this is the slippery slope fallacy… “where does it stop” is not a valid argument to not start

if a govt seizes a device and discovers channel IDs to be taken down, i’m sure than signal would do so - there have been no arrest warrants, after all… however, the problem is also significantly smaller for signal because signal can’t have enormous broadcast groups

it’s kinda irrelevant what it is - you have to comply with police orders to moderate your platform… if this were musk and x lemmy would be cheering on the arrest! no matter who you are, you don’t shouldn’t get to just break the law

and you’re right CSAM is frequently used as an excuse, and no i don’t have evidence - that would require actually looking for said content, which i have no inclination to do. the only information i have is that multiple independent news outlets have referenced telegram for years - not proof, but a more convincing argument than simply denial - because let’s not kid ourselves, unless you’ve gone looking for that content, you’ve got no proof against it either (and even if you didn’t find it, that’s no guarantee either - it’s unlikely easy to find)

breakable for the NSA doesn’t mean the police have access

also the current issue is with moderation: telegram is refusing to take down CSAM channels etc

and this is called the slippery slope fallacy and is either a flaw in your logic or a way of arguing in bad faith. either way, it’s just fearmongering. if that’s all you’ve got then i have nothing more to say

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

if metas monolopoloy is literally the only thing you care about, but replacing a terrible platform with another platform that lacks privacy protections is not much of an upgrade

you think they’re going to link to still available (that’s the point - they’re still available) sources of CSAM?

if that’s your burden of proof then buddy i’m sorry to say there’s no way anyone’s going to convince you, and that’s not a good thing

that’s an entirely separate concern to f-droid

we don’t disagree about that: governments don’t like that telegram doesn’t cooperate; that’s not in dispute

where the disagreement comes is the part after. telegram (and indeed meta, google, etc) have that data at their disposal. when served with a legal notice to provide information to authorities or shut down illegal behaviour on their platforms, they comply - sometimes that’s a bad thing if the government is overreaching, but sometimes it’s also a good thing (in the case of CSAM and other serious crimes)

there are plenty of clear cut examples of where telegram should shut down channels - CSAM etc… that’s what this arrest was about; the rest is academic

that’s correct - the issue here is that he has full access to the information that investigators are requesting and is simply refusing to comply with requests

this isn’t shit like a conversation you had with a friend about weed - this is CSAM and drug trafficking

free speech can be good. free speech can also be bad. overall, it’s more good than bad however society seems to agree that free speech has limits - you can’t defame someone, for example

free speech absolutism is fucking dumb; just like most other absolutist stances

this also isn’t even about free speech - this is about someone having access to information requested by investigators to solve crimes, and then refusing to give that information

they have apks

they’re not hostile… they don’t see the reason for them and it’s not as clear cut as you’re making it out in favour of f-droid

wire is US-based these days AFAIK - they accepted a bunch from VC money from a firm that does things like data mining and moved to the US

i neither have the time nor inclination to research to that degree - i’m merely saying that the bounties prove very little, and change nothing about how people should treat non-standard protocols and algorithms. in fact, the lack of substance is proof that they don’t fully understand the scope of what’s required in the field of security

telegram put up bounties relating to specific properties of their encryption, yes but there’s more to private messaging than just encryption… for example afaik it’s trivial to do things like replay attacks

their encryption may not be flawed, but they failed to design an algorithm that protects against the wide array of modern attacks, as they are mathematicians; not security experts. they understood the maths, but not the wider scope of implementation

a good example of these is linked down thread about MLS

Security properties of MLS include message confidentiality, message integrity and authentication, membership authentication, asynchronicity, forward secrecy, post-compromise security, and scalability.

the telegram bounties afaik only cover 1 security property

would there even be an OS left?

in the context of privacy the distinction could be interesting: typescript is a microsoft project; foss as it may be… and that might (or might not) have significance

they tied meat to themselves and ran at the bear screaming

and in the same way, perhaps stop saying “westerners”

many us had the same thought that it’s xenophobic bullshit… perhaps we all should stop arbitrarily grouping people into geographic groups and making sweeping generalisations

and saying that the USA is dumber than a donkey and implying that china is not is just fucking laughable… i’m aussie, so i have no horse in either race: our economy is almost entirely reliant on china and we rely on the USA for basically everything else, including protection from china… and yknow what? all cultures are fucking weird… stop being so god damn condescending. the only thing it proves is that you’ve never travelled enough, or that “different” makes you uncomfortable which makes you an incurable bigot

the australian government (i know, slightly different level of security and requirement) does an interesting thing where when you take a photo in their identity app it flashes a bunch of different colours very quickly. i assume it takes several photos with different colours to help ensure that shadows are behaving correctly (perhaps it also helps with adding detail for facial recognition and rejection?)

… kinda unrelated, but i’ve always found it fascinating

remember that your searches for yourself feed them data too

you’re saying a buzz word without understanding the trade offs in designs… POW doesn’t have to imply higher energy cost for more transactions: shove more transactions in a block and POW cost is the same… that’s a trade off sure because then a block becomes a more valuable thing to 51%

POW is also only 1 of a lot of different consensus algorithms, all with their own trade-offs… POS benefits those with money for example (although you can still form mining pools - TBH i’d argue it’s exactly the same in this respect to POW in practice - good luck mining anything of value in POW without investing $ millions)

some blockchains aren’t built to be entirely trustless and uncoordinated, merely semi trusted and loosely coordinated (think a consortium of banks - they don’t trust each other entirely but a blockchain means no individual member working alone can cheat. in this case because it’s semi-organised they can use POS with a special token and delegate those “mining tokens” 1 per member of the consortium or something… you can even set this kind of chain up as an ethereum side chain!)

aren’t needed for regular transactions

but that kinda defeats the point of a central authority having control: the value of any currency is entirely based on what you can use it for… unless you tied their value in a way that the government regulates - eg to have a banking license you must swap USD for eUSD and visa versa on a 1:1 basis without fees (perhaps they burn eUSD to get new USD; IDK - you can’t oversupply. it gets tricky)… anyway, beside the point: regular transactions is exactly what the government needs some control over

imo i actually hate the idea of a public crypto currency

people think that the government having their hands on the levers of a fiat currency is a bad thing, but it’s an incredibly useful property to make sure that we can stabilise things and push away from recession etc! without those levers we can end up in a spiral a lot easier

i think though that where these problems don’t exist is behind the scenes: what if the whole world replaced SWIFT with a private blockchain? maybe a wire transfer wouldn’t take 5 days and cost like $20 (or maybe it would because it’s probably not the technology that makes these things slow)… in this case, you have a known group of semi-trusted actors (international banks), which is actually a perfect set of properties for a blockchain: they’re all able to cooperate but don’t implicitly trust, and can verify each other but mainly use blockchain so they can all automatically agree

and here lies the issue with asking about crypto in non-crypto circles… everyone thinks they completely understand blockchain in its entirely. what they actually have is a rudimentary understanding of a single blockchain as it was literally 15 years ago

of course the problem with asking in crypto circles is that they’re all trying to sell you their new big thing which is probably total trash

so really there’s no good way to ask and get reasonable answers about crypto