his niece?
By the way, if you live in the West then your comfortable lifestyle is based on the work of slaves of various degrees. From forced prison laborers in America to cobalt and lithium miners in Africa, to actual full-on slave markets in Libya because tptb didn't like how un-exploitable the country was getting. We're all hypocrites, and pointing that out when it's not relevant just derails discussion.
Btw, Ben Franklin became an abolitionist later in life. He was elected as the president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery around 1785.
Perhaps, but Telegram is not really a E2EE chat app, but rather a social media. Like 90% of Telegram use (at least in my circles) is channels which are not E2EE on Telegram.
This arrest is not about E2EE.
The arrest is about how much responsibility social media platforms have about the content posted on them.
There is no good answers to that question, and the debate of topic online is utterly useless.
Well I mean in many countries, blocking the surveillance agency from listening in on your calls/texts/chats is illegal. So making an app that interferes with the agencies ability to "listen in" is infact a criminal enterprise.
How about adding "illegal thoughts" to that mix too. It is only one short step away from wearing a monitoring "headband". All subversion grows its first root in the mind of the citizen. Nipping this in the bud through detection and re-education guarantees peace and safety of society and the nation. If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.
The Telegram fanatics for some reason are unwilling to hear it but we'll say it again: the reason why we still have an Internet in 2024 is that all those services at least attempt some form of moderation.
With more or less success, sure, but they can at least say there is an attempt and they do take down stuff. Durov pretty much brags about not doing the bare minimum.
Telegram allows to report illegal content to moderators. Jail those who saw the content but didn't report it.
I am sure all those claims in the media about "cooperating with terrorists" is just a lie. Probably it is something related to not implementing fingerprints for copyrighted material.
Or Telegram is threat for current establishilment because of platform used for organising protests. It could be politically oriented like main purpose of DSA.
No because those platforms make the values token effort to curb illegal activity via moderation be it user performed or done by their own employees. Telegram does not do this. Anywhere at all. It's very different.
I know chat rooms that have been nuked for Pornography etc. I reported some chats where I've seen inappropriate content and I received notifications that they were deleted. A lot of users are muted/banned too for illegal activities. It isn't exactly unmoderated, but the staff can't exactly search every single server under the sun for illegal material or activities. You probably don't know how bad Matrix is, out of 200k servers, 70k were banned for CSAM and there are still a lot of them around.
Last time I used Telegram and had a look at the "discussions around your area" or something, I couldn't find anything that wasn't about selling drugs or fake documents. It was a giant drug delivery platform.
It might be different in other places but here, in a large city of continental Europe, Telegram is definitely little more than an enabler for illegal activities.
Well, it really tells you haven't tried buying drugs on Telegram. It is all scammers, every single one of them (maybe with the exception for prostitutes but I bet most of these are scam too). There is pretty much 0% chance you'll buy drugs or fake documents using the geo search. They will scam you for a transfer and disappear. It really is no that different from a spam email, just different media and targeting.
That said, you CAN buy drugs on Telegram, sure, it is just not as easy as everyone seems to think. You need to know the account name of a service that delivers in your area, you need to be reeealy careful when typing the account name because for every real drug seller account there are multiple fakes with slight variation in the name that fish for people using search, and then even if you have a verified account and they sold you drugs last month, there is like 30% chance that the account have been compromised and now you are talking with scammers again.
Note that selling drugs is a victimless crime. Also, you could report those illegal posts, or you knowingly and willingly allowed criminals to continue their activities?
> If your app is known to be uses heavily by criminals ranging from Pedo's to drug dealers.
What about toilet paper? It's used by quite some criminals (not all that said: many criminals have very poor hygiene and just put their undies back on without wiping after number two).
Should we arrest people manufacturing toilet paper?
Anyway we all know it's not about criminals: it's about controlling speech so that protests as in Barcelona, the UK (where people who are denouncing rapes and killings are put in jail, while the actual rapists get very light sentences like only six months in jail), etc. cannot organize themselves.
It's about controlling the narrative.
And they're using useful idiots resorting to broken logic to push their totalitarian agenda.
Well much like the owner of omegle found out you can't provide platforms for criminal activities and make no effort to curb it. It only takes a 30 second google before you find telegram rooms offering all kinds of illegal stuff. You don't find that on Twitter. Twitter is atleast mildly moderated. Telegram could have moderation built in to catch illegal activities but it chooses to do nothing. See the difference?
The fun fact is that while Telegram won't make use of something akin to PicDNA to automatically detect CSAM, it will very happily take down your channel or group if you distribute copyrighted material.
They do know how to respond to copyright complaints. Not so much about other, far more serious sort of illegal activities. Just on that point, they should have expected something to be done against them.
Telegram is end-to-end encrypted in private chats, the Telegram team doesn't even know what people are discussing. Same should happen with Whatsapp or Signal. Should Whatsapp or Signal be accountable for what terrorists talk in private?
App can have internal keyword check that could open backdoor to law enforcement when certain terms are said. *fbi enters the conversation* probably won't be in your chat log anytime soon but you can't argue telegram, signal and whatsapp can't do it. Whatsapp being fbs darling almost certainly does already and signal servers anti spam folder is smelling mighty like a five eyes backdoor.
Tbh given both those apps company's have dealings with gov in aus I'm gonna say signals probably already got a backdoor into em. If you don't think so you don't know aus law well enough or who signals are.
Also the owners of the apps aren't liable for the content of the conversations. Their liable for providing a platform for the conversation to take place and for not knowingly taking available efforts to curb criminal activity on that platfor/service. It's like hey I'm gonna rent you a store house to hide all your illegal drugs in Mr gang member. I'm not doing the hiding or anything but I'm assisting the activity by providing the store house. I could make efforts to curb such activity like you know doing a rental inspection once every six months but I choose not to and turn a blind eye. Am I assisting a crime or am I completely innocent? Now repeat this but telegram is the store house.
Telegram has an open-source client and is moving to verifiable builds (not on every platform). You cannot hide such a backdoor, and users would be able to recompile a clean version of the app.
> "Thierry Breton, the French commissioner, had posted the warning letter on X, the platform owned by Musk, hours before the billionaire interviewed US presidential candidate Donald Trump, also on X."
> "On Tuesday the European Commission denied Breton had approval from its president Ursula von der Leyen to send the letter."
Ursula von der Leyen is not the Queen of the EU, no matter how much she'd like to be. Other people have the authority to speak and act officially without checking with her. That doesn't make their statements any less official, nor would her endorsement make them any more official.
>The fact that it was wound back by the head of the EU's executive branch - Breton's boss - demoted the statement to "the opinion of the commissioner".
I don't remember anything about "the opinion of the commissioner" in the letter, but there was huge "eu commission" sign right on the top. So the letter went as complitly "official" position of commission.
The contents of the letter are within his brief, but the timing of it was done in such a way as to impact the EU's foreign policy, which lies outside of his remit.
> According to the French authorities, Durov, who is estimated to be worth €13.9 billion by Forbes, is being charged as an accomplice to crimes including drug trafficking, fraud, terrorism and crimes against children over Telegram’s alleged “lack of moderation and cooperation with law enforcement”, as well for Telegram’s use of disposable numbers, and for allowing cryptocurrency transfers that cannot be monitored by the authorities. - https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/08/25/russian-billiona...
Seems more a NATO intelligence operation - apparently, there are rumours that he met recently Putin, and had extensive discussions with Kremlin officials - https://archive.is/8sdYQ . The investigation against him is pretty broad according to the charges laid against him by the French authorities - https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files... (PDF, english translation from page 3).
I find it highly amusing that people on here actually think secure messaging platforms are "locally backdoored".
Despite what the article says, Telegram is not even a nominally end-to-end encrypted platform. You need to jump through hoops to get end-to-end encryption on the platform.
On Telegram, even private messages are not end-to-end encrypted by default. The so-called secret chats are end-to-end encrypted but are a major pain to use.
EU has been complaining about Telegram's end-to-end encryption for a long time and they want to implement some regulations to basically add backdoors into all messaging apps. I don't really see how this case will go on since at least private chats are encrypted so Telegram (theoretically at least) can't see the contents.
Except Telegram has much less E2EE than Signal or Whatsapp.
It's not on by default, works only between 2 devices, they both have to be online at the same time and you can't access anything from the web. And group chats don't support it at all. Private chats are not end to end encrypted by default and it's actually quite clumsy to encrypt them so almost nobody uses it.
It's really weird that Telegram is singled out like this.
That was my first thought as well. There are good uses for telegram and some things work better than signal ( API comes to mind ). But just from privacy perspective, telegram is much more easily neutered than signal.
I will admit I am confused. I can only assume something else is at play.
edit: The only thing I can think of is that there some rather gruesome channels showing Russia/Ukraine, Palestine/Israel toll. I wonder if it was decided that general population should not have access to these.
I can't tell if it's just uninformed grassroots mistrust of big tech, or the result of astroturf PsyOps to get more people to use the app with weaker encryption.
Encryption is really not the main issue here. I think nerds may not fully grasp Telegram's security model: it's essentially stateless, not tied to any particular country. Its infrastructure is distributed across various jurisdictions, with no official representation in many countries—no subsidiaries, nothing.
As a result, it doesn't respond to authorities because it doesn't have to. However, this approach is unsustainable and unacceptable for many governments, both in the East and the West. That's why he's being accused in France: he is not "cooperating with law enforcement".
Or it could be that he has French citizenship; subject to French law. Spreading your infrastructure across legal jurisdiction doesn't make you stateless - it just ensures you're subject to the laws of each jurisdiction you operate in.
I don't think that's accurate. Like any other business, he collects money from the Western users, so that's one easy choke point. He is also fully accountable to Apple, otherwise he can forget about 1.5 billion Iphone users forever. (apparently, he also just seems to enjoy visiting France and other countries he decided to go against)
He is partially accountable to Apple - he's agreed to a TOS and EULA, as well as conditions for furnishing his Apps. Even with Apple's authoritarian control of their ecosystem though, he isn't fully accountable to Apple. Apple is not a nation or a court that can make decisions like that on their behalf; they have been sued several times for taking punitive action that is illegal obstruction.
Nobody is "fully accountable" to Apple. Apple is fully accountable to the law, and that's that.
he has to disclose his company's location, where they are paying taxes, probably how much money they are making, which makes it far from "stateless, not tied to any particular country". Through that, he also is forced to comply with local laws that Apple plays by, or get kicked out of those countries iPhones', or the App Store entirely. Apple can and does take that action by requests from local governments, e.g. remove a gay dating app from Turkey's app store by the government request.
Signal and WhatsApp do have that. You can easily use group chats that way, you just have to get invited. You can't look for them and join them.
It's really easy for e.g. a drugdealer to post QR codes or something on lamp posts with their contact and then they can invite people. Making Telegram go away is just going to hide the problem, not solve it.
If you don't cooperate while having the data and your approach to legal compliance is "votes on your personal TG channel", expect to get arrested. At least the services with actual E2EE worth a shit can make a convincing argument they can't produce the data.
Going after the one with the least care factor first would make a lot of sense, assuming their cryptographic implementation is inline with their care factor.
> It's really weird that Telegram is singled out like this.
wasn't he bragging that he operates with like a dozen people or something. I can also see him just punting on many kinds of moderation (outside of the kind that helps running the service), because it's a lot of subjective, dirty work and an army of people.
In a way, Durov's arrest retroactively vindicates every EU citizen's decision to use Telegram (up until now), as it proves that they haven't been getting what they want from him. I am not nearly as concerned about Durov himself or the government of Dubai getting to read my messages as I am about the EU or one of its member states doing so, as there simply isn't much I can see the former doing with that data. The real danger only arises when the people who can read your messages and the people who can dispatch dudes with guns to your house are in cahoots. (For the same reason, I tend to roll my eyes at warnings about various forms of Chinese spyware.)
Iran and Russia also had reasonable laws once. Then things changed.
The problem is, you can't delete your old chats from the %EU_NSA_analogue%'s servers once they get there. The funniest part is, you might think that you are safe because that one sussy message was posted so long ago. Well, statutes of limitations are changed/ignored just as easily as any other law.
Paternity testing is illegal in France. Attempting to verify a very basic fact that your child is indeed yours is criminal. So is outsourcing it to other (even neighboring) countries. If French customs intercept DNA samples or results in the mail, the perpetrators can face up to a year in prison and a €15,000 fine.
EU countries prosecuted Assange, the Pirate Bay guys and now Durov. People in countries like Britain appear to frequently get persecuted for political posts. I'm sure that I've said things online that could get me in trouble now or would at some point in the future when the Overton window shifts in some other direction.
If Apple hypothetically agreed to iMessage backdoors, why would you trust the Telegram app updates served up by Apple's app store? Western government's can pretty much hack into any device they want - the only reason for backdooring messaging apps would be for dragnet surveillance, and I don't see big tech having the appetite for the bad publicity and lawsuits that will result when that inevitably becomes public
Apple already has a kind of "backdoor": they store the keys for encrypted cloud backups in their cloud as well. They advertise that cloud data are encrypted but prefer not to mention that they also have a key to decrypt it. Even with the highest level of security [1] your contacts list in Apple Cloud are not encrypted. Why? Probably someone asked for this.
CSV or PNG weren't created with encryption in mind, but one can easily encrypt them. Apple can always make their own proprietary protocol. This doesn't explain anything. However the version that the govt wants to be able to see who is in person't contact list explains it well.
As I understand, this protocol is used between an iPhone and iCloud and it being open or not doesn't change anything because there is no alternative iCloud or iPhone.
You’re mistaken, you don’t only connect to your iCloud from iPhones.
You connect from any compatible client; and the effort that has gone in to the Mail client for iOS means it’s a decent enough mail client for non-iCloud mail accounts too.
Apples closed ecosystem is mostly its developer tooling and iMessage.
> If Apple hypothetically agreed to iMessage backdoors, why would you trust the Telegram app updates served up by Apple's app store?
I wouldn't. I don't trust Apple hardware or software, and I don't see why anyone who cares about these issues ever would. But fortunately Telegram runs on devices and OSes from a wide range of suppliers, many of which might be less open to the influences that apply to Apple.
>The European Commission has told its staff to start using Signal, an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, in a push to increase the security of its communications.
Also Telegram is not E2E by default. You need to activate it per chat. By default and in groups it is only server encrypted.
Private chats are a hassle to initiate and not multi-device.
Most use normal chats.
With anonymous accounts, using anonymous +888 numbers, whose price has increased from $16 to $1000+ in a matter of a year, it is indeed a very convenient playground for all sorts of activities.
It was the default method of contacting the dealers on Russian darknet when everything was a just a message board (hell, it was available without TOR) and not a proper marketplace
Why would a criminal mastermind pay $1000 for an anonymous Telegram account when they could buy a burner phone with a prepaid SIM included for like $20 to register and throw it out? In my experience the people who buy those are more Durov superfan than Keyser Söze. And evidence of criminality on Telegram predates the Fragment numbers by a while - for instance in like 2014-2015 pretty much the only time Telegram was in the news was in connection to ISIS. They could also just use Signal which is provably private.
"Burner phones" are a TV trope of the 90s and 00s. In most countries you cannot get a phone number without registering your ID with the telecom provider.
I’m referring to tracfones or similar prepaid devices which you can buy in the US for very cheap. In other countries if you apply yourself just a little bit you can get the same result. Greece has SIM card registration yet you can buy pre registered ones off the street in Athens. Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Estonia, UK, and other countries have no SIM card registration at all and roaming works good across the EU. And you only need the number once to sign up.
There are no vendors, Telegram issues those numbers. So it's basically a pass to create account w/o mobile number requirement, if you're ready to pay for it.
> To get an anonymous number, you need to go purchase one through the Fragment blockchain... Durov calls Fragment “an amazing success” that already generated over $50 million in sales in less than a month.
That concept is as old as politics itself, the Romans already stated quod licet Iovi non licet bovi (What's allowable for Jupiter is not allowed for cattle), the modern version of which is rules for thee, not for me or do as I say, not as I do.
BTW, install your own XMPP server and use OMEMO-compatible clients - Conversations on Android, Gajim on desktop - and you get to have access to non-surveilled [1]communications just like those politico's.
[1] assuming that your client and server devices remain uncompromised, not a given if you happen to be a high-value target. Caveat emptor.
/s aside, politicians need privacy for the same reason the rest of us do: they work with sensitive information and it's really important they don't get blackmailed.
Simultaneously, they need a light shone on their private lives for the same reason they want to do that to the rest of us: to make sure they're not abusing their access to sensitive information, getting blackmailed, or otherwise being nefarious.
I have absolutely no idea how to fix this apparent paradox. Perhaps it can't be done. Even if it can, tech is unstable and this is all a moving target — the way GenAI is going, I suspect that we'll all have to carry always-on cameras that log and sign everything just to prove we didn't do whatever some picture or video shows us doing.
For sensitive information, I mean e.g. a whistleblower has contacted them, or they're working out the finances for next year and there's potential for market manipulation based on the discussions so far, or they're discussing an emergency (health/economic/military) response that will be unpopular with someone no matter what.
If you are with your example referring to some specific example of them committing crimes, I refer you to my second paragraph in the original message:
> Simultaneously, they need a light shone on their private lives for the same reason they want to do that to the rest of us: to make sure they're not abusing their access to sensitive information, getting blackmailed, or otherwise being nefarious.
> I suspect that we'll all have to carry always-on cameras that log and sign everything just to prove we didn't do whatever some picture or video shows us doing.
Yeah good luck with that :')
PS: A change to "guilty until proven innocent" policy would require a serious constitutional change in most countries.
The main problem with Telegram is it’s not subject to Western surveillance and censorship. Best I can tell, it’s also not subject to Eastern surveillance and censorship which is why it was (unsuccessfully) banned in Russia in 2018. As of right now, this is one of the few places where you can find true information about WW3 which is currently ongoing in Ukraine. This is true of all sides of the conflict: the only truly uncensored source right now is Telegram, whether you’re in Ukraine, in Russia or in the west. People investing hundreds of billions of dollars into the war do not like this lack of control over the narrative. That is why Durov is in jail.
Speculative. We don't know why he is in jail. Maybe his lawyers know why, maybe not. Maybe the prosecutor knows, maybe not. We don't know if there's a case. There's hardly anything we do know.
My take is he doesn't reply to LE requests related to CSAM. That is one of the few things we (as in: our governments) don't like anywhere in the world, and Telegram is known to respond slowly to [such] requests. But I won't pretend I know for sure. Cause either way, it is a neat honeypot compared to technically better protocols.
What's your method of finding true information outside of Telegram?
Telegram is structured like a mix of a social network and a blogging platform. You find people you trust and read them. Sometimes they would repost someone else and if you like what they write you can read them too.
You look at both sides and try to get some nuggets of truth out of that mountain of bullshit by checking what doesn’t line up. Thing is, though, if you only look at the mainstream media, you can’t even figure out what’s bullshit - the conflicting narratives are suppressed so well that editors of Pravda would blush.
"The deputy speaker of the state Duma, Vladislav Davankov, said he had called on Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to secure Durov’s release. “The arrest of [Durov] could have political motives and be a means of obtaining the personal data of Telegram users. We must not allow this,” he said on his Telegram channel."
Yes, in case like Facebook it would be easy to say that it provides information to the U.S. gov.
With Telegram, as you say, the Russian ban (somewhere around 2014) could have been designed to signal that Telegram is not run by the FSB.
This arrest, on the other hand, could have been intended signal that Telegram is not run by the CIA.
There have been a couple of house searches, extradition orders and YouTube bans all in the last two weeks for pro Russian commentators. I always wonder if these individuals are genuine or actually working for the U.S. gov.
Anyway, together with the latest crackdown of the EU on Musk all these events could be genuine and not staged.
after watching Carlson's interview with Durov have come to think he may be the genuine article. Very interesting bit his relating us agents trying to recruit a dev and pushing some specified but alas unnamed oss libraries to use in Telegram.
A bunch of people in comments here seem to misunderstand what telegram is. It is not just a messaging app, it is essentially a platform like twitter, with channels, hundreds of thousands of subscribers to those.
While I fully support E2EE communication with no back-doors, I think it is perfectly fair for governments to have some control to take down large channels that are clearly against the law. I do not know the true cause for the arrest, but I hope it is because of the latter not the former.
The moment you put even the option of backdoors, some governments will abuse it heavily.
What might be essential right to human communication might suddenly become "illegal" according to the government.
So there should never ever be, under no circumstances, even the code and infra to be there to provide backdoor/censorships, otherwise it _will_ be abused by limiting people's communication in the moment they literally need the most.
Even in WhatsApp which has E2EE they have reporting mechanisms so if someone starts a broadcast channel with the explicit intention of promoting illegal behaviour, it can at least be taken down by reporting. Personal experience and second hand accounts tell us that Telegram was known to mismanage these things in ways that a company of its size and impact cannot ignore.
There’s a lot of false dichotomy in the ongoing discussions here which assumes there’s a binary “control to the gov” or “freedom for all” choice. It’s a spectrum where at the most basic level, a robust process to handle reports of illegal activity should be accepted.
"Illegal" according to who? Government? The same government which can decide something else that we would consider fundamental right is also "illegal" at any time?
Illegal things are going to happen mostly in physical world regardless of where they plan it. The government can catch them while they're at it or after. The governments are fear-mongering and creating a public narrative to support mass surveillance.
There are only very few illegal things that can happen within the telegram app like fraud, or minor abuse. Those must be reported by end users and individual actions can be taken against them.
What the government is asking is a massive backdoor for surveillance in the name of preventing crime, but they decide what they can monitor. It is a pandora box and if you open it there is no going back. Even if the current government is asking it with purest intentions and manage it well, the same can not be said for any next elected governments.
> I think it is perfectly fair for governments to have some control to take down large channels that are clearly against the law
How is a channel "against the law?"
Do you mean access to the channel is creating opportunities for lawlessness that simply wouldn't exist otherwise? I'm not sure the French justice system has demonstrated that it has exhausted all options other than to handcuff a CEO of one particular platform.
It will probably help if people take the time to read Article 8 in the European Declaration of Human Rights:
Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private
and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority
with the exercise of this right except such as is in
accordance with the law and is necessary in a
democratic society in the interests of national
security, public safety or the economic well-being
of the country, for the prevention of disorder or
crime, for the protection of health or morals, or
for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Thus a channel where terror actions are planned /can be made/ "against the law", but it will not automatically be so, unless there is a specific french law that makes it so.
A channel that incites violence is against the law (in some countries). A channel selling drugs is against the law. These are few examples. I do not how the specific details of the French case to comment on the specifics. I could believe the arrest is poorly justified, but I have reasonably belief in their justice system.
A channel doesn’t do that though. People do that. If I take a megaphone to the street corner and start selling drugs, are you really going to arrest the megaphone I used?
Weird parallel. If you're on the street it's easier to arrest you.
Now if your megaphone is used exclusively to sell drugs and for some reason you cannot be arrested, then it makes sense to confiscate it?
You're in your house using a walkie talkie connected to a megaphone placed in the streets, and you're yelling that you sell drugs. Should the police leave the megaphone/walkie talkie untouched because "it's just an object, it's not the megaphone selling drugs?" Or should they remove it, and try to find you?
> How does an inanimate object incite violence or sell drugs?
Please stop being so (seemingly-intentionally) obtuse about this. Certainly the participants of the channel are the ones who incite violence or sell drugs. But some laws also make it illegal to "host" the people who do those sorts of things. A Telegram channel can host these people.
> If France can't access these channels, how do they know the violence or drugs are actually occurring _in_ France?
They can access those channels.
> And if they could know that, what does Telegram have to do with it?
Telegram is hosting the content, and apparently under French law, the host can also be liable.
> Wouldn't they just be able to go and arrest the violent person or the drug dealer?
Not if they don't know where the people are, because Telegram hides their real identities and locations.
I'm not being obtuse, I'm exceptionally uncomfortable with someone rather blithely saying a "channel is against the law." I'm probing the depths of that. I'm sorry if this is somehow inconvenient to you but I have no intention of altering my behavior and I find it rude that you would even ask in such a way.
> A Telegram channel can host these people.
Is this the majority of users? Is Telegram intentionally marketing it's services to these users? Does it do internal research to be more appealing to this use case?
> They can access those channels.
So Telegram is not intentionally hiding them from the government or preventing their discovery and infiltration by law enforcement? Then why arrest the CEO?
> and apparently under French law, the host can also be liable.
If you're comfortable saying "well, it's legal in France" then what do you hope to gain from further discussion with someone you believe is going to be intentionally obtuse?
> because Telegram hides their real identities and locations.
They are buying drugs? Doesn't this require two people to meet up and physically exchange goods and money? What good does outlawing the channel do?
It's not so much obtuseness as different assumptions about what is "normal" law: most young American computer-science trained programmers probably believe that ISPs or even Pirate Bay websites are not responsible for online crimes such as piracy, the authorities should go after the distributors of pirated material, and so this event does not fit the prior mental schema. It's a difference due to values, expectations, context having to do with how we reason about technology and in large part this depends on one's background technical culture, which varies depending on country as well as the type of university of study, exposure to Silicon Valley attitudes, etc.
Yes, and telephone operators are required to give law enforcement enough access in order to track down people who do crimes over the telephone.
Telegram does not do that, and does not shut down the illegal behavior. The problem isn't that illegal stuff happens on Telegram, the problem is that Telegram won't help law enforcement when that illegal behavior is found.
> are required to give law enforcement enough access in order to track down people who do crimes over the telephone.
They are not; however, required to prevent certain people on a prescribed government list or criteria from owning or using a telephone or from dialing certain numbers.
> won't help law enforcement
So it's not because a "channel is against the law."
"Probably" doesn't cut it. If law enforcement doesn't observe it (as would likely be the case on an E2EE-by-default platform), then there's nothing actionable they can do.
If they do observe it, and the platform owners are responsive to taking down illegal content and/or providing information on the participants, then likely law enforcement is satisfied with that.
you're right. Only they have probably have the fullest data on how much crime is moderated or unmoderated on what messenger, the rest is speculation. He probably just got cocky and overconfident, thinking he can beef with the EU on the same level like Musk or Gates.
So you endorse governments from the middle-east being in their right to delete anything they see as "illegal" because they are blasphemous for example?
I think that interpretation of GP's stance is pretty uncharitable.
If the thing they want to delete is run by an entity that has a physical presence in that country, then they -- unfortunately -- have the right to get that material deleted.
For better or worse, we are all bound by the laws of the place where we physically reside. If we want to do or allow things online that are legal where we are, but are illegal in other countries, then we shouldn't visit those countries.
It doesn't matter if anyone "endorses" repressive governments in doing their repressive things; they are legally able to do those things to people physically present within their borders. That's just the reality of the situation.
France claims Durov allowed stuff that's illegal in France. He went to France, so France has the ability to punish Durov for his alleged misdeeds. It doesn't matter if we think that's right or wrong; that's just how the world works.
National laws are largely based on the local morals; for instance in Europe breath is more or less indecent to show in public. A woman being topless on the beach, even in France, could be arrested, in theory (in practice it would just be "please put on some cloth, madam").
The laws are (usually) defined by the people of a country, based on their idea of morality, and are totally in their right to reject blasphemous stuff or whatever. It's their home, after all.
The only thing non-negotiable, to me, is that the Declaration of the Human Rights is universal and no law, anywhere, should go against them.
> in Europe breast is more or less indecent to show in public.
There is no single "Europe". I have seen many women sunbathing topless in Denmark - it seems to be totally acceptable there. Haven't seen that in France - but it has a very strong nudist culture dating back at least to the 60s. Some of these nudist beaches are actually famous e.g. Cape d'Agde.
And then we didn’t even talk about Spain, and all the German tourists in, say, Mallorca. If anything, this is a stark difference between the EU and the US, in general — the EU is much less afraid of a nipple being shown in public, both in arts and everything.
I once attended a local one man show where the actor's private parts were exposed for a second or two (by accident). There were a lot of kids in the audience (including mine). I was a bit uncomfortable for a second but we laughed it off with the friends.
No, there is no spectrum when it comes to Free Speech. Free Speech is an ideal that promotes total freedom to say whatever you want and is against all (state) censorship.
(And btw, I'm unaware of anything that exists that is a 'spectrum' apart from the electromagnetic spectrum. To have the quality of being a spectrum, the subject must continuously span a 1-dimensional space. It's a way overused metaphor, in my opinion, especially for political positions which are anything but 1-dimensional.)
So you correctly identify that modelling it as a one-dimensional spectrum is a gross over-simplification. Then conclude that as it's not a one-dimensonal spectrum, it must be a binary property? Rather than accepting that reality is more complex than is easily captured in common language?
> Then conclude that as it's not a one-dimensonal spectrum, it must be a binary property?
I can see how you made that interpretation but that's not what I was saying. Free Speech is an ideal (not a binary property). I doubt that that you will find any human society with a system of laws that puts absolutely no restrictions on speech. That still doesn't mean that you can talk about Free Speech as a 'spectrum'. It's an ideal that ppl strive for, to varying degrees and across different domains. (Perhaps similarly to how Truth is an ideal that ppl strive for; Truth is not a 'spectrum'.)
Hate speech is a nebulous term, extremely dependent on the speaker's values.
Plus, people aren't really obliged to love one another or their institutions. Why should I pretend, for example, that I respect some dead Iron Age prophet and people who follow him like sheep?
And yet anti-religious speech is usually perceived as hate speech by the religious folks on the receiving end.
'Hate speech' is a term deliberately coined to undermine the ideal of Free Speech.
There is no need for the label, other than to serve this purpose. We already have long existing words for what is lumped under so-called 'hate speech', such as bigotry, or invective or slander. But they don't contrast so neatly against Free Speech as the invented (subjective) label 'Hate Speech' does, which is why it was (only recently) coined.
My point on spectrum wasn't relating to free speech but rather free speech regulation.
Open discourse is universally recognized as a generally good thing for society.
So, we can try to embrace Free Speech ideals even as we grant our government right to censor some speech and draw (a somewhat arbitrary) line of what's allowed.
We've seen Russia, for example, abuse that power even though free speech is written into their constitution, they use that power to censor political speech and what they refer to as blasphemy, so we know this power can and has been abused but it's also possible, so, perhaps, you are right.
there is no solution to this. If you want to do business in EU (for example, to be available in EU's Apple Appstore), you have to comply, otherwise Apple will be forced to kick you out, and if they don't, they will be harassed by the authorities until they do. If you want to do business in Saudi Arabia or Turkey or any other country you agree or disagree with, it's the same thing. If Turkey says something is "blasphemous" you either comply or withdraw from Turkey entirely. By now every government that cares has figured out how this works, and it really doesn't matter whether you "endorse" this or not, this is how it works.
Ah very interesting. Thanks for making that distinction! To me, I’m wondering at what critical mass of people should you need to provide a back door to the government? Is it 2? 3? 100? 1000? Are the number of people the right indicator here? Genuinely curious of people’s thoughts. I haven’t though too deeply about this.
There is no need for backdoor anything, when there are public channels.
I do not know the specifics of French case though, so I don't know if their case is about those or some private chats.
You seem to assume there is a “need” to backdoor the people’s communication. Liberty of the people assumes there is not a need nor a right of the State to do so
I am long done with commenting on this platform, as most of Russian people, who cannot write here (and most of other western internet forums) what they think. I will make an exception in this case, however.
1. "I think it is perfectly fair for governments to take down large channels that are clearly against the law"
Telegram obviously acts upon such requests Here in Italy I cannot access the channels of RIA and Sputnik, obviously a request was made to Telegram on behalf of EU /Italy, and Telegram complied.
2. I think that you, in your US bubble, which you THINK guarantees free speech, misunderstand yourself what Telegram is. Right now, it is the ONLY wide audience platform in the world, where Russian people can freely (as opposed to, say, HN) write what they really think. And it is true as much for the people who are "pro", as for the people who are "against Putin", (I use these nonsense labels to adapt what I write to the general american level of "understanding" Russia).
> [...] your US bubble, which you THINK guarantees free speech [...]
That's a very common misunderstanding (even among Americans) of what the First Amendment actually guarantees: It protects you from government censorship of speech, but does absolutely nothing to compel private individuals or corporations to carry your speech. (In fact, compelled speech has been ruled to be a violation itself.)
That absence of such legal protections can definitely be seen as having a chilling effect on free speech in practice, but as I interpret it, currently the assumption seems to be that legal intervention is not necessary due to market forces achieving the same or a similar outcome implicitly. There's also strong resistance from a value perspective against the idea, since these provisions themselves might be incompatible with the FA for reasons mentioned above.
You can definitely have some discussions around whether additional "duty to contract" rules should apply, e.g. in the same way as there's a law in Europe that makes it illegal for banks to not give somebody a bank account in certain circumstances, but nothing like this exists at the moment.
> Right now, it is the ONLY wide audience platform in the world, where Russian people can freely (as opposed to, say, HN) write what they really think
Hackernews has always been very strictly moderated to maintain a specific type and culture of discussion. By necessity, that excludes certain types of comments. In that sense, it's always been very far away from a "free speech platform".
Most peoples homes would count. Most people don’t enforce their governments laws on each other. They have their own moral code and logic that takes precedence over whatever the politicians have actually penned on paper.
This is no different than a Tor server being shut down for sharing illegal content, like CSAM, which is what Telegram was doing. Pavel Durov not taking action to shut down CSAM is an illegal offense and should be punished.
North Korean meth is sold in bulk on Telegram channels in South Korea. Drug abuse is out of control and crypto currency is used by NK to sell drugs to SK and use funds for its regime.
Since it's NK responsible for manufacturing the meth, I'm sure they have established easy methods to get it into SK, China, and shipping out of ports in NK and into other countries.
One detail that's missing from the English article is why he got arrested.
The French article mentions:
Why was he under threat of a search warrant?
The Justice considers that the absence of moderation, cooperation with law enforcement and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable numbers, cryptocurrencies...) makes him an accomplice to drug trafficking, child-crime offenses and swindling.
Private messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted either. The so-called secret chats are end-to-end encrypted but are a major pain to use. I doubt that feature sees much use.
As said before: the whole E2E, CSAM diskussion is not really the issue here. This is afaik about complying mostly to very specific takedown requests (as telegram offers no legal address inside the EU) and more general platform regulations that require mechanisms to prevent illegal content. Telegram does not offer any E2E encrypted group chat and actually actively interferes in groups by pushing advertisements, so they should be able to also block illegal content.
Having said that I am no fan of installing law enforcement inside private companies. However, telegrams noncompliance with court orders is problematic particularly related to protecting human rights of 3rd parties in the digital age.
It means complying with an order from a judge. Just like every other social media or really any form of communications (including emails, phone calls, letters) that operate in France (and in the EU) do.
If you think the governments of the world do not have the metadata of every single phone call and at the very least an outside picture of every letter being sent by non-companies, then I have a boat te sell you.
The post office and the phone company refuse to cooperate with law enforcement and offer disposable phone numbers and means to move money without trace/attribution?
Just because he is the CEO doesn’t mean he is directly liable. The company is a separate entity. I don’t see anyone arresting Elon or other CEOs because of “not enough moderation.” Most actions are to block platform access. There must be something else for sure.
Twitter doesn't encrypt messages, so there is indeed no chance of that happening - after all the reasoning for this arrest is fundamentally inapplicable to Twitter.
It's however a very very very slippery slope to prosecute someone for providing the tools to hold encrypted communication, just because this is also used by criminals. A lot of privacy oriented services would probably have to exit France if this holds up
by default telegram doesn't encrypt anything. I'm not sure if you where implying that telegram had encryption and therefore hiding illicite activities.
The problems is the huge telegram channels spreading hacks and illicite tricks.
I don’t know in France, but at least in Italy companies are not a shield for penal responsibility; crimes are always committed by persons. If a company does something criminal, someone is responsible for that decision within the company, and that could be the CEO.
Elon Mustk is a very important person; Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Twitter. He provides services to the military with the Starlink and he is deeply connected to the state with SpaceX.
On the other hand Pavel Durov is "homeless". He is like a normal citizen.
If a court orders twitter to take down a tweet, and twitter doesn't comply,
then I believe anybody that is responsible for that inaction, including Elon if he was aware and didn't act may be tried
> TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.
So they're going for the ISPs too, then? Considering the drug traffickers, child crime offenders and swindlers were actually paying the ISPs, NOT telegram.
But on a serious note if he's a billionaire then he can drop the whole monetization schtick. Telegram has become unusuable in the last few years. There's crypto scam ads everywhere.
Whenever I open Youtube via an EU proxy, I see "a crypto scam" video at the front page, the first one. The title is "+35 ETH generated last month by effectively using the contract bot for trading" and the account name is "Web3 developer", and the label says "Sponsored". The thumbnail displays a happy bearded man's face resembling that famous Youtuber who gives away money, a fire emoji and words "+35 ETH in July personal bot".
Maybe this is not a scam and therefore is allowed? Maybe it is a joke video? I didn't watch the video, but the title and thumbnails looks like a "scam".
I don't know. I analyzed the code from below the video with GPT[0] and it flagged a bunch of stuff it considered shady.
[0] Every time I mention using AI my posts get downvoted to infinity, so take the above with a grain of salt :)
I don't know anything about coding crypto, but it looks to me like it has a bunch of functions which each return a little hex string which it merges together into a wallet address which it then transfers all your funds to. I could be totally wrong and it's all above board.
You can see that most functions deal with converting hex strings to bytes or parsing utf-8 despite their name. For example, checkLiquidity seems to just convert hex representation to binary and not what its name says.
The contract is payable, i.e. will accept ether as payment but doesn't actually do anything.
From a glance looks like the withdrawal function is setup to generate the address of the scammer - through all of those obfuscated functions that have hex string slices - so ultimately only they can remove the funds.
I think this might be not an address belonging to the scammer, but an address of an exchange or something like that. Why would he write his address in clear text.
I can corroborate GP's claim. I've used AdBlock at home, but at work my Youtube main page has a persistent ad that's like what GP described. Location: Hong Kong with an office network that presumably VPNs to USA.
I heard it directly from a YC alum who said he helped me push a post to the top. But this was several years ago. I didn't mean that YC alums would be less likely to upvote that particular article, but it does make the rankings much more unpredictable.
> not being able to decrypt chats that he has no keys for…
Except he (or his corporation) has keys for almost all initiated chats on the Telegram network. Only the private chats are E2EE and they're not default and rather inconvenient because they don't sync between devices (unlike Signal's E2EE chats).
> To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data.
> Thanks to this structure, we can ensure that no single government or block of like-minded countries can intrude on people's privacy and freedom of expression. Telegram can be forced to give up data only if an issue is grave and universal enough to pass the scrutiny of several different legal systems around the world.
That's a system put in place against the legal system but it's not a technical limitation. For example, he will be able to look into the chats of his ex without the need of court orders of multiple unfriendly countries proving that the situation is grave and universal one.
When the limitation is not technical, your only guarantee is the integrity of the operators and the lack of interest of your attackers coercing the operators into spying on you.
In Telegram's case one could easily assume that the Russians and now the French said him "Nice fortune you built, you are very successful person with a long life to live ahead. It would be a shame if you lose your fortune or spent your days locked in a room instead of flying on a private jet to Ibiza"
Funny thing is that now Russia says they France needs to guarantee access to the Russian embassy for him (not really sure if he wants that). But wikipedia says he has UAE and French citizenship...
Where does it say they don't have the keys? It literally says they store the keys in their own datacenters. Which is obvious anyway, otherwise the API wouldn't be able to return the unencrypted data.
AFAIK Telegram isn’t e2e for the interesting bits, that’s the group chats etc.
If I have to guess, I would say that the authorities would be interested in identities of some users and access to private group chats with shady stuff and Telegram would be able to provide these.
These are probably already available to the Russian intelligence considering the low radiation levels in Pavel Durov’s blood stream and no novichok experience.
> According to this source he’s accused in non-cooperating.
With the context that you omitted it makes more sense:
Justice considers that the absence of moderation, cooperation with
law enforcement and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable numbers,
cryptocurrencies...) makes it an accomplice to drug trafficking,
pedo-criminal offenses and swindling.
That's probably exaggeration or straight lie. There are open-source messengers who don't even require a phone number, and phone number is not legally required for registration in most countries (but, for example, in Russia you cannot signup users in a messenger without getting their phone number. So those open source messengers are technically outright illegal).
As for moderation, any post in public or private groups can be reported to moderators. As for one-to-one chats, this might not work, but you should not be chatting with random people anyway.
> I don’t understand how they’re going to convince French judges that he’s guilty for not being able to decrypt chats that he has no keys for…
That false statement is refutable trivially: Just perform the mud puddle test [1] in front of the judge (and a cryptographer explaining the implications to the judge).
There are lot of direct laws about record-keeping (company accounts for instance) but there are also a lot of laws which indirectly impose requirements of record-keeping, because having records will be the only way to comply with the requirement (tracking of origin for food recalls for instance).
France almost certainly has a law that says that if you run a telecommunication service, you must respond to court orders with the following information: X, Y, Z & W.
If non-compliance with such a law is the basis for the arrest, it will be his damn problem to convince the judges, that despite being subject of many such court orders, he had a stronger legal basis for not keeping the necessary records to comply.
However, my money is on Al Capone: I would be very surprised if the charges do not (also) contain tax-evasion, securities fraud, money laundering.
My immediate guess is that there’s more. The french secret service strikes me as much more “intelligent” than the US secret service (which I heard is mostly ran by mormons), so I would think this type of move is heavily calculated
If he's taking a privacy stance then it's bloody stupid since he's protecting an insecure app. In contrast Signal would've cooperated and provided essentially nothing useful.
> I wonder what caught up with him first: the undisturbed sale of hard drugs vIa telegram, or the undisturbed recruitment of freelancers for GRU's terrorist attacks across Europe.
Seems there could be some truth to the accusations.
My working theory is that by making it difficult for the average user to activate end-to-end encrypted chats, especially compared to industry standards, and by positioning the service as an 'anything goes' platform, Mr. Durov might have created the world's largest Kompromat machine.
You won't believe for what are responsible paper money printed by central banks.
As for those South Korea-related stories, the blame is partially on the government. For example, an operator of a website selling illegal videos got only 18 months in that country [1].
>Telegram and cryptocurrency has single handedly responsible for the recent drug epidemic,
I thought Reagan beat that with his war on drugs? Obviously flippant comment, but wouldn't it be more appropriate to say "Te....chnology has single handedly responsible for the recent drug epidemic,", to which I would answer 'No, it's always been about dollar bills, and what 'recent' drug epidemic?" The US opioid crisis wasn't fuelled by telegram.
Still a bs argument. 1890s, terrorists takes a mule to the assassination. 1920s, terrorist drives a car to the assassination, and now we deem henry ford liable because of it.
So not sure what's the non-cooperating about banning "terrorist" content is about, since various info channels definitely were getting blocked on telegram in EU over the last year.
I can't for the life of me as an EU "citizen" even figure out who asks for these bans on behalf of the EU. Kinda doubt it's someone in my country, because it's reported as EU wide ban in this case. Maybe it's done by some overbearing country on this particular topic, like Germany, and Telegram just blocked it EU wide, for some reason.
The detainment order was outstanding for some time, and Durov certainly knew that. Still he plainly landed in France and was detained. Why?
My pet tinfoil-hat theory is that he decided that staying in a French prison is safer for him than being out in the open and get some polonium, or whatnot.
> My pet tinfoil-hat theory is that he decided that staying in a French prison is safer for him than being out in the open
People do that.
Recently, the Bulgarian drug lord nicknamed Brendo not only surrendered, but somehow bribed border control to let him in the country so he can show up directly in front of Sofia Central Prison, with a duffel bag, ready to be taken in. He wanted to skip the bureaucracy and go behind bars ASAP.
Not necessarily. He may have thought he was in danger.
FWIW, France do not extradite its citizen and Pavel Durov is french. He may have been arrested but that doesn't mean he will stay in detention depending on the nature of the charge and his eventual cooperation. Who knows, maybe he called before landing in France so that he was arrested and seen as cooperative.
Why would he get some polonium? There are endless official Russian state telegram channels. Putin clearly has no issue with it or he would have banned it.
From Telegram sources:
>Pavel Durov faces up to 20 years in prison in France. The trial will take place very soon – sources close to the investigation.
In addition to drug trafficking, he is accused of collaborating with an organized crime group, covering up for pedophiles, fraud and money laundering.
I don't know how reliable this is, but I've seen in 3-4 sources that he's arrested for terrorism, child abuse, drug trafficking (not providing data to prosecutors).
If he intentionally cooperated with criminals then it is one thing. But if someone posted something illegal, and nobody reported this, then it obviously is not Durov's fault. If you are too lazy to report illegal content then you should arrest yourselves first.
Basically as he did not provide access to the encrypted messages and communication in Telegram, they accused him for supporting the criminals. That's all to it.
It is basically the part of the current politics in EU where they are trying to force access to all encrypted traffic across devices.
If they were functionally encrypted, how could he possibly provide them?
Since they’re not, this doesn’t seem much different from e.g. an email provider refusing some court access to somebody’s mail archive (i.e. a very bad idea if your executives ever want to set foot in that country).
I’m really having a very hard time finding much sympathy for an operation that kept endangering users by spreading misinformation about its own security model, while at the same time building a jurisdiction-hopping warrant evasion machine to protect data they arguably shouldn’t even have if that security model were accurate.
Yeah, and do you think France is going to arrest Durov on the Kremlin's request.
Fun fact: the Russian government and high ranking officials are outraged by the arrest and are asking the Russian state to pressure France into releasing him.
It's one google away. Before you blame this one on Russia too.
huh? I was not suggesting that France is collaborating with Russia lol. sorry for facts getting in your way. Russia already has plenty of blood on its hands from kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children and raping others.
I, for one, have reported heinous illegal content multiple times over a long time span, as well as e-mailing both their support and abuse addresses. I checked back months later, no responses to e-mails and the content was still up. Telegram has how many employees/staff and moderators for about a billion users, many of whom know exactly how exploitable the platform is? Every source I check says Telegram has just around 100 employees. What is criminal is how late this action is.
The fact that it has reporting mechanisms, doesn't it uses them.
There have been govt commissions in the UK, France, the EU, and the Netherlands about getting Telegram to act on their reports.
All of this while Durov is bragging in Russian press that he doesn't need more than 3 moderators.
If you're not aware of what's really happening here, I'd recommend not commenting.
This guy is a legit a-hole. There's bots on Telegram where you enter women's names or social media URLs and you get back if someone ever posted revenge porn about her. Those bots remain online until a journalist covers them. Unless the company is publicly humiliated, no Telegram channel is ever taken down. Telegram has been the go-to platform for hosting malware and stolen data for half a decade. Nothing... NOTHING has ever been taken down even if it's a blatant TOS violation. So yeah, fuck Durov!
Maybe just wait a moment for things to come out through the natural course of justice rather than getting yourself all worked up here.
The accusations are serious enough that it’s probably reasonable to assume that they have some serious evidence for this and if that is true then this is a good outcome that should be celebrated.
> The accusations are serious enough that it’s probably reasonable to assume that they have some serious evidence for this and if that is true then this is a good outcome that should be celebrated.
Isn’t it equally reasonable to assume the accused is innocent until proven guilty?
Presumption of reasonability in political prosecutions doesn't exactly have a great track record.
I remember when the GoF tried to blackmail a Wikipedia admin with prosecution threats, to coerce them to censor Wikipedia entries it didn't want people to read,
I don’t know what anyone is supposed to assume from one story from over a decade ago.
I’m just saying to slow down and wait for details to come out. This thread is turning into a paranoid fever dream based on nothing as far as I can tell.
I would be very surprised if the _trial_ was to take place "very soon". (Trials hardly ever take place "very soon" in France.)
However, I could imagine him staying in custody while being investigated for a couple days, then quickly facing some level of judge to decide whether he has to stay in jail or can be released.
Once this is done, don't expect a formal trial until multiple months (and most realistically, at least a year.)
About the custody thing, he's an extremely high flight risk. If the French authorities are serious about his arrest and it's not just a dumb PR move, there is absolutely no chance he's going to be released. Not without 24/7 police surveillance and giving up on all this passports.
> I could imagine him staying in custody while being investigated for a couple days, then quickly facing some level of judge to decide whether he has to stay in jail or can be released.
I think the original link mentioned exactly that, and it would be done over the weekend
He's a super high flight risk, so I'm thinking the prosecution is going to make a pretty solid case for him staying in pre-trial until trial in a year or two.
He's gonna have a very miserable time. Flying private jet --> watching another man shitting next to you.
Well, he'll only have to see them twice a week now [1]: he's been officially charged, then released (under bail), has to check in regularly, and can't leave the country.
I don't know if that counts as "due process" for everyone ?
That seems very unlikely. I don't think France has a statutory number of days in their speedy trial right, so even if you demand trial as you walk in the door, for a serious trial of this size, with this many charges, my experience is saying one to two years for trial.
Now, France does have more rights on pre-trial detention, so he might be able to get some sort of bail, but he's an enormously high flight risk, so.. maybe not.
I have no specific data, and Europe has slightly better bail rights than most of the USA, but I would think for this list of charges and his flight risk a judge would have qualms or problems denying bail.
The extent of the accusations is evidence that all that is made up in order to get access into Telegram. Telegram is too important to the other side in the Ukraine war. If Telegram goes, then the other side is silenced.
I have always assumed that Telegram was a Russian op. Any doubts I had were resolved by this event. [0]
> Deputy Russian State Duma Speaker Vladislav Davankov said he had sent an appeal to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to seek Durov's release.
> "His arrest may be politically motivated and a tool to gain access to the personal information of Telegram users. This must not be allowed," the state-run RIA Novosti news agency quoted Davankov as saying.
Wikipedia says that the same member of Duma was suggesting an idea to abolish homework at schools because his son asked for this when he learned that his father was elected. I would not treat him seriously.
"Vladislav Davankov" is a token "liberal". He's supposed to make such statements. Nothing that is uttered by Duma members is worth any consideration -- it's a complete theater.
That's how successful Telegram's PR has been. People believe - like you do - that it's end to end encrypted. It's not.
The secret chats presumably are (if you trust Telegram). Secret chats are 1 to 1. So anything outside of those that most people on Telegram access (massive channels and groups, smaller groups, private groups and channels) is NOT encrypted.
Sorry for whataboutism, but Apple does the same thing. It claims in advertising that all cloud backups are "encrypted", but if you dig deeper, "encrypted" means "encrypted with a key that is stored in the cloud" (see the table in [1]). Apple also (exactly like Telegram) requires you to opt-in for E2E encryption of backups, it is not enabled by default and even in this case contact list backup do not support E2E encryption.
The article claims that "Contacts and calendars are built on industry standards (CalDAV and CardDAV) that do not provide built-in support for end-to-end encryption." but it seems like a weak argument. Nobody actually cares what protocol is used between a device and a cloud.
There is a feature that can be enabled to create an end-to-end encrypted chat between strictly two users, but most people do not actually use it.
Telegram is largely a social network masquerading as a messaging app. There is a deep network of “channels” that interlink with each other to provide a community for users. None of that is encrypted.
Messages in groups are not E2E encrypted, especially in public groups where anyone can read them even without joining. However, anyone can report the message to moderators. The public groups are often limited (temporarily removed from search, temporarily or permanently banned) if they do too much violations.
> However, anyone can report the message to moderators.
Good luck with that. And that's a seriously big issue. Moderators (and "moderators" in Telegram mean an alleged team of people they hire to moderate all content in Telegram - if you report content, the group administrators won't even be notified about that so they can act by themselves first) in most cases won't do absolutely anything.
Telegram encryption is off by default and is a joke compared to Signal and others. This has nothing to do with encryption. I could list a dozen E2E encrypted things in common use that are all legal and online.
It has nothing to do with ordinary sorts of “bad” content either like hate speech or crypto scams or whatever. All of that can be found in abundance in many places, all of which are still online.
This is about something else. Note the standard cast of characters with certain well known alignments rushing out to defend him.
My top guess is direct involvement in scams, money laundering, CSAM, etc. I mean direct participation, not just running a chat used by others for these things.
My second guess is the upcoming election. Telegram was a big vector for coordinating the January 6th riots. Maybe there’s a network being taken down here.
Telegram outright refuses to comply with any records requests not related to child abuse or terrorism, and even those they often delay and only release phone numbers and IP addresses. They have the data and basically use grand scale legal gamesmanship to avoid data requests. See https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/apps/telegram-gibt-nutzerdat... or even their own official policy https://telegram.org/privacy?setln=it#8-3-law-enforcement-au.... If you actually have the data to turn over you can't do this legally.
> Direct involvement with scams? You got to be kidding me. This guy is worth 15 billion USD, he does need to do anything.
I have no knowledge about this and make no assumptions about whether or not he is involved in any kind of financial misconduct - but there are many cases of very rich people doing risky and illegal things to further grow their wealth, despite already having more than enough money.
Exploration geophysics (large area mapping in search of resources) loses money hand over fist .. it's like sinking money into lottery tickets .. and yet billionaires routinely dabble in it and a few own companies that take on contract work, lose money and act as tax write offs for other parts of their business.
It's about the contacts and the advance inside knowledge.
Circling back to an alledged "pedo web ring" ala, say, Epstein .. the big pay off wouldn't be connected to "services" and charging access to view materials, the real money (if any was being made) would be in "blackmail" and "quid pro quo" investment infomation etc.
Once a few whales are landed, say past and future POTUS candidates, C-Suites of mega tech companies, bankers, etc. what limit is there on making money from tips in exchange for keeping a few secrets?
I have zero knowledge re: the Telegram founder and any of this, but history is littered with rumours of elite clubs, cosy finnancial arrangements and getting away with the breaking of convential rules. (eg: one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_paedophile_dossier)
Using https would already mean encryption is not off by default. There are so many layers that can be encrypted. But at the end data is stored somewhere, and the keys must be available to the infrastructure to decrypt and serve the content.
Maybe the parent content meant E2E is off by default, which is what your first link states:
> Secret chats use end-to-end encryption, thanks to which we don't have any data to disclose.
Then the next paragraphs elaborate about the non-E2E encryption, and how would it be harder —- while not impossible —- to disclose data.
From the same link you shared:
> Thanks to this structure, we can ensure that no single government or block of like-minded countries can intrude on people's privacy and freedom of expression. Telegram can be forced to give up data only if an issue is grave and universal enough to pass the scrutiny of several different legal systems around the world.
Maybe getting the CEO of the company arrested is what it gets to disclose that data they want. After all he controls infrastructure and deployments.
Meanwhile, unlike Telegram, everything in Signal is E2E by default[1].
Encryption between you and the service provider isn't encryption protecting you from the service provider. No end-to-end encryption means no encryption for messaging.
The only context where client-server encryption matters is when I want secure e-commerce, or to shield from my ISP what searches I make or what I do on sites.
Well, they are "encrypted", but not end-to-end encrypted. Encryption does not really mean much if someone else has the keys. So it is reasonable to treat non-secret chat messages as if they were unencrypted.
Or maybe the people in French gov are not competent enough. They are the same people as all of us. There is zero special things about them. They just don’t like his “I’m not cooperating with governments” position.
I don’t know how much this founder is personally complicit in any of the charges brought against him, but if he’s just being held accountable for running a service where others did nefarious things, then this should be a chilling effect for all founders.
Why would anyone want to innovate and develop privacy technologies if this is what happens? So, your best bet is to work with government agencies if you want to work on this tech? What if the government isn’t one you agree with? No one has good answers for these, but criminals aren’t the only ones who need to use privacy-preserving tech.
Durov has a French passport, so he will be charged as a French citizen. What is weird is that he sure knew that he was on the watchlist in France, though he has chosen to go there. Why?
Usually courts are a lot more lenient with foreign citizens. Try to get jailed in Mexico as an French citizen - pretty hard unless you do obvious bad stuff.
From what I've seen, it's the opposite. Nobody wants an outsider coming into their territory and committing a crime. And it also makes you a flight risk, so that's going to factor badly into any pre-trial detention.
> Nobody wants an outsider coming into their territory and committing a crime.
Right but they don't want to deal with them either. They'll deport someone and ban them from entry (which can often be done essentially at will) rather than putting them through the whole legal process and potentially dealing with protests from their country of citizenship.
In fact, in Illinois there is a specific statute to cover this. The Dept of Corrections can simply dispose of someone's sentence and hand them to ICE for deportation. I knew a Mexican guy who had a 6 year term and I heard from him 6 weeks after he was sentenced -- he was back with his family in Mexico, having had his sentence terminated and quickly deported.
As did (does?) TOR.
I have the impression that the US intelligence services are always in an internal struggle - some parts wants and needs invisibility, deniability and secure communication - other part wants transparency for intelligence. Both realize that there is no such thing as a safe backdoor.
Yep, TOR is not a solution for hiding from western governments. That's why anything large enough out there gets wrecked as soon as someone makes an appropriate decision.
Yes, those three words are rally cry to support rich people breaking laws and ethics. A tech billionare hosting child porn for closer to a decade on his app isn't the context you want revolutionary slogans to shield.
No, that doesn't matter in the least. It is trivial to kick him off the Western appstores and arrest him in Dubai, so it really doesn't matter. He was allowed to operate - almost certainly in some kind of a deal - until he wasn't.
1. Dubai has extradited to the EU in the past, 2. the EU can easily cripple his business and whatever assets he has in his "home" country of France in a couple of weeks. It doesn't even matter if this is about the alleged real criminal activity on Telegram or political persecution like Musk alleges, the moment Durov decided to stop playing ball his life would be miserable no matter his location.
I don't know anyone who uses TG "secret chats". (I tried to convert one friend but then there was some buggy stuff that also lost us long chat history so we reverted)
"Full Ulbricht" is quite a leading term. You could just as well say "full Bankman-Fried". From my reading it sounds like the man is as guilty as sin and knows it.
I can see your point. I should qualify that -- my comparison was just on the indictment only, in that they threw the crimes of every user into his indictment, like they did with Ulbricht.
A most likely outcome now is that a deal will be made to avoid jail time and he'll let EU do the backdoors or whatever they were asking politely first.
Telegram has also tried to distance itself from TON crypto token, but it is so obvious how it still serves the original Durov's vision and controlled by a team of founders (aka initial token holders), now proofing their stakes for a supposedly decentralized blockchain to operate.
It's not a wise idea to run "uncensored" messenger where a lot of shit happens and also offer it's users built-in non-government-surveilled payment methods.
Signal offers all of those things and the creators, developers, and operators are thus far unmolested.
They have de-emphasized the built in token and payment features, and Mobilecoin has tanked in value, but it’s still there and still works and nobody has been even detained over it, much less prosecuted.
It's unlikely that EU has the capacity to install backdoors and to monitor them. Maybe a few individual states can sort-of do that, but not all, and most likely not brussels.
Are there clear and certain rules, that cannot be interpreted differently by different judges, about how you should run the messenger? For example, are you required to ask for a phone number and passport photo to sign up, etc?
By "clear rules" I mean not something vague like "you should not cooperate with criminals" (does "criminals" include not yet convicted criminals? does it include Trump? what is "cooperate") or "you should not allow illegal content" (what is exact definition of "illegal"? how can a person declare some content "illegal" without going through the court?).
People comparing to WhatsApp/Signal etc. are missing the point.
The lack of E2EE is actually what has got Telegram in trouble.
The same stuff that happens on Telegram also happens on WhatsApp and Signal - but because it's E2EE, it's harder for the police to find it, and when they do find it, WhatsApp and Signal have no way to comply - they can't see the chats! That said, they will provide details to LE that they do have access to (e.g. metadata) - of which WhatsApp holds a lot more.
In Telegrams case with public groups sharing illegal content out in the open - this is viewable to LE and they request logs from Telegram for their investigations. This stuff is publicly viewable on and to Telegram. Telegram can remove it. Telegram can provide chat logs to LE - but they refuse to. This is why they're in trouble.
Moral of the story - if you want to start an internet service - you either go E2EE no knowledge, or you moderate your shit and cooperate with LE, you can't avoid doing the latter unless you're doing the former.
I've always been under the impression that as long as your country has your back, you can refuse law enforcement requests claiming their government or their laws are bad so you don't have to comply.
The EU will be first of the west no doubt. Brussels has that technocratic total control thing which runs deep. Maybe UK, they started doing overnight SWAT raids over mean tweets a decade ago and these days it seems to just be a normal accepted thing there.
Telegram has an amazingly fresh UI/UX and interesting channels unlike the ad-ridden, antiquated, repulsive, greedy Facebook or Instagram that hammer you with "recommended posts" and ads until you turn blue in the face. But, ultimately it's just a form of entertainment, so it's ok for it to go. There are other messengers and will be other content platforms. Pavel is smart but somehow completely failed to realize that if your life and your multi-billion-dollar business depends on Europe, you need to shut up and do what they tell you, because you have a lot to lose.
Well.... it might (unlikely, but...) have implications for the Russian military forces in Ukraine, who are widely using it for communications (even for things like targeting artillery with drone spotters).
Interestingly (and understandably I guess, given the original nationality of the current CEO), the Ukrainian military are mostly using Signal, and the Russian military almost exclusively use Telegram.
Last I checked, Durov had some of his biggest companies confiscated by the Russian government, and he basically fled Russia, so it's hard to believe he would be cooperating with them. (But not impossible I guess, they might have scared him into cooperating ??)
Also, doesn't the Ukrainian military also use Telegram quite a lot ? (And what about the Israelo-Japanese Viber, also very popular in Ukraine?)
it is hosted on Dutch and Western servers, and most chats are not e2e encrypted, especially group ones where you coordinate things like that. They are just incompetent and sloppy to use it for military, which probably already suffered for it greatly, but all the data was flowing unecrypted to closed-source servers in the Western Europe this whole time, so this has no new implications for anything.
Is Messi a "huge story"? I don't even know for what team he is playing. And as for Swift, I only know one of her songs name (pokerface, I guess?). As for Bieber, I never heard a single song and not interested to hear.
But in contrast, I have read lot of news about Durov.
Facebook has many illicit groups and Mark Zuckerberg was never charged with anything. I assume this is more related to privacy where US government has backdoor to Facebook while doesn't have one to Telegram.
> Facebook has many illicit groups and Mark Zuckerberg was never charged with anything.
Maybe because their legal compliance strategy is something other than "we will only, and only possibly, comply with law enforcement requests if it concerns terrorism"?
> If Telegram receives a court order that confirms you're a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened. When it does, we will include it in a semiannual transparency report published at: https://t.me/transparency.
FB actively takes down groups and blocks users that (1) break FB’s community standards or (2) do really bad stuff (share child porn, recruit terrorists, etc.). There are manual and automated ways to do this. Users have a way to report bad stuff to FB and to group admins, and FB has a way to send really bad stuff to authorities when complying with a warrant. IIRC the majority of Meta’s employees (tens of thousands of people) work on these safety systems.
So yeah, Meta takes it really seriously. It doesn’t work perfectly because the scale is mind-boggling, but it’s probably the best system of this kind at this scale, and it is constantly being evaluated, red teamed, and improved.
Use the CEO as lever to gain control over a Russian controlled medium used to deliver unfiltered information about a lot of ongoing conflicts right now. Can't have that when you're hell bent on war.
There are a large number of highly active Ukrainian channels on Telegram, all about as anti-Russian as you would expect. There are Ukrainian government ministers operating channels on Telegram. How does that occur on a "Russian controlled medium?"
I don't speak either Russian or Ukrainian. I know none of these channel operators. Yet I've been granted approval on a number of "private" Ukrainian channels. Certainly a Russian could as well. Why wouldn't Russia's state actors, given that they enjoy "control" of the medium, shut it all down?
Why would they? It's mostly just a couple of thousand people following those channels. Analyzing their meta data and behavior is worth much more than restricting reach of these channels or forcing them to go elsewhere.
Russian-controlled is an overstatment, but it's definitely Russian-influenced. There seems to have been some kind of balance - Durov allowed the Russians some limited control in exchange for being allowed to operate in Russia. The publicly visible manifestation of this deal was, for instance, the ban on "Путь домой" (Way home) channel where the wifes of mobilized men organized their movement. I'm not stating this necessarily happened as a result of some direct negotiations - maybe Durov just intuitively probed "the red lines", who knows.
Путь домой is an active channel. It has 53,690 subscribers. There is a "FAKE" label (first time I've seen that...) and an associated warning: "Warning: Many users report that this account impersonates a famous person or organisation[sic]." There are regular posts, the most recent being 31 minutes ago. Translating about 10 of them, I see a many parents complaining about the treatment of conscripts.
Yeah, "fake" means you can't find it in search, which was good enough to kill the momentum when it mattered. It's also not fake in any way, and the explanation they gave is laughable.
Also, there were previous instances of cooperation when Durov himself admitted it in his memetic "...or full cesation of Telegram operation in Russia" survey.
Many people outside AND INSIDE France still have not much understood that the current government have transformed a step at a time the Republic in a ready-for-a-full-coup fascist state, for those who can read french I suggest trying:
Just to cite the relatively recent more stunning move. But there was many in the less recent past (starting from police surveillance, impunity and so on) not counting the current delay to DENIED the last legislative elections results...
I've linked the laws actually existing, anyone can read what's in and take a personal conclusion. These laws are clearly a base for a coup, no matter how PR rhetoric can try to justify that.
Installed Element on my phone and asked my contacts to do the same, just in case TG dies. Few of them did. It works just fine for texts, photos, small videos. Certainly not as fast or feature rich as TG, but good enough. Might spring up my own server if need be.
Looks like a better alternative to all that centralized drek.
Interesting note: Durov was flying to France from Azerbaijan where he was staying at the same time when Putin visited the country. There are rumours that Durov wanted to meet with Putin but he allegedly refused [1]. Those rumours are based on a publication of a Russian Telegram channel allegedly related to law enforcement agencies and have no other confirmation.
This is very clearly the reason why I trust Telegram 100 times more than Signal. Signal conveniently appeared when Telegram became popular. Now that they couldn't stop Telegram they're actively trying to take it down or gain control over it.
Yes let's infer app security from 5D-chess of spy novel grade news analysis, instead of reading source code.
Telegram: client source code shows e.g. all group messages are always shared to the company
Signal: client source code shows end-to-end encryption is always on for every message.
You pretending reality isn't real is really telling.
Also Telegram conveniently appeared when WhatsApp became popular and it was the spitting image of WA back then. Typical Russian IT economy where all they know is how to copy. First Durov copied FB to VKontakte, then he copied WA to TG.
From the article, that's a massive pile of charges they're dumping onto him, all apparently because people use Telegram in ways the French state disapproves of?
> Why was he under threat of a search warrant?
> The justice department considers that the lack of moderation, lack of cooperation with law enforcement, and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable number, cryptocurrencies, etc.) make him an accomplice to drug trafficking, pedo-criminal offenses and fraud.
A French citizen running a service in France is going to be subject to French laws and can expect to be arrested when they step into the country of France if they have charges pending.
>A ~French~ Chinese citizen running a service in ~French~ Chinese is going to be subject to ~French~ Chinese laws and can expect to be arrested when they step into the country of ~French~ Chinese if they have charges pending.
>This isn’t some grand conspiracy theory.
Funny that when the wrong country does it it's tyranny. When a Western country does it it's the rule of law.
There's nothing funny or wrong about this argument. In a democracy, law is a community consensus. In a tyranny it's just a rule set up by the tyrant for everyone to follow (but never followed by the tyrant himself and his gunmen).
That said, even in democracy a law can be bad, and likely is in this case.
I reread what you wrote and I think it's fair to say that you're deferring to a 'whataboutism'. If you can provide actual examples of what you're talking about, then an intellectual argument/discussion could be formed.
Well of you provide a service and it's knowingly used by criminals and you just implement features to benefit the criminal activity but make no effort to curb it. Yes, your an accomplice.
If the road worker built features that specifically provided an oversized benefit to the bank robbing community in general, you’d definitely investigate the worker or construction company
To get the analogy straight, they would definitely arrest the CEO of the roadworks company if the road was letting robbers through but hindering law enforcement and the CEO was refusing to make the changes legally asked of them to mitigate the problem, yes.
No it doesn't. If you set up PGP or SSL you'll be able to encrypt things and might even misuse this capability for crime, but you won't have installed a platform where crime is openly advertised.
I like Telegram, a lot, but if you're ignoring the fact that large parts of it openly function as a mall for criminal services (and it's 100x easier to find that stuff than via Tor, for example) you're not being honest with yourself. A lot of people here are just reflexively assuming its mean cops vs encryption because that's an issue tehy personally care about, and ignoring any other context.
To be involved in crimes in the nutshell: You provide exactly as much information as required by law. If EU law were not followed, Telegram would simply not be in the Google and Apple stores.
Well, this is the consequence of Telegram's poor privacy choices. Most chats are not end-to-end encrypted, and they could have access to their content. This makes them liable when they refuse governments' requests for such information. It also raises the question of whether they have given such access to other governments like Russia (coincidentally, Durov was in Baku at the same time Putin was visiting, and there is speculation that they may have met).
In contrast, Signal does not have access to any chats or user information (except the timestamp of when users last logged in) and could not be forced to wiretap.
Couldn't they just quietly release an update, under a threat of a 20y jail time, or just $5 wrench? Any centralized solution is vulnerable. The only real solution is open source serverless p2p network.
Well, maybe in russia but not in the USA. At least not yet. Check the history of PGP as an example of strong encryption the government was not happy about.
very interesting past few days for people running internet services. first kim then pavel.
seems like the prosecutorial, sacrificial lambs in internet platform space are those who are big enough to afford private jets but not too big to become faceless. hope he has a decent judicial insurance in place.
The people behind the "Think of the children" type argument for interception expect people to implicitly understand that. By the same token, I would expect people to implicitly understand what with great powers needs great accountability.
However... the same governments, and here I'm talking primarily about the one I know the Netherlands, has absolutely ZERO accountability against severe human rights abuses. You will get absolutely nowhere trying to hold government abuse accountable.
In the Netherlands, it took around 25,000 victims before any kind of traction was gained and primarily due to one politician, Peter Omzigt. And others turned against him.
Even now, you have princess Laurentien coming under heavy fire for trying to help the victims of the government abuse here.
So infite powers and less than zero accountability? No thanks. It's actually less than ZERO accountability because attempting to hold someone accountable will bring you under attack.
> The people behind the "Think of the children" type argument for interception expect people to implicitly understand that.
You don't even need to go as far as to talk about government lack of accountability for their own.
The French government has shown numerous times they don't care about that, anyway. We protected actual pedophiles slash rapists like Roman Polanski from being judged for crimes they committed in other countries (in this case, the US) but we are to arrest the man behind telegram because think of the children? does that compute?
> In 1977, Polanski was arrested for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor in exchange for a probation-only sentence. The night before his sentencing hearing in 1978, he learned that the judge would likely reject the proffered plea bargain, so he fled the U.S. to Europe, where he continued his career. He remains a fugitive from the U.S. justice system
""Justice"" is a very relative thing. The western democracies want you to believe it's fair. Ha. Ha.
There are many parts to government but the French are actually sponsors of matrix. So one would have believed that they agreed with secure communications.
It’ll be interesting to see if the likes of Marlinspike, Firefox, EFF, etc., rally to support this guy.
It’s really chilling to see the steps EU gobs are taking against free speech. In some ways they seem more authoritarian than even China and Russia. It’s like “free world” is becoming a farce.
Durov has been shilling his crypto scams while shitting on all those services you're talking about (well, at least Signal) claiming they don't do anything for privacy.
Considering how he's tarnished Signal, there is absolutely no reason for them or anyone else to back him up.
What will be very funny is the fact that Telegram is pretty much not encrypted (yeah ok, "secret chats", whatever sure) and now that investigators probably have access to Durov's phone, that lack of encryption might come back to bite him in the ass. Can't wait to know what they find and if they do find something, it might be interesting to see if he finally changes his stance.
Signal also has a long history of shitting on their competitors with extremely questionable arguments, if not quite to the same extent as Telegram. The issues at stake here are far more important. Encrypted messengers had better hang together or they will surely hang separately.
Look at their blog posts about PGP (one of them is pretty much "when I get a PGP-encrypted email it's always from a weirdo" - not any kind of technical argument, just a straight-up smear), or about Matrix.
Those comments were absolutely correct. That PGP failed as a viable solution for securing email communication isn't even debatable. And you're missing the point of the argument. It is a technical argument: The UX of PGP is so bad that hardly anyone bothered to use it, and that the workflow of decrypting the rare PGP-encrypted emails he received annoyed him.
>What happened to "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Nothing. It still is the same fake Voltaire quote used to con overly idealistic adversaires into giving you some situational supprt against their better interest. No institutional actor ever followed it.
Large geopolitical powers are all the same. It's only people who live there that are convinced they are doing better than those other guys.
Yes, that includes people from Russia, China or the US believing they are the ones who are truly free, and everything else are totalitarian shitholes. Each one of them is even kind of right in their own regard.
Nobody in Europe disappears for six months because they have offended the government before mysteriously reappearing like in China. No one dictates single handedly what’s going to happen without any form of oversight like in Russia.
Heck France currently has an interim government because they voted out the previous one and the US had a decisive election coming in a few months.
The people who want to convince you otherwise generally have a vested interest in undermining democracy and pushing for a form of autocracy.
> In Russia, China or North Korea - nobody believes that.
Well of course, they're all actually super miserable and are secretly begging the government of your country or her stronger allies to liberate them and wisely lead to a glorious bright westernized future.
Don't be naive. It's probably worth exploring where'd you get such a maximalist idea in the first place and measure just how much empirical evidence you have to back it up.
Normal people: We see you host groups for organized crime, we need targetted data you have about those criminals. This is what law enforcement should do (instead of surveillance dragnets).
HN: NO! free speech.
Sincere advice: get out of those libertarian echo chambers, and think about real consequences.
I'm not a liberatarian nor am I a US citizen (Australian), however ...
IF you let LEO's access group chats THEN you absolutely need civilian accountable honest transparent clear oversight to avoid mission creep.
The task isn't as clear cut as "known criminal is part of OC groups", there's a clear Sorities Paradox asking when does an OC group chat become a neighbourhood watch | knitting group chat.
If our criminal of interest is part of RealMafiaChat, PrepperLifeStyles, CamThePolice, GuideDogsForVets, etc. etc. et al. then how many of these should be surveilled .. and how many other group chat members should also be surveilled ?
Yes. Take down real criminals.
Yes, it's an actual problem that real innocents get swept up Kafka-esque for being unwittingly criminal adjacent.
What's the cost benefit number and trade off for actual innocent lives ruined?
I would be very concerned if your knitting grandma was an active member of a drugs and arms dealergroup.
I am pretty much against surveillance in the form of drag nets, but none of that applies here. Instead, this is exactly how a functional state should work.
(And note that no exceptions are made for Pavel because he is rich and well-connected.
Contrast that with brittle countries where politicians rely on tech billionaires to fund their campaigns.)
I sympathize with you being an Aussie; I can see where your allergy comes from, but in this case it is misplaced.
Australia is part of the five eyes, many Australians with, say, a signals intell background will have seen things that may or may not make your eyes bleed wrt crime and|or state actions.
Yes, functional states should have extremely good oversight .. in reality they "mostly do" but with cracks that allow unwanted behaviours to sneak through and sometimes become normalised.
eg. recent revelations that SASR types are "blooding" new members with unsanctioned kills in war zones.
Or regular joe LEO types using surveillance powers to stalk ex's. Or total innocent gets railroaded by tangential "evidence" simply because they chance to tick all the boxes for a needed arrest and the actual perp was overlooked | unseen.
> I would be very concerned if your knitting grandma was an active member of a drugs and arms dealergroup.
And yet an actual sergeant at arms type of an organised biker gang based in Australia used knitting terminology key phrases in just such a group to organise international transfers of "packages".
The person in question was a NZ background stone cold killer with a special forces background.
( Yes, most crims are "dumb" | "lazy" and yet a good few understand covert messaging, not all can be caught with a fake encrypted phone honey net trap )
These are all real concerns and examples of things that have actually happened.
Yes, no disagreement here. The Five Eyes is a poignant example of what happens if your essential view on societal ordering is that ordinary people are there to serve the select few. The problem for the US and Australia is that they inherited all the flaws from the UK, which till this day is still quite a class based society.
This is also why the US did not inherit a real, solid concept of personal privacy. Instead, ordinary people are increasingly becoming sort of property of corporates. You can see that if you contrast the Rheinland model (state reigns in corporates, protect people rights) with the Anglo-sphere, which is much more suited to a few select capital holders extracting value from the workforce (compare holiday allowance, fire at will etc).
This doesn´t mean that in Europe the Rheinland model is not under active threat, far from it. And look at collective self harm: watch this space (HN) if the EU sometimes takes measures against abusive monopolies. It is a very difficult fight.
First mistake: move to the EU and get French citizenship. You can’t have an asset that’s critical to some of the military operations in the largest European armed conflict and reside in the EU. Should have stayed in Dubai.
Otherwise known as the flame war detector, which does a decent job of keeping flame wars off the front page but occasionally has to be fixed by a mod when it kicks in incorrectly.
Moderation is hard, and HN actually does a pretty good job all things considered.
It pains me to agree, but this is quite right: for every important developing story that gets erased like this, there's like 500 nonsense flamewars that guaranteed you don't want to read, that get erased by the same heuristic. It's genuinely tuned well.
(I'll never agree with HN's title-editing bot though. That thing's cray).
The funniest thing is Russia’s evil government allowed Durov to leave motherland with money, but democratic France threw him in a jail. Why does he need France citizenship in the first place? He could use his Saint Kitts and Nevis passport to travel the world.
Telegram is not E2EE (with the exception of phone-only 1-on-1 Secret Chats, which are also questionable security-wise). Telegram has access to everything ever shared on their services, even if users delete it.
Signal by design can't moderate their service.
Telegram by design has full access, but doesn't act on it.
I have deleted Telegram for now because I don't want to be associated with international terrorism. These are serious accusations and I expect that Pavel won't live long enough to defend himself in a court.
- Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, was arrested in France after arriving from Azerbaijan.
- Durov was detained at Le Bourget Airport by the Gendarmerie des Transports Aériens (GTA) due to a French warrant.
- The warrant was issued on claims of Telegram’s lack of moderation and cooperation with law enforcement, making Durov complicit in crimes such as drug trafficking, pedophilia-related offenses, and fraud.
- Durov’s arrest was contingent on him being on French territory, as he is listed in the FPR (wanted persons file). Unclear why he decided to land there.
- Durov is now in custody and will face a judge, with potential charges including terrorism, drug offenses, complicity, fraud, money laundering, and pedophilia-related content.
- Authorities believe Durov will likely be placed in pre-trial detention due to his substantial financial resources and perceived flight risk.
- The arrest aims to pressure European countries to cooperate on law enforcement efforts against crimes facilitated through Telegram, particularly terrorism and organized crime.
"100% private" claims always make me incredibly suspicious since it is impossible to achieve that. Security is a matter of threat modeling against an expected adversary and nothing protects against a serious interest from a state level actor.
This is why I don't really care that Telegram doesn't do E2EE by default. Most of my chats aren't that interesting and in my threat model it's good enough.
I don't disagree. It's just another messenger. Just a 'check it out' - I stick with the simple things. No need for 324823494234 different things that try to solve the same problems, and never do. The telegram jpg/file exploits recently with the inline imaging just go to show security is theater until the next CVE
Yeah absolutely not. The project lies about its ability to look away from the fact it has access to all IPs conversing. A server has to have a way to relay packets from identifier A to identifier B, yet they claim they don't know if A and B talk. And they claim something as mundane as a multiprocess Queue can achieve this.
I can't make sense of how such people were able to get preferential treatment from governments and/or the media to the extent that their apps were able to get so much attention and traction to begin with, and yet the same government-media complex turns on them later for obscure reasons. At this stage, It seems like all these celebrity tech billionaires are government spies or working with intelligence agencies and are being persecuted for ceasing to play ball. Like there was some kind of deal where some elite group told them; we'll let your app gain traction but then you'll do everything we tell you, or else...
I just can't make sense of these serial entrepreneurs otherwise. Thousands of similar apps were launched which were the same or better than those ones. Why were these ones allowed to gain traction? Why these people were chosen?
Whenever I've met people who've had success in tech, it was clear that there were some weird dynamics behind the scenes which made them act in ways which were highly counter-intuitive and often involved sabotaging their own projects in some ways.
>The European Commission has told its staff to start using Signal, an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, in a push to increase the security of its communications.
Except for any media you post which end up as a unique key behind CloudFlare or Google Cloud load balancers. They may not reveal your chats, but they certainly export your metadata (i.e. list of devices fetching and putting a key) to the worst possible parties
> Of course he is complicit. I imagine most people in tech would argue the good outweighs the bad, but to provide E2EE without any backdoor is to turn a blind eye to the horrendous things for which some people will use it.
> There has been a constant in the tech community, since forever, of stupid idealism. For example, I remember the apoplexy when Napster had to stop facilitating mass piracy. Yeah, what a head-scratcher that was. And now the tech community has convinced itself that E2EE without a backdoor is some viable. Your neighbors won't consider the overall harms worth the benefits, and neither will their governments.
PGP is more than 30 years old. What do you mean by "now the tech community has convinced itself that E2EE without a backdoor is some viable"? What is "now"?
The quality of posts in this thread are unusually low for Hacker News. Is this place being brigaded? Extremely uncharitable readings and frankly conspiracy theories everywhere.
Trifecta of bad Internet discourse here. A Russian who runs a chat service that competes with inferior services beloved by nerds is arrested on nebulous charges related to his platform being somewhat censorship resistant. Beware ye who enter
This tends to happen whenever there is any tinge of geopolitics in the discussion. That subject has a remarkable ability of making monkeys out of people.
The only lesson Silicon Valley will take is personal responsibility. Fines just hit the shield that’s the shareholders wallet which means nothing in most of the power structures popular with tech companies.
Throwing these people to jail horner, preventing them from wine and dine in destinations they actually want to go to, that puts a price they have to pay personally.
Musk and Durov share views on privacy. If the West did the same to Musk, he'd move SpaceX to Russia in the blink of an eye and Tesla to China. Musk is safe because he is the embodiment of the American dream of American superiority. NASA and Boeing: yesterday's heros. This action is not 'rule of law' - don't bother trying to figure it out - it is just politically motivated. No discussion required. .. in my opinion.
It's hard to respond to some of the commentary here. We truly exist mentally on different planets. The West wants Telegram destroyed because the platform permits the sharing of information and ideas that are in opposition to Western domestic and foreign policy(Israel, Ukraine, China etc). This is in addition to the West not having a backdoor to Telegram and not having it's servers on Western soil.
Why do you want your country to control what you can see, read or say? Why do you want your country to have access to your private thoughts and opinions? Stop being a coward and fight this fascist overreach. And spite yourself if you support it.
You are distracting from the issue: when law enforcement infiltrate into criminal telegram groups (drugs, child trafficking etc), they are for once doing their fucking job by ordering the platform to give them all the details they collect, so that they can come after those criminals.
If Telegram did actually prioritize private and secure communication, they would indeed be just a data pipe and nothing could be shared with law enforcement.
> ordering the platform to give them all the details they collect, so that they can come after those criminals.
What details are you assuming Telegram are sitting on, besides the data law enforcement already collected?
Durov got arrested for insufficient moderation of public channels, so my guess is that law enforcement would be able to get exactly the same data as Telegram themselves sit on.
But it's hard to get a full picture without it going to public courts, for now we can only go on what's being reported.
Let me introduce you how 1-1 chats are not encrypted by the default, that this option is quite hidden, that many/most Telegram users don´t even know about "private chats", and that their particular hand-rolled encryption scheme has been questioned by encryption experts for many years.
The person who wrote the text in the screenshot (a typical sensationalist "milblogger") most likely is not informed enough to realize that this software was written in Berlin, hosted in the Netherlands and its code is continuously audited and gate-kept by Apple which can throw them out of the Appstore for non-compliance with local laws any second. It has most likely survived for a whole decade in the West by cooperating from day 1; any data of interest is already being handed over to whoever is asking, otherwise they would have been banned from the stores many years ago. The only reason why it is still being used by the military is incompetence: believing the hype that it's "safe" and lack of alternatives.
I think this is projection. Claiming the arrest has to do drugs and child trafficking is distracting from the issue and the actual reason for the arrest. Which I outlined above.
I believe it's as incorrect as arguing the United States wants to ban or own Tik Tok because China has access to Americans private data.
China itself has banned TikTok as-is from China, because its deems it as a negative for society. In the mean time it has served for spreading disinformation inside the rest of the world.
Whether the US has sincere reasons for proposing a ban is a station that has by long been passed. If your point is that "social" media is mainly a tool in the hands of tech elites, whose main business model is social upheaval and where foreign influence is up for the highest bidder (troll farms), then yes, I agree that we should have a broader discussion of what we as democratic societies expect from those profiting from information chaos, distrust in societal institutions, outrage, and advertisement clicks.
Parasitic tech elites and their tools of influence in the information sphere have nothing to do with free speech -- in fact they kill a fair debate among equal citizens in a democratic society.
Ah yeah, the general sentiment was definitely "there are laws that everyone breaks every day, so they can always get you on something". Mostly because I remembered the anecdote about the USSR outlawing fax machines that no business could do without, so they could always charge any business with a crime.
If you really want to start a flamewar you can also casually mention the fact that Telegram also gives CCP major headache cause they don't control it and it's actually popular (unlike Signal) in China.
I can't comprehend how ensuring people other than me can read, see and talk about whatever they want is starting a flamewar. Like I said, I just exist mentally on another planet. Maybe universe.
"Why do you want your country to have access to your private thoughts and opinions? "
Anyone who does not want that, should stay away from Telegram in the first place - an app that stores all your private messages unencrypted for the company to read. All your interactions on any channel ever - all their data. All this is about is sharing that data with the western governments. The russian government already has it for example.
> The russian government already has it for example.
With the situation in Ukraine being what it is, wouldn't they be cracking down on Telegram usage in their country if this were true? They don't seem to be doing so, and the usage seems to be quite high.
Why should they crack down on Telegram? They tolerate it, as long as the high profile channels are broadcasting pro russian points of views.
(everyone above a certain viewer size MUST register with the state, that goes for any site)
> everyone above a certain viewer size MUST register with the state, that goes for any site
this is false, it's kind of funny you are using all caps to lie. Something that resembles what you described may happen in November, but doesn't exist yet.
haha this is so ancient not a single person or channel i read even remembers this. Canceled in 2017, i guess the cancellation part has not been as widely reported (probably not as exciting for sky news to report that) https://old.rkn.gov.ru/news/rsoc/news48342.htm
He's saying why would Ukraine tolerate Telegram if it was so Pro-Russian? Since he's saying it directly leads to their conversations/data being handed directly to the Russians
I did not say Telegram is pro russian. Pavel Durov certainly isn't that much - but he still made a deal with them in order to be allowed to continue operating there.
When your idea of a sensible argument includes things such as "but think about the children" or "stop being a coward" then I think you should reconsider how you communicate your thoughts.
Didn't signal and WhatsApp support e2e encryption better and by default? Last time I checked didn't find telegram to be superior in the encryption space.
Most of the people I know use Telegram to buy drugs.
The main use of Telegram in France is supporting illegal activities. The page allowing you to discover channels in your neighbourhood was clearly designed to facilitate that. Telegram has basically no market share as a chat application here outside of that.
You don’t see “the West” whatever that means go after WhatsApp, Signal or Matrix. That should tell you something.
> Most of the people I know use Telegram to buy drugs
I'm in France. I use Telegram extensively for chatting with friends (1:1 or group chats) because its UX was vastly better than any of the alternatives when we started a few years ago (stuff like polls to decide when to meet, location sharing to find one another in a crowded place), custom bots, being able to edit messages to fix typos, etc. Nowadays WhatsApp does those too, but UX is still worse, especially on non-mobile.
Meanwhile I know people buying drugs off WhatsApp.
That's weird because it's really a convenient chat app and unlike WhatsApp, works equally well on both phones and desktops (Whatsapp works great on phones but desktop client sucks, Skype in it's old days, worked fine on desktops but totally sucked on phones, Telegram was the first app that did both well).
In our company all of the work chats are on Telegram although it's 100% legal, audited, and does nothing wrong. It's just the most convenient way to communicate. We use Slack only when some client heavily insists on it.
It's also really easy to integrate with as a developer, the bot API is genuinely one of the best and easiest-to-use APIs I've ever had the pleasure of interacting with.
From what I'm hearing through the grapevine (from people who actually use Telegram for this), some of the dealers on there actually use bots to take your order / address. You can't really do this on any other messaging app, at least not easily.
As a lightweight user, I had literally no idea what you’re talking about.
Not saying you’re wrong, just that it’s not something in your face and you need to actively search for this (now that I know this exists, it took me a minute to find it).
Or "find me a hook up close by", "find me the notification channel of a nearby protest" (mind you, this actually happened in Hong Kong in 2019). But yeah, what you said also makes sense.
I don't use this feature as I don't really want to send my precise location to Telegram but I can imagine it being in someone else's usability complain against Signal, too.
“find me a hook up close by” literally means “find me a prostitute nearby” which is also illegal here and is indeed present on Telegram.
Considering how everyone reporting their actual experience with Telegram here is downvoted to death, it seems to really hurt some users to actually consider that maybe the reason Durov got arrested is because Telegram welcomes criminals with open arms and does absolutely nothing to moderate the platform.
Apart from the fact that, in my years of using Telegram as my messaging app, I have never seen any of the "easy access to drugs" screens people here seem to find: an easy way to find drug sellers is a boon to law enforcement. This cannot be a reason for going against Telegram.
Like two weeks ago the WSJ reported a big expose on how Instagram permits users to sell drugs using paid advertisements. I guess Zuck will be arrested shortly after Durov? I can't believe these comments are in good faith but dang says assume so. Smh
> You don’t see “the West” whatever that means go after WhatsApp, Signal or Matrix. That should tell you something.
WhatsApp is a good corporate puppy of the West; Signal is a crazy nothingburger that recently burned its reputation by going into cryptocurrencies; Matrix, like with all FLOSS, has approximately zero users and is way under the radar of authorities. Still, you do occasionally see talk and moves against the first two.
> Do you have an actual argument against my main point - Telegram UX is literally designed to facilitate drug trafficking inside the application
Shmaybe, idk. It never occurred to me until you wrote it that this feature would be used for drug trade. Then again, the one time I turned it on out of curiosity, I figured it's mostly used for prostitution. I guess the use may differ across the world :).
FWIW, I'm somewhat with you on this - I'm not assuming that governments and law enforcement frowning on E2EE chats are just fascists revealing themselves. USA is good at signalling the zeitgeist, but all the issues with police power abuse are IMHO a USA problem, not a whole world problem; over here, people seem to have a little more trust in governments and law enforcement.
TeMPOral is indeed not responsible for most of the vapid idiocies written here about the EU which annoyed me. Thank you for pointing that I’m commenting in anger.
The ship has already sailed years ago. Suddenly, everyone is pro-censorship, you just have to say the magic words like "hate speech", "terrorists" or something with children. The media became a mouthpiece of the government instead of asking critical questions. It wasn't like this before and it terrifies me. The people will only see the damage once it affects them personally.
I don't see how you can maintain your privacy if it's possible you might believe some of the examples you listed. Certainly the state has to be sure you've never thought about those things. Privacy could thwart knowing.
Democracy is not a spectator sport. You have to be vigilant for it through the years.
With that vigilance, it helps to be able to accurately assess the problem. In this case, Durov wasn't arrested for non-Western aligned subject matter. He was arrested for tacitly allowing drug trade and extremism on his app. Yes, Telegram is deleting many of these groups, but it is a token effort at best.
If Telegram ramps up the moderation of these efforts, perhaps the charges against Durov will be dropped. But if they continue to allow these whilst upping the moderation against.. say.. pro-Russian groups, Durov stays jailed. Hence, accurately assess the problem, and choose to work on it.
For what its worth, I lean libertarian with a progressive bent, so in my book anything that is not overly dangerous should be allowed to be communicated.
- Weapon sales? Probably not.
- XTC sales? Go ahead.[0]
- Nutella boycot? Go ahead.
- Infiltrating a local government to sabotage it? No.
[0] Yes, I am fully aware drug production funds violent organisations and there are tonnes of externalities like chemical waste dumping. That needs to be fixed via legalizing, it is not an inherent problem of drug sales.
If the rule of law is robust, we should abolish the police.
You are very mistaken. Democracy requires defense. Everyone can have its own stupid opinion, but that is not the point.
Actively sabotaging society via campaigns is something any sane democratic society should defend against (all western "social" media are relentlessly hit by troll bots and disinformation campaigns, funded by your favorite dictatorships like Russia and China).
It is no wonder that Twitter for example got in the hands of Apartheid Musk.
The paradox of tolerance, read it up. It is a __paradox__.
The paradox of tolerance isn't real. Laws are real. Someone could argue for whatever they want. If the law says it cannot be implemented, it doesn't matter if they win an election. It's just about the law.
This is about identity theft like selling credit card details, meth and child porn (telegram deletes 60 thousand such groups. Per month. It's a shitpile that attracts flies, evidently)
That fact that you think that "alt right, anti-vaccine crazies" are extremist is the best example for not wanting people like you be able to censor anything.
In my country the anti-vaccine groups incensed each other so much that at one point they started burning down cellular ("5G") towers, causing reduced availability of emergency services in rural areas.
They gathered in front of politicians their houses in large groups, sometimes even with torches, hoping to scare even the kids inside the house.
The alt-right is directly responsible for the attempted Coup d'État on the capitol on Jan 6. Project 2025 vows to replace any competent officials with partisan sycophants. Mr. Trump said to his electoral base that if he is elected, they would "not have to vote ever again".
So yes, the alt-right is an anti-democratic extremist group.
As for anti-vaccine groups, their contribution to the death toll of past pandemics is no secret to any moderately informed person.
So because some people choose to express their democratic right to disagreement for their own reasons, and this includes doubt about vaccines, the idea of being against vaccines should be treated as extremism to be forbidden? If that's your interpretation of how personal rights and free expression work in a democracy, then I fear for the direction of democracy with idiots such as yourself guiding policy.
As for what happened on January 6th, it was in practical terms a concentrated bit of aggressive protest theater, and far from anything seriously resembling an attempted coup. You'd have to be deluded by ideology to call it something so serious. For example, that event was much smaller than the enormous amount of government property damage and calls to topple governments made by a much larger number of people during the earlier Floyd protests across the US and other countries. Would you call those extremist too?
In any case, by naming the most radical actions of a certain subset of a wider belief system as a reason for considering all aspects of that wider belief system as extremist and worthy of banning, you're just another garden variety autocratic monkey at heart, looking for ways justify banning whatever concept doesn't fit your tribal identity.
By your ridiculous logic, any belief system could be justifiably banned because in some ambiguous way, it's "responsible" for the specific activities of certain people who hold to its most extreme version, though the two things (a wider system of beliefs and specific people's active choices) are separate.
"You'll wear yourselves out swallowing dust, running around the courts to unblock the assets." (c) Vladimir Putin when persuading Russian oligarchs to repatriate their wealth. Turns out he was right.
They claim that criminals use Telegram, but it is not the best choice for doing crime because Telegram requires a phone number to sign up, and a phone number can be linked to identity and full location history (telcos record full location history for every number).
However, Telegram might be involved in cooperating with criminals; for example by not deleting channels related to protests against government at govt's request, by not blocking channels of allegedly spreading misinformation Western media like BBC. This is indeed illegal in Russia.
Fraudsters have access to a near-infinite supply of phone numbers. It is only an annoyance for the average user trying to legitimately access a service and only helps prevent the smallest and least prepared criminals. But it's true that for 1:1 communication or not having to reach a broad audience there should be better alternatives.
Funny story - there were some protests in my country some months ago. We're a semi-autocratic country on the verge of becoming a dictatorship. During the protests, the government used masked 'civilians,' or what you'd call 'titushkis,' to beat up activists at their home addresses or elsewhere in public. We were also getting calls from fake numbers on our personal numbers with threats.
A channel was created on Telegram by a government propaganda journalist, where they basically dox every activist, posting their addresses, phone numbers, and other private details, at times when these details are actively used for beating people to near death. That's the only content that Telegram channel produces.
I was one of the people whose details were posted on that channel. My phone number, home address, etc., were posted there, along with the private details of tens of others. I contacted Telegram support multiple times, we mass reported the channel - not once have I gotten an answer, and the entire channel is still up, for nearly 4 months.
So, hearing that he's arrested for lack of moderation? Good. I'm very happy. Hope he learns a lesson.
Since perchlorate's comment is now dead, and yours is similar, going to reply here.
I do agree to some extent. Having tools to challenge a dictatorship that cannot be silenced can indeed become invaluable. However, there is a significant difference between responsible moderation, which aims to protect individuals' safety, and full-blown censorship. While it can be a slippery slope, the absence of moderation shouldn't leave users defenseless against doxxing and threats, which can have real, harmful, and even deadly consequences. There must be some form of balance. From my experience, it feels like Telegram lacks any moderation whatsoever, which represents another extreme. I assume, though, that they must be enforcing some level of moderation for things like CP, since governments typically, really do not tolerate a no moderation policy in such areas.
I would say that being on this extreme end, Telegram has actually opened itself up to government scrutiny. If there had been some form of responsible moderation, governments might not have found enough grounds to justify their actions. The absence of any moderation means that governments can use full force and indeed justify it, potentially damaging the very area of free speech that Telegram aims to protect.
> help I'm being harassed online [detailed description of how]
> tsk tsk, and you think that justifies *censoring* people?!
Free speech and freedom from censorship are important, but I'm well tired of seeing them used as an excuse to deflect from real problems like online abuse, CSAM etc. Many people on HN seem to think some kinds of problems aren't even worthy of discussion because they any sort of regulation as an attack upon their privacy.
> What you call moderation is also a tool dictatorships use to censor people. It goes both ways.
The veracity of this claim aside, posting this as a reply to someone who just shared their own experience getting doxxed in a country where victims have legitimate grounds to fear for their lives... feels a little out of place.
Also, usually the dictatorships abuse the censors once their grasp is firm. Until then, they're typically abusing the lack of censorship for their own ends. We see that here in the US with troll farms abusing limited content moderation around misinformation to sway public opinion with falsehoods. Countries are trying to pull the US election in both directions right now this way.
> Posting this as a reply to someone who just shared their own experience getting doxxed in a country where victims have legitimate grounds to fear for their lives... feels a little out of place.
They should pick a bone with their country’s government that allows such thing to happen, not Telegram.
Wouldn't in this case the culprit is that Georgia didn't have rule of law? Yes, Telegram didn't help and ignored your plea, but prosecuting the owner for the presumed malice? I'm not sure how that will go well in the long run.
Well, it's complicated. In our case, we don't have the rule of law (my legal case was dismissed, unsurprisingly), but then the technology that is supposedly moderation-free because it provides free speech to dissenting voices (I'm assuming that's the justification), becomes a tool of the government itself—the only people who get hurt are those dissenting voices.
We don't use Telegram for communication, or at least it's strongly advocated against, including by me - because I've always viewed Telegram as malicious. There's a longstanding belief that it's E2EE, while it's only so under special circumstances, and Telegram holds the keys. I view insecure defaults as malicious, especially when you're advocating the network as very secure. So in the end, dissenting voices have no use for the tool and only the government does.
I do agree that prosecuting the owner is quite a big deal, but France has the rule of law. Durov faces up to 20 years in prison. While I don’t wish for him to be incarcerated for that long, if this situation serves as a wake-up call and prompts him to reconsider his app’s approach to moderation, it could be a win for everyone.
I'm sure if those workers picked up a dictionary and looked up the word dictatorship, they would agree.
They have a vote. One person does not rule the country.
> Since 2022 it became nothing but a propaganda tool itself.
How can it possibly be "a propaganda tool" when it has no feed, no algorithms, no suggestions or recommendations? You only get sources you've willingly subscribed to, nothing else.
Telegram has also absolutely no filters, so it can be filled with lies and propaganda without any response from the platform, except, only if it is russian government making requests. Your responses remind me of russian bot playbooks, tbh. Are you one?
Your own head should be your filter. This is literally craving for Big Brother.
> so it can be filled with lies and propaganda without any response from the platform
So does any other platform with the only difference being that it's the "right" kind of lies and propaganda that would also be shown down your throat with the rest of your feed. The cope is real.
> only if it is russian government making requests
Says who?
> Your responses remind me of russian bot playbooks, tbh. Are you one?
Well of course they do, and of course I am. Everyone knows that everyone who doesn't share your opinions and perspectives in 2024 isn't even worth of being considered a human being, duh!
Didn't protesters use Telegram for coordination as well? Lack of moderation sure hits both ways, but is the balance really in favour of governments? I'd be surprised if this is the case.
Ukraine? That’s the only context I’ve read the term titushkis. But those were used against Euromaiden protesters and with what happened since, plus the given n month timelines, that just doesn’t make sense.
I've been recommending Signal to anyone potentially targeted for years. Almost everyone aware of being a target has used, and continues to use, Signal. Those not specifically targeted are at least well-informed about its importance.
However, during protests, the government sometimes jams the network, or perhaps the cell towers simply fail under the load of thousands of people in a concentrated area - rendering Signal unusable. Consequently, we needed a peer-to-peer messaging solution, but couldn't find a suitable one. During the protests, we were essentially left without any means of digital communication and had to rely solely on verbal one.
We couldn't use Briar due to the mix of iOS and Android devices here. Cross-platform compatibility is a must. And we never got Bridgefy to work at all in our tests.
With more protests possibly on the horizon depending on the outcome of the October elections this year, I'm on the lookout for a cross-platform messaging app that can function without internet connectivity. If anyone has recommendations for such an app, or other suggestions, please share them with me :)
This and the sexual blackmail the network fully permits. Although it's my understanding they have been doing slightly better when it comes down to children (the fact it was made possible in the first place is unbelievable though).
Not counting the pro-Israeli channels posting details of anti-genocide activists and encouraging violence (and sometimes openly putting bounties on activists' heads). All constantly reported yet no action is taken.
There have been so many things this guy has allowed for years, believing he could act (or fail to act) with total impunity because of his fortune. Hell, he got offered a French passport because Macron used to be a big Telegram fan (might still be). It's absolutely incredible he was so brazen he would just travel to France because there is absolutely no way he wasn't aware he could be held liable (especially considering recent EU legislation), he probably just believed he was above the law.
Self-admittedly he has over 100 children. OTOH, Telegram's DCs are in: the US, the Netherlands and in Singapore [0] and he was just arrested in the EU.
So I don't follow how you've made a connection between Putin and (Putin's?) "(fake?) victim" Durov.
Does this Matsapulina realize, that when you install Telegram on new phone, you just need to confirm the phone number and all your chats are restored on that new device? So for authorities to read her chats it's just a matter of intersepting an SMS with the confirmation code?
Of course, I suggest everyone to assume the software they use may be compromized.
But let's not post trash articles. In the article's own words, "conspiracy theories, paranoia, and speculation".
I did not see the info anywhere else, but it was just broadcasted by the main French tv channel.
Pavel Durov, the Telegram founder was just arrested out of his airplane in the Bourget airport in France near Paris.
There is no info about why exactly he was arrested but it looks like that French police had a warrant for him.
But it looks like it is because that he is accused of being an accessory of a lot of things like traffic, drugs, pedopornography, anything bad you can image because he would not have done anything to combat that on Telegram.
If it is real, it would really be the same kind of political crime abuse on an individual of the same level as what happened to Julian Assange.
I can easily guess that assholes in secret service would probably like very much to use that to blackmail him to add backdoors to telegram. So sad.
Since forever I stay suspicious but so far Telegram as an impeccable track record. Never there was a single instance of case where there would be even a suspicion of proof that insider knowledge of conversations was accessed/used.
Also, it is clear that Durov is a dissident and personally experienced and run away of the dictatorial state. So I think that it is probably one of the tech personality that I trust the most in the world.
Obviously FSB is not going to make a press release and be like "We have the keys LOL" so there would never be definitive proof.
Fun fact: Telegram at some point was blocked in Russia for not giving FSB access to data. Later telegram was unblocked and is used extensively in Russia. It's not hard to figure out why it was unblocked.
Telegram wasn't fully blocked in Russia even for a single day. They tried to block it and failed miserably. The team actively circumvented the blocking by deploying to new IPs faster than they were blocked, and in addition to that every IT guy in Russia had a tgproxy instance running for family and friends.
After a while they just stopped trying and decided that it's less reputational damage to just let it be.
>After a while they just stopped trying and decided that it's less reputational damage to just let it be.
That's not true. It's legally unblocked. the reason why it was unblocked was never published. "It was unblocked because they gave up" is just your interpretation of the events. Pretty naive one, in my opinion.
This is pure FUD. They're still trying to block it, the latest three attempts happened this week. Two of them were done in the middle of the night as training exercise, maybe for 3-4 hours each, and the last one then happened in the middle of the day. All three broke large parts of the internet and were quickly reverted.
When something newsworthy happens in some region, all messengers get blocked in that region for days, Telegram included. They don't care about collateral damage to other websites then.
You're the one who is spreading FUD. Telegram was officially (legally) unblocked in 2020. There is 0 evidence there is an active force trying to block Telegram in Russia. Which is very busy blocking every non-russian platform btw. As you yourself pointed out, most likely the reason why TG was down is because of attempts to block other platforms.
And? I use TG everyday. I know about the times when TG is down. as YOUR OWN links show, usually it's not just telegram who is down, so it's clear it's mass block.
The article doesn't contain the evidence though; it claims that someone changed access to private for a Telegram group that covered the protests. However, as the article says, it could be done not only by Telegram, but by one of the administrators.
Durov was notorious in Russia for refusing to cooperate with FSB (successor to KGB), too. I remember when FSB asked him to give access to protester communications on VK (in 2011 during mass protests), he mockingly responded with a picture of a dog with its tongue out (showing your tongue means "I won't give it to ya" in Russian culture). That's why he left Russia, because he felt he'd get arrested soon. Quite ironic that he ended up getting arrested in the "free world", not Russia. Telegram was also banned in Russia for a few years.
> Telegram was also banned in Russia for a few years.
And how exactly do you think it got unbanned?
Their "encryption" used to use an in-house algorithm (in house algorithms almost always are vastly inferior to standard ones) and even today encryption stores the keys on their servers (in Russia...) and E2EE has to be enabled per-conversation by hand.
And my intuition is that Telegram is going to become banned in Russia soon, as Youtube is being banned now and Telegram is the last popular application where you can find the content about war, protests or elections that govt doesn't like.
Telegram has also large Russian pro-war communities, and it's extensively used by soldiers deployed in Ukraine for communication. If pro-war channels outnumber opposition channels (and they probably do), Telegram probably won't be banned as long the government has no alternative.
The fact of Durov getting arrested could be also used for propaganda purposes (no free speech in the West).
> And my intuition is that Telegram is going to become banned in Russia soon
It had already happened with extreme humiliation of responsible agencies.
> as Youtube is being banned now
It's not banned, it's throttled because google kept abusing backbone networks once their CDNs had started to burn down and claiming that this is totally fine and fixable with direct BGP peerings with ISPs (yeah, right)
It works just fine on mobile internet connection where traffic shaping is an inherent feature and it only works like shit on broadband where ISPs are only capable of sending TCP RST once the queue is over the limit.
> Telegram is the last popular application where you can find the content about war, protests or elections that govt doesn't like
Clearly you are not in touch with people in Russia and have never actually seen their social media. Or just being dramatic.
Do you have any confirmation for what you are claiming? E.g. the claim that all ISPs simultaneously voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube to reduce foreign traffic? It seems to me that you either don't know the details or are simply trolling.
> It's not banned, it's throttled because google kept abusing backbone networks once their CDNs had started to burn down and claiming that this is totally fine and fixable with direct BGP peerings with ISPs (yeah, right)
> It works just fine on mobile internet connection where traffic shaping is an inherent feature and it only works like shit on broadband where ISPs are only capable of sending TCP RST once the queue is over the limit.
This is not true. The connections to googlevideo are throttled by government-operated DPI, not by ISPs. You can verify this by sending following request from a Russian residential or mobile IP address to a Russian hosting provider Selectel:
The request above is not send to Youtube, it doesn't even leave Russia, but it will be throttled because curl uses "googlevideo.com" in SNI field in ClientHello TLS record. DPI detects the SNI and drops the packets. The download speed will be very low, in the range of kilobytes/sec. However, if you remove googlevideo.com domain from SNI and write
Then the file will be downloaded at full speed, megabytes/sec. It is a request to the same host, to the same IP address, but it is not throttled anymore.
Also the information about mobile connection not being throttled is outdated and incorrect. Nowadays mobile connections are throttled as well.
The information that all ISPs voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube is implausible. Why would they throttle the speed to allow their competitors to lure away their clients?
> E.g. the claim that all ISPs simultaneously voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube to reduce foreign traffic
> The information that all ISPs voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube is implausible
> Also the information about mobile connection not being throttled
Why are you trying to build a strawman? That's not what I said. I've said "google kept abusing backbone networks" (e.g. IEXPs), which obviously means it's a matter of the Main Radiofrequency Centre, since it involves nation-wide infrastructure - not some "ISP volunteering".
And I’ve never said that “mobile connection is not being throttled”. In fact, I am stating exactly the opposite, pointing out that traffic shaping is an inherent feature for a mobile ISP. In contrast to broadband, where no one bothered with deep traffic manipulation before, so an ad-hoc throttling solution (yes, typically simply reusing existing law enforcement integrations) works like shit.
> This is not true. The connections to googlevideo are throttled by government-operated DPI, not by ISPs. You can verify this by sending following request from a Russian residential or mobile IP address to a Russian hosting provider Selectel:
One does not need a synthetic test such as yours. One can simply try playing a video from the same browser, switching connection between broadband connected Wi-Fi and a mobile hotspot and notice that broadband doesn’t seem to be working properly, but mobile actually works, even if it’s not Full HD. How come? Does your hypothesis regarding “not by ISPs, but by government-issued DPIs” explain the variance in ISPs behavior? No, it doesn’t. Just as it doesn’t explain why “blocked” YT seems to be “blocked” completely different from your typical weed growers forum. It works differently from how you imagine it.
> Why would they throttle the speed to allow their competitors to lure away their clients?
Speaking of which, apparently some broadband ISPs are now trying to implement throttling properly to give them an edge over the competition: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6919868
IIRC the bans weren't successful because the Telegram client had a system which announced new servers/IPs via push notifications. So they easily evaded it. Plus, the agency responsible for the bans got a bad rep after accidentally banning lots of unrelated services, ruining random businesses in Russia.
Maybe they also understood that if you can't defeat them, lead them. Currently, Telegram has a lot of pro-war, pro-Kremlin channels.
The procedures and setup for censoring the Internet were significantly improved; no need to go to the court, no need to exchange data with ISPs, black boxes with DPI are installed at every large ISP, compared to blacklists of IP/hostname hat were sent to ISPs before.
I think this might become a future for most of the countries; China and Russia are just several years ahead.
Nitpick: USSR was never officially a communist state, it was a "socialist" state. I remember the Soviet government had slogans like "we will build communism by 1980" etc. No one thought they already had communism. IIRC their idea was that, to build communism, you must have some kind of transitional state/ideology first. But something went wrong :)
Why don't you post it yourself. And why should I care about what he says when telegram has some of the worst default encryption settings among commonly used messaging apps in the west?
Except Telegram is considered one of the most secured apps around. Obviously it cannot stop people from being stupid when they expose themselves.
The very reason why France is not happy is that because they cannot get access to private chats and stuff. EU was (and is) pushing for the end of E2E encryption after all (it failed this time, but they will try again).
Durov created Telegram because the russian government was trying to take over his original social network - VK (basically imagine USA gov taking over Facebook). Thus he sold his shared and left the country.
I do find it hilarious to see apologists of government over-reach like you.
What about group chat encryption? You can not possible say telegram is more secure than signal or WhatsApp.
What did I say that made me an apologist for government overreach? I recommend users use Signal? Your accusation is unfounded when I was complaining about a lack of encryption.
With Whatsapp it is pretty obvious at this point that it is in cahoot with governments in regards of backdoors and stuff. With Signal? Who knows? Maybe too.
Governments don't go after services that they can access freely.
I know that TuckerCarlson is a polarizing character. My posting of this link is not any kind of statement for or against him or his politics. That being said, the interview really gives an interesting picture of Pavel Durov IMO. If you can ignore Carlson's annoying tangents into American politics, you get to hear a good bit of Durov's life story straight from his mouth in reasonable detail. I came away from it with a more positive picture of Durov and Telegram.
> Do you unironically believe it's not already backdoored for Russian government?
To people arguing against this, Russia's Sovereign Wealth Fund RDIF has an ownership stake in Telegram after co-raising with Abu Dhabi's Mudabala in 2021 [0]
Either way, Telegram is at the whims of MbZ, and if the UAE ever needs something from Russia, they'll use Durov and Telegram as collateral. The UAE's done the same thing with Pakistan (Musharraf, Nawaz Sharif), India (Dawood Ibrahim), Israel-Palestine (Mohammad Dahlan), Serbia (Belgrade Waterfront Project and Mohammad Dahlan), Turkiye (Mohammad Dahlan), etc.
If the Telegram founders were truly opposed to Russia, they would have immigrated to Israel, the UK, Germany, Netherlands, or the US like most business dissidents in Russia. If VK wasn't stolen by an oligarch, they would have remained in Russia to this day.
Telegram has, by design, message content accessible to whoever runs the servers. WhatsApp has gone to great lengths to not have that.
Obviously there’s client security, potential backdoors, unencrypted backups, and many other things to worry about. But I don’t see a scenario where it fares worse than Telegram, and many where it’s significantly better.
Whatsapp has to have some kind of escape hatch if not back door simply because of the amount of heat it doesn’t get (think of all the regimes who are ok with it).
I believe that escape hatch to be cloud backups, which are heavily encouraged by the UI and not end-to-end encrypted by default. iMessage has made the same compromise.
As long as enough people click that checkbox, law enforcement has access and Meta/Apple are out of the news without having lied about or hidden anything.
My understanding is that WhatsApp has never made claims comparable to Telegram or Signal.
I also can’t tell if you’re being sincere. I was under the impression that Telegram was considered significantly less secure than Signal and that the matter was mostly settled. I’ve been seeing the following talking points repeated for years now.
That is absolutely not how it works. If you offer a platform for public discourse you are required by law to moderate it or face the consequences. Telegram group chats are technically open to moderation, yet the company has done nothing to put any kind of moderation in place.
This is in contrast to Facebook or Twitter. Those platforms will absolutely take down content that is offensive or criminal in nature.
Actually, there is a moderation within Telegram; it is not at the scale of Meta & X in terms of the head-count. Telegram probably has 100x less employees than Meta (I don't know the actual number)
https://telegram.org/tos/eu-dsa
>Telegram group chats are technically open to moderation, yet the company has done nothing to put any kind of moderation in place.
This is not even remotely true. I have reported content many times and when I come back to check it, it's gone. This includes account of spammers, some sellers (or pretending to be) of illegal goods, etc.
Facebook does not generally take down content that is offensive or criminal in nature.
The have moderation teams because they are required by law.
These are outsourced to the lowest bidder. They are so overwhelmed by the amount of that content.
Watch those documentaries about the psychological traumas inflicted to those that moderate Facebook content.
The political establishment doesn't want the proletariat having journalism that reports against the wishes of the powerful or of regular people having free speech to be used against the government.
No ethical person should take part in enforcing these laws.
That’s good, while prosecutors and law enforcement are wasting time building a car against him, the drug dealers and pedophiles will just carry on elsewhere.
> "I can easily guess that assholes in secret service would probably like very much to use that to blackmail him to add backdoors to telegram. So sad."
Telegram is a backdoor by design. The server has complete access to all your messages, they can do whatever they want with those.
Goole Translate works good enough for this article, there is also one from "FiloSottile" but I haven't read it and iirc it still references this one, it's called "The most backdoor-looking bug I have ever seen"
Note that America has been caught spying on EU countries politicians and manufacturers so many times and nobody got ever punished for this. While the backdoor talks are purely hypothetical, and Telegram's client and protocol are open source: you can just study the code.
I hate the way Telegram always gets flak for crime when WhatsApp and Signal can be used for it just as well and they are even harder to track things down on because they have E2EE. Telegram by default doesn't and it doesn't even support it in group chats!
So if these things happen in WhatsApp or Signal we simply don't know about it.
> There is no info about why exactly he was arrested but it looks like that French police had a warrant for him.
> But it looks like it is because that he is accused of being an accessory of a lot of things like traffic, drugs, pedopornography, anything bad you can image because he would not have done anything to combat that on Telegram.
This very article says that it's because Telegram doesn't cooperate with authorities in handling illegal content (which it is legally obligated to, to operate in France) and provides services to facilitate illegal activities (crypto or throwaway numbers).
There’s a world of a difference between refusing to hand over data you have to the authorities, and plausibly not having stored them in the first place.
By end-to-end encrypting messages, but uploading backups to Google Drive and iCloud, and in a non-end-to-end encrypted way by default, WhatsApp (and iMessage, which does largely the same) have quite cleverly maneuvered themselves out of that potential source of legal problems without cutting off law enforcement access entirely.
Just think: all the companies that do illegal shit and get slaps on the wrist with a few thousand/million dollar fines. That's the only "consequence" for the executives that blew up the economy in 2008, the politicians that are in cahoots with company executives to funnel money into their pockets, the companies that spy on their own employees without due diligence or cause, the producers of products that knowingly cause cancer, the producers of medicine that knowingly destroys lives, the decision-makers that destroy engineering standards resulting in airplanes falling from the skies with hundreds of helpless people being blown to pieces, and the companies that destroy the planet with actions that can never be reversed.
And instead they arrest the CEO of a company that provides a mechanism for people to talk to one another.
We can be honest and the government realizes that it's not just talking. At least for the conversations they are concerned about. *EDIT* I dont agree with it, but Ive seen governments do far worse with far less.
I can assure you they are not concerned by illegal drugs and crime as every single french city is gangrened by drug dealers and thugs. But they really don't like free speech.
Governments want control and intelligence. Im not saying the did this legally or valid like but I can see exactly why they did it. Same with Assange... The government was tired of dealing with his bs, legal or not.
Telegram is not a police and not a court though; it doesn't need to search and identify illegal content. And how can you call something illegal without court's decision?
Governments want control and intelligence. Im not saying the did this legally or valid like but I can see exactly why they did it. Same with Assange... The government was tired of dealing with his bs, legal or not.
Governments want control and intelligence. Im not saying the did this legally or valid like but I can see exactly why they did it. Same with Assange... The government was tired of dealing with his bs, legal or not.
I keep bringing it up since people forget about it: in 2006 the EU adopted the Data Retention Directive that forced all ISPs to save the browsing history of everyone.
It was eventually declared invalid by the European court of human rights, but it was still in effect for many years. Countries that did not implement this (eg Romania because their constitutional court found it illegal) were sued by the EU commission.
The EU's attempts to spy on people go back decades. You'll also note that government gets exemptions from all the privacy stuff the EU pushes.
I hope the EU changes course on this, but as with their handling of other tech... I'm not holding my breath.
Is that directive the reason why website operators do not want to implement ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) which allows to encrypt server name in TLS connection? I tried googling this, but Cloudflare blog only says that they disabled ECH without disclosing the reasons: [1]
No, and other sites seem to not support it. This is a list of top 10 000 sites and it seems that virtually nobody supports this TLS extension: https://divested.dev/misc/ech.txt .
> Countries that did not implement this (eg Romania because their constitutional court found it illegal) were sued by the EU commission.
This is funny because the secret service abuses citizens' privacy in Romania all the time. But this turned against corrupt politicians which is probably why they sued. The secret service wiretapped them and gave the recordings to the anti-corruption directorate which was then led by the current EPPO chief prosecutor. Some high level politicians ended up in prison after much friction, but in the end a few heads had to roll in order to at least give the impression of fighting corruption, which the US Embassy and the EU asked for.
Romanian establishment parties would vote anything that comes out of the Comission. CSAM? They will vote for it. The opposition is basically Kremlin funded right wingers which were barred even from joining Viktor Orban's conservative group and two small parties like Macron's, one which didn't get any votes and the other has like three MEPs after making an alliance with two other small parties. If the right wingers vote against CSAM it's just to sabotage the EU decision process.
"Welp.. funding terrorists and then pretending like we're afraid of them didn't work, how about we fund child pornographers and then pretend like we just can't catch them if encryption exists."
Typical modern law enforcement incompetence. They don't care about you. They just want to protect their access to your data.
> Declassified American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.
> The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.
> The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington's main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.
> The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA's first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement's funds.
Modern day EU, is a sharing of power structure over the EU between France and Germany. The institutional seats for the EU are in Brussels, Frankfurt, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. Poland and the UK wanted Turkey to join the union to provide voting balance against Germany and France. This didn't happen and France made it clear that they'll never agree to it. The UK left because of this imbalance (despite having special privileges).
One way to think about the current EU in medieval terms: A personal union between France and Germany; and a bunch of associated vassal states.
I don't think the CIA had much to do with it. I am pretty sure they tried to soft-power their way through some decisions though. Europe is too big for the CIA to control.
> The UK left because of this imbalance (despite having special privileges).
The UK had a very beneficial (for the UK populace) position. Disinformation campaigns fueled by oligarchs and Russian money got the population to score an own goal. Gains for the few, destruction for the others.
But as one of those wealthy politicians said, "at least the fish are now happy".
With its creation, by which I mean Lisbon Treaty. Before that EU was basically just a free trade zone, after Lisbon the eurocrats took over, trying to turn EU into socialist's version of heaven on Earth.
The censorship initiatives in the west largely originate from the US „Blob“, the amalgamation of the State Department, Pentagon, CIA and the soft-power NGOs.
Mike Benz, a former insider, spends his days explaining how this works.
This is not the best introduction that he has done, but it is the latest space he recorded on the Telegram affair:
„A turbo-charged 10 mins on Telegram as an instrument of US statecraft, why the US State Dept selectively promotes Telegram as a free speech tool in some countries but pressures gov'ts to censor Telegram in other countries, and Who Dunnit behind Pavel's arrest.“
Let me tell you ...seeing the amount of crap this American gets from Europeans regarding all our messed up institutions and also seeing how much the EU does try to fight for its people, the EU is pretty darn good.
This is definitely a "grass is always greener" situation.
I like a lot of things the EU is doing, but this spread of surveillance is something I'll always protest against. That's my biggest gripe with the EU, and I hate the Big-Brother-like thinking that gives us the GDPR and also mass surveillance.
It's clear the EU's mindset is "nobody can compromise your privacy except me, but it's OK, I'm benevolent", and I'm not a fan of that exceptions.
The GDPR is the "nobody can compromise your privacy" part and the surveillance is the "except me" part. Big Brother's whole spiel was "we're watching over you for your own good".
To clarify, I like the GDPR, and wish the EU would give us more of that and less of the surveillance.
That's good, though I suspect it's a bit of a losing battle. I'll keep protesting, at any rate. I look forward to more GDPR, DMA, etc. Those make me glad I live in the EU.
WUT? GDPR gives you controll of your data, which all those "saint" vc-blessed startups from siliconvale hate with passion... (and they can go * themselves :D)
At any rate - the mass surveillance effort is just an idea pushed by some MEPs/comissioners... it would be nice to be able to dimiss those.
Besides, there was also a complain about "cookie" banners but the UE didn't mandate to make annoying popups - the intent was to force services harvest less data... as it shows - if the law is not explicit enough then private business will try to circumvent it and push users to hate the entity/the law ('buuuu, stupid EU'... no - it's stupid and abusive corporation). At any rate I do hope that there will be push to make the configuration a browser setting akin to "DNT" with various levels ("allow all cookies", "only functional", "no cookies"; maybe more) and make websites follow it...
Reddit is very far from representative. Try posting anything there that isn't far left and you'll get banned or modded into invisibility pretty quickly. The only people obsessed with speech enough to want to moderate subreddits for free are all people who, surprise, think controlling speech is really important.
Free speech is not something they value. Individual rights aren’t valued.
Nonsense. Of course Europeans value those things, but they're also mindful of the fact that such freedoms can be abused, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.
I fail to see what this has to do with European conceptions of free speech in general. You may recall that Britain went out of its way to leave the EU, in part citing its dislike of the EU's legal concept of fundamental rights.
Of course people who don't value much free speech say that they're mindful of the fact that freedom can be abused etc. Nobody will ever say "yes I like censorship because I am a reactionary".
In general, remember that villains almost always justify their action as necessary or just- only in movies their stated motive is obviously egoistical.
> Nobody will ever say "yes I like censorship because I am a reactionary".
Yes, because no one except idiots will say "I am reactionary", and no one except idiots believe that "because I am reactionary" is a valid explanation of anything. Political categories are dumb, and most people aren't stupid enough to define themselves by them.
Like reddit is representative of what EU citizens think.
Also hopefully LinkedIn will get banned indeed, or have you already forgotten how Microsoft has been (at least theoretically) illegal for nearly a decade already in the EU, because they were (and most likely still are) complicit with the US government in violating human rights, and that is even before considering the monopoly issues ?
So a website you don't like you would ban for everybody else as well just because you decided that it is merely marketing crap there making you nauseous. So you then conclude it should be banned for everyone else? How do you think the world would look if everybody had the power to ban things with similar reasons? We'd have nothing left in the world. Scary.
PS: I'm just annoyed being pretty much forced to "profile myself" there in order to be considered for jobs. I used to avoid it but several recruiters told me they would rank people without a linkedin profile lower and even people inside the company where I work now insist on it.
I really hate that kind of corporate evangelisation. If it didn't exist I wouldn't have to take part in it, that's all.
The company I work for is the same. We were one of the last to close our Russian offices when the war started. They say they're committed to LGBTIQ+ rights yet do huge business in Saudi and the rest of the middle east (and don't even display the rainbow banners on our site there). The C-Suite say they care about sustainability yet fly all over the world in private jets.
You don't have to take part in it, period. I've been doing fine in my career with no such corporate nonsense. Heck, I've been doing fine saying "no" to a lot of bullshit.
Free speech is not unrestricted speech, nor freedom from consequences. The market is also not free when it’s uncontrolled, that would just result in blatant manipulation.
And hate speech is a serious crime, not sure why you believe otherwise. In many aspects, most EU countries have much freer speech than the US.
no they are not lying, they just have a different meaning for "democracy", it just means "them". So if you are against them, you are effectively against "democracy".
Most of officials in every democracy, purported or otherwise, are unelected. For practical reasons, you always elect a group, which then sets up or elects other groups, which together form the government.
And your point is? Generally only unelected officials are allowed to formulate or propose EU policy (the EU "parliament" is only there for rubber stamping it) how is that similar to most countries?
They added this wallet feature with a lot of different cryptos, which implicates that they are also now providing maybe a financial service. The regulation with those is heavy.
His Telegram channel is somewhat odd. It's a mix of what you'd expect (updates / general stuff about Telegram), some slightly weird stuff (highly praising countries he visited or talking about his oh-so-high-quality sperm and how he's the biological father of "over 100" kids), and then there's just shilling for some random watch-ads-to-get-coins things or whatever that totally aren't scams built on Telegram's new mini-app thing and TON (which is Telegram's cryptocurrency that they can't legally sell as theirs).
You can take a look for yourself here: https://t.me/s/durov
2) "Praising countries" aka focusing on increasing the reach of Telegram, similar to Zuckerberg with Facebook.
3) "biological father of "over 100" kids" is quite the mildly interesting fact. It's unsurprising for an individual in his position to be a little eccentric.
4) "shilling for some random watch-ads-to-get-coins" aka focusing on increasing engagement with the Telegram app ecosystem that directly benefits Telegram.
He's an interesting but odd man. It's rare to see him fully dressed on his Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/durov. I expected him to remove his clothes during Carlson's interview, but he didn't.
Jack, Pavel, Zucc... all security-state agents, just different states. Anything centralized, or at least centrally intermediated is full-blown AIDS. I don't like why they arrested him, but he had it coming regardless.
The discussion you are thinking about is neither dead nor flagged. Overly active discussions get downranked automatically:
„Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.“, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
It's not perfect, but it really does often correctly identify flamewars. If you feel a post has incorrectly triggered the flamewar detector, email mods at hn@ycombinator.com.
As I write, this thread doesn't trigger the criteria.
Boo fucking hoo. Being opposed to fascist dictators invading peaceful countries isn't "Russophobia", it's rational and ethical. If Putin dropped dead and was replaced by sane people, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much so-called "Russophobia". Stop painting yourself and your corrupt murderous warmongering invading fascist dictator tyrants as the victims. It's totally your fault that reasonable peaceful people justifiably hate you, as long as you're invading Ukraine, threatening nuclear war, oppressing LGBTQ people, and bullshit like that.
They convicted 54 people in two weeks. I guess "military like" means that trials and convictions were specifically expedited for right wing rioters on request of the neo elected prime minister.
Exactly. Similar to what used to happen a century or so ago in places like Sicily as a result of peasant/popular revolts [1]. 30 years or so later the whole liberal Italian political system would be sent to the garbage bins of history with not much of a fight and we know the rest.
The problem is not with communication with the outer world. The problem with other messengers is that everything you type there is monitored by CIA/NSA and Ukraine has access to this information. Telegram right now is the only secure messenger that doesn't leak them data on Russian citizens.
and the Russian govt has carte blanche access to Telegram. Russia invaded their sovereign neighbour Ukraine who the f cares about their forums for messaging. yawn.
He hasn’t lived in Russia for a decade. From what I understand the reason he left is because he refused to give them access. He’d prob be arrested there at the airport as well.
I’m guessing you’re in SMS-land (USofA) where telegram (nor WhatsApp) never really caught on? Because telegram is HUGE outside of the US and China, including Ukraine.
By the way, I'm not sure what reasons would Ukraine have to make up their accusations: if Telegram weren't entangled with Russia, why would it be such a big problem for them?
I really have no idea why you think this is worth noting; they've only posted a few times, and haven't once said a negative thing about Ukraine or Ukrainians.
Also, you don't have to tell people to take the opinions of anonymous strangers with a "grain of salt." It's weird.
It was a workaround to avoid saying that I think that there's a non-zero chance that this account exists to be shill against Western aid for Ukraine and so people might want to stop upvoting them.
Saying that outright tends to get you flagged to death and for good reason, but since my alternative got flagged to death anyway I guess I can say it outright now.
Based on media reports, Telegram has been continually used by a hostile autocratic government to recruit, organize and direct various gray-zone attacks against Europe, on European soil.
Now it sounds like Europe finally put the foot down.
Telegram is also one of the very few places where ordinary Russians can read alt-news and not only Kremlin-approved propaganda. And Russia's stringent internet censorship is only tightening as years go by.
From my experience those charges are valid and well deserved. As a Telegram user since 2015, I've spent 2 years actively reporting groups and individuals in posession of explicit materials involving children and animals. Some of my friends have also joined me in this effort. Unfortunately, Telegram never banned any of those groups and individuals which is a textbook case of not only being an accessory to crime, but also being complicit in letting the crime go on.
I don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. You guys are upset that I was trying to get pedos and zoos banned? You support what they're doing?
This will be an interesting case to watch -- I don't believe there are any western nations that want non-locally-backdoored messaging of any sort -- but generally my understanding is that harassment on border entry has been the order of the day, rather than arrests.