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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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 :)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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
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.
>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.
> 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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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!
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 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 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.)
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 ?
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
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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. "
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
/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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> "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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
*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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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 .
"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.
> 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.
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.“
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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".
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 488 ms ] threadThere 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.
Do you unironically believe it's not already backdoored for Russian government?
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.
I'm not sure that counts as an impeccable track record.
I'm not even going to mention how many people were arrested over telegram messages in russia.
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.
If you're implying it's backdoored, that's a wild mental gymnastics you made there.
No hate, but your comment is speculative in nature.
Saying Russian government would give a shit about people opinions, funny joke.
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.
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.
https://storage.googleapis.com/gsc-link/cbe9d20e.html
https://t.me/agentstvonews/4973
https://t.me/meduzalive/94295
I doubt they explicitly say to themselves, "Today I do evil for fun and profit.". I wonder what their rationalization is.
Yes. You should read the history of Durov and why Telegram was created in the first place.
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 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.
Governments don't go after services that they can access freely.
Can you point to the relevant part of the comment?
https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1780355490964283565
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/xk1jdw/comment/ipbv...
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.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-23/russia-mu...
Yes as Telegram was banned in Russia for a long time (or at least they tried) before giving up.
The fact of Durov getting arrested could be also used for propaganda purposes (no free speech in the West).
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.
> 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?
> 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
The Communists lied to us about Communism, unfortunately they didn't lie about the West.
It was still better than what happened to the USSR between 1993 and 2000 when the West won the cold war and dictated surrender terms.
What has changed since then?
I think this might become a future for most of the countries; China and Russia are just several years ahead.
Maybe they also understood that if you can't defeat them, lead them. Currently, Telegram has a lot of pro-war, pro-Kremlin channels.
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.
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.
Telegram is a backdoor by design. The server has complete access to all your messages, they can do whatever they want with those.
And they even had a backdoor in E2EE chats, see: https://habr.com/ru/articles/206900/
This is in contrast to Facebook or Twitter. Those platforms will absolutely take down content that is offensive or criminal in nature.
> Reporting a channel
> Open Telegram > Open channel > Select channel name (top) > Report > Select the report reason
> If you need to report content by email
> Address it to abuse@telegram.org with a subject like “Report user @username”
In desktop app you can simply click right button on the message or click three-dots menu in the top bar and there will be an option for report.
[1] https://netsafe.org.nz/social-media-safety/telegram
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.
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.
> 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).
It's in the "why was he arrested" section.
So if these things happen in WhatsApp or Signal we simply don't know about it.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
> 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.
[0] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/08/25/telegram-boss-pave...
It is basically the part of the current politics in EU where they are trying to force access to all encrypted traffic across devices.
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.
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.
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.
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,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5503354 ("French homeland intelligence threatens a sysop into deleting a Wikipedia Article (wikimedia.fr)")
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.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Isn’t it equally reasonable to assume the accused is innocent until proven guilty?
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!
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.)
He's gonna have a very miserable time. Flying private jet --> watching another man shitting next to you.
I don't know if that counts as "due process" for everyone ?
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2024/08/28/le-pdg-de-...
I think the original link mentioned exactly that, and it would be done over the weekend
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.
That's what I read
- 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.
It's registered as a separate company, but they even share some office space.
Has been this way for decades and shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
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.
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.
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.
Which would be pedantry if it weren't that one of the two chambers is much more in line with the former
Notably, it can be agreed upon in the EC using qualified majority, unilateral veto doesn't apply.
The last time they tried (in June), the qualified majority wasn't reached, but the difference was slim.
https://www.wired.com/story/europes-moral-crusader-lays-down...
https://www.statewatch.org/news/2024/july/police-should-have...
It's a bizarre lie, not the least because it so obviously does not hold up to even the most basic scrutiny.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Zoom in on parts of the U.S you get a much higher murder rate - https://usafacts.org/articles/which-cities-have-the-highest-...
like I said everything is relative, and Sweden does not have as big a problem as the reporting lets on.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, the police and social services has compiled written information that they want to share with parents of at-risk children.
This seems a strange thing to ridicule.
The main issue being "an encrypted messenger". So whatsapp=gang… unclear if telegram is ok since it's normally not e2ee.
I am skeptical this will achieve anything useful.
> 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.
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.
https://restoreprivacy.com/telegram-sharing-user-data/
> 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.
Signal and Telegram were publicly sparring in May 2024, https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/chat-apps-government-ties-a...
> 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.”
"other offences" probably means copyright issues?
sounds logical and can probably be checked!
>"routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.”
sounds logical and being a big company I suppose true.
>“the US government spent $3 million to build Signal’s encryption”
sounds probable, meaning they got funding from some NSA project.
>“activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad.”
this sounds a bit crazy!
In my experience it's the channel's admins who respond, not Telegram's.
If that's the case then CSAM not getting actioned is probably just channel admins allowing content that they approve of.
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.
Does it?
The EU usually takes 3 steps forward, 1 to 2 steps backwards.
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.
Orthogonal facets are orthogonal.
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.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
So unless you’ve built application by yourself, you have no guarantee of it’s sequrity.
PGP is impractical for regular email communication unfortunately and pointless on platform like gmail.
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).
Why? I'm allowed to connect two or more tin cans by a string. Why can't Apple?
If you don't have a tin can, then you can't join.
Why do you need it when you have Matrix and Signal? Why do you trust a closed, non-auditable Apple software?
Which every company does more or less. The fact that Telegram doesn't reach this extremely low, very low bar is quite something.
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.
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.
This arrest is completely preposterous and is just an attempt to get Durov to play ball with France's privacy destroying authorities.
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.
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.
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.
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".
https://www.criminal-lawyers.com.au/criminal-defences/lack-i...
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.
That's a strawman. They believe all speech should be held legally equal, not that's it's value is equal.
It's that any speech has the potential to be extremely valuable to the person not responsible for regulating it.
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.
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 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?
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.
If a business can't do a thing it is required to do, their CEO's option is "close business" or "break law".
> it failed to pass recently
These two sentences cannot be both true
> I don't believe there are any western nations that want non-locally-backdoored messaging of any sort
means
> I believe every western nation wants all messaging to be locally-backdoored
> I believe no western nation wants any messaging to be non-locally-backdoored
> I believe all western nations want all messaging to be free of remote backdoors
!=
>> I believe every western nation wants all messaging to be locally-backdoored
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
We don’t trust proprietary stuff because we’ve been burned by it, if there’s an open standard, even a worse one: use it.
If it’s really that bad, we need to improve the standard.
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 your rationale against first-party backdoors relies on this logic, then you're in for a really big surprise when you read the Snowden leaks.
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.
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.
> 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.
SimpleX is the real deal.
They actually don't want that backdoored, guaranteed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063025 ("ChatControl: EU ministers want to exempt themselves (european-pirateparty.eu)", 202 comments)
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.
Yeah good luck with that :')
PS: A change to "guilty until proven innocent" policy would require a serious constitutional change in most countries.
Indeed, though there I was thinking more the court of public opinion which loves hearsay and rumour.
The actual law? I have no idea. Tech will change the world before the law can catch up with yesterday.
You mean railway station locker codes for bags of money from Quatar?
For blackmail I mean e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_research
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.
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.
An even more egregious example : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39918245 Facebook-Meta and Whatsapp maybe accessories to warcrimes perpetrated on a massive scale.
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.
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.
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)
What does this even mean???
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.
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.
In Telegram you can have 10k and more in a channel
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.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-to-staff-switc...
>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.
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.
Not by default (unlike the other services you've mentioned )?
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.
For fun, I tried that and was unsuccessful, at least in the allotted time.
Google turned up many third-party references to illegal activity on Telegram, but that's not the same thing.
Search for any of these phrases and it will return tons of channels to join:
- Combo lists - Check fraud - Redline Stealer - Bank logs
There are tens of thousands of channels on Telegram w illegal content and material.
I really do hope they dont shut it down bc it's an extremely valuable asset in terms of intelligence and monitoring criminals haha
Source: I work in CTI and actively monitor and scan thousands of Telegram channels.
I used python and the Telethon and Pyrogram frameworks to help scrape and monitor em.
A paid Telegram account can be in 1k channels/groups. A free Telegram account can be in 500 channels/groups.
Good luck and happy programming!
> "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."
https://www.ft.com/content/09cf4713-7199-4e47-a373-ed5de61c2...
https://archive.ph/zugnf
> Breton is empowered to oversee enforcement of the DSA and can communicate independently with companies.
So maybe he didn't need to get permission from anyone to send the letter.
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.
Don't have to like it but the law is the law.
Don't have to like it but the law is the law. /s
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.
The victim of drugs is the whole society. It's only "victimless" in an absolutely individualistic environment, which I wouldn't even call a "society".
But none of this contradicts my initial comment. Telegram is a straight enabler of illegal activities.
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.
She first asked where I was and was very coincidentally there as well. A sure sign of a scam.
Then asked me to buy a steam card and take a photo of the code before "meeting".
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.
It's that simple.
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.
It’s become centralized and controlled by the hands of the few.
This is not an improvement.
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.
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.
Supposedly that's not his quote though?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41342251
> 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.
[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-01...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
"roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly."
All of those can be monitored by the government, even your letters could be.
To use your analogy: shouldn’t everyone look away when you drive by so that you can have private road usage?
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.
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.
Bad analogy.
Better one is that your a taxi driver and someone who committed a crime hops into your car for a ride, then you’re found guilty by association.
> Is there a check box to state that you are a criminal when you message someone
I assume they'd could check for specific keywords or use perceptual hashing for images etc.
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".
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'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.
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?
He doesn't say that doing "jack shit" (not exactly a fleshed out legal term) will remove that liability, as you are suggesting.
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.
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.
What do you mean by this?
It's a major pain for gen z
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.
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.
https://www.ft.com/content/c5d40e3c-9f9c-43dc-a467-1c713b40c...
That makes me wonder if Telegram was always a Russian spook op and its [ineffective] banning just a ruse.
I don't think any of the major platforms are independent of some spook oversight.
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.
Very interesting to see where it will all go.
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…
With the context that you omitted it makes more sense:
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.
It's just they're the current power structure, so they can get away with the state monopoly on violence et al?
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.
https://telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests
But if it was so weak then various intelligence agencies wouldn't be bothering with it
So we actually don't know if it's weak or not.
There is a difference between can't and won't.
They just make it hard to force them but they could if they want to.
Proper encrypted message can't be decrypted no matter how much they want to.
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"
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.
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.
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).
[1] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/04/05/icloud-w...
Ukraine has many many other options.
What else is there for Russians to communicate with the outer world?
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.
Yes, it's Ukrainian, but it's very detailed.
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?
That hardly corresponds with Durov's relationships and history with Russian government.
> Russia invaded their sovereign neighbour Ukraine who the f cares about their forums for messaging. yawn.
What does one even have to do with the other? Feels like obsessing a bit too much over a single topic.
Now it sounds like Europe finally put the foot down.
And why wouldn't they?
Also, you don't have to tell people to take the opinions of anonymous strangers with a "grain of salt." It's weird.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41342512
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.
„Putin and Telegram Founder Durov in Baku at the Same Time“
https://x.com/JAMnewsCaucasus/status/1825889800634733025
> 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.
This isn’t some grand conspiracy theory.
>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.
Especially when they are the exact same thing.
If not, this is just whataboutism.
I can't think of any, to be honest.
That said, even in democracy a law can be bad, and likely is in this case.
Bingo!
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.
Citation needed.
No mention seen in UK national press.
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.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasci_Siciliani
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.
No source on what the warrant is about though.
FWIW I really like Telegram and pay for it, I hope it will get cleared up soon.
France can and will charge anyone on its territory no matter what passport you hold.
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.
For more complicated stuff, quite the opposite.
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.
Requiring a phone number most certainly isn’t some fool proof method in the way you are claiming.
- https://www.senat.fr/leg/tas22-148.pdf page 43 bottom, or searching "réquisition de toute personne"
- https://www.senat.fr/leg/pjl22-569.pdf with a good intervention from an LFI MEP, Ugo Bernalicis who is DEFINITIVELY worth to hear https://youtu.be/PDG9V01jPUs
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...
And instead they arrest the CEO of a company that provides a mechanism for people to talk to one another.
Arrest all postwomen.
>we've got to save democracy by restricting free speech and enforcing laws and regulations created by unelected officials
> 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.
https://www.quora.com/Was-the-European-Union-a-CIA-project
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.
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".
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
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.
[1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/early-hints-and-encrypted...
Typical modern law enforcement incompetence. They don't care about you. They just want to protect their access to your data.
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.
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:
https://x.com/mikebenzcyber/status/1827514567884255430
Update: there will be a part two on the „The Geopolitics of Telegram & who is really after Pavel Durov“ 1am ET tonight.
This is going to be one of the best sources of background info on the subject. This is not some random conspiracy theory hack, I promise.
https://x.com/mikebenzcyber/status/1827550903324598354
https://x.com/mikebenzcyber/status/1827580931974029821
https://x.com/mikebenzcyber/status/1828267107353583869
We don’t expect our politicians to dedicate their lives to scientific research so this perspective is inherently flawed.
What? Not in the commission. It's a 100% politically appointed body made up of politicians, it's just not elected.
Also even on the lower levels being an "expert" EU apparatchik has absolutely nothing to do with dedicated your life to science.
In any case it's a deeply flawed system, minimum oversight and a lot of money to spend/waste can't ever lead anywhere good.
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 ?
But the people repeating sickening corporate PR and marketing crap there making me nauseous. It's 100x more fake than Facebook. I really hate it.
If it'd be banned I could do without it because nobody would have 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.
So that's why I'm a bit sour about that.
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.
The clear-cut example I usually pull out - there's PLENTY more.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/31/23004339/uk-twitter-user-...
And he's AMERICAN.
In general, remember that villains almost always justify their action as necessary or just- only in movies their stated motive is obviously egoistical.
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.
The citizens of the EU or Europe?
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.
I personally don't considered hate speech to be worthy of criminalization, much less as a "serious" crime.
What I consider to be serious crime is censorship, though.
Jail them, fire them is a pretty common demand on the left and right.
And fo be fair not everyone can surveillance the whole Internet like the US do or can enforce local laws worldwide.
Things like like the CloudAct and FISA section 702.
Not to mention that free speech sounds good, but you still can get fired and lose your income and health insurance.
So it's free speech for people like Musk and many others self censor their posts.
Because society is more important than individuals.
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.
To clarify, I like the GDPR, and wish the EU would give us more of that and less of the surveillance.
Same with their attempts to make the data export to the US legal.
Safe Harbor, Privacy Shield, etc. They try and try but fail every time because it's always the same just a different name.
Hopefully that prevails.
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...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41341607.
p.s. No, this is not a comment on the EU or any of your views—just about unsubstantive/flamey forum posts.