A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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I don’t care much for the guy, but the fact he gets arrested for the service is a bad sign for private messaging in Europe.
I think you and most people in this thread have been mislead by the article because of the closing remark.
But it isn’t the private stuff he is being prosecuted for though AFAIK (although it might have been reported by “traitors” within those chats).
Unlike Signal, there are public chat groups and channels and I presume these are the ones which got him into trouble for propagating illegal activity.
From another article…
terrorism, narcotic supply, fraud, money laundering, receiving stolen goods and others… he allowed an incalculable number of offenses and crimes to be committed, which he did nothing to moderate
The platform has faced issues of misinformation and hate speech, especially antisemitic speech following October 7, 2023.
So platforms are now liable for everything people post? This seems like a free pass to censorship and authoritarian control.
Just like how municipal governments are responsible for every crime that occurs in city limits!
Wait a minute
What do you mean ‘now’? Even 4chan had to remove illegal things, this isn’t new.
In the US platforms are shielded from liability with the exception of CSAM
The platforms should be held liable when those groups can easily be accessed by anyone, and moderation would be “simple” as the conversations aren’t even encrypted. We aren’t asking for more of Telegram than Youtube or Facebook
If you don’t care for the guy, you will nearly certainly lose privat messaging in Europe. Maybe, it’s even too late by now.
No. Pavel Durov is a nut and he is not out there saving private communication. Signal is offering the most accessible e2ee messenger right now. Telegram has questionable security on their optional e2ee chats which is also not the default.
But the people trying to save e2ee in europe are activists and politicians. Patrick Breyer has done excellent reporting on the chat control plans of the EU.
Durov is just some dude peddling his mid messenger
Doesn’t matter. In the reach of EU, some law about Chat Control. If they make this into law, no provider within the EU will have a choice in this matter.
good thing Signal is US-based. I hope it will remain possible to use their service in the EU though…
Wasn’t Signal revealed to have NSA backdoor or I am confusing it with something else?
I have googled it and I just found this report here.
I think you’re confusing it, I haven’t heard that at least but it’s possible I missed it! Though signals apps and I believe even server code are open source so this would have been tricky to accomplish.
Okay, now I’m wondering, can we actually check if servers run on this published code or modified version?
no, but the client code already guarantees e2ee
Telegram is not private messaging.
To add to that. Russian government was demanding to be able to access messages or will ban Telegram in the country.
Did not hear anything beyond that, but Telegram continues to operate there.
There wasn’t any legal ban. RosCommNadzor slowed down TG like they recently did with YT (it can barely load a music track without VPN) without any court decision because they can, it went for a week or so, and then it was lifted. Nobody knows why, but there is a suspicion that TG started to cooperate with russian authorities, in a non-automatical manual manner. Some suspect it was a PR campaign to make it as popular as it is now.
It didn’t leak stuff as far as I know, that’s done by bots like Глаз Бога that accunulate all info on a person and frequently used in OSINT and deanon\bullying, but blocking popular bots and channels that are too annoying to Russia is what they do. From the top of my head: CleverVoting (Умное Голосование, УГ) channels from Navalny’s team*, channels for cooperation of protest of soldiers’ wives, separatist channels from Bashkortostan and other places. I’ve seen iranians also posted that they had their protest channels banned - and Iran and Russia banned free and popular VPNs at the same time, spoiling their cooperation.
* Durov’s public comment on that gave birth to a meme. He implied that there are just two ways: either banning it from TG or having TG banned on the whole territory of Russian Federation. As a copypasta it was transformed millions of times, and if it hasn’t lost it relevance, we could’ve probably seen a boykisser version of it.
Russia banned Telegram, everyone (incl. the government) continued to use it, Russia unbanned Telegram - that’s how it looks from here. A government official told me Telegram being unbanned was just a matter of time when it was still banned.
That’s what they say. I only trust encryption and not people.
Telegram has been banned in Russia, as far as I heared.
deleted by creator
Durov was travelling to France from Azerbaijan, where he had been meeting with Putin. There’s a theory that he basically surrendered to the French authorities so as to avoid retaliation for saying no to Putin too many times.
Where did you read about a meeting with Putin?
I read it on a reddit thread about this arrest story. However, looking it up Putin declined to meet with him. That still kind of fits with him turning to France for safety.
That’s wild. Remember where you read that?
Him turning himself in for safety is pure speculation at this point, however he was due to meet with Putin in Azerbaijan, until Putin declined.
They do support e2ee in private chats
Not activated by default. First strike. Cannot be activated in group chats. Second strike.
They use a custom encryption protocol and there’s been bugs that look like a backdoor.
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113020871978942265
Yes, they do, but it’s very inconvenient. You can’t access such chats on desktop, no cloud syncing…