Telegram is not the most popular messenger in Russia. It's not even in top-3 as far as I remember. But it is widely used by people who tend to be opposite to the current government (young professionals). Also, there are a lot of anonymous Telegram channels curated by the opposition.

Telegram was reported by one of three russian cellular network companies as 2nd after Viber by number of clients (both each day and simultanious peak) nearly a week prior to blocking.

It's going to take those people a hot 15 seconds to find another provider and switch.

Not only Telegram still working here, but it was a great experience yesterday.

Imagine the following: a manager in a supermarket explaining how to setup a proxy to a customer so that she (a woman in her 60s) could use their bot again.

Or a woman with a kid who is asking what the are going to do: "It's okay, we'll ask dad and he's going to do proxy-something".

Cyberpunk is now.

Similar things long going on in Crimea for the same reasons established by the other side (whatsapp and viber are blocked by whatsapp and viber owners correspondingly). When I was there, everyone seemed to have a vpn on their phones and getting it installed was none of a problem. Smarter people are better!

Are there any other convenient apps that support public channels?

So much misinformation in the replies here.

Russians do make up a huge list of telegrams overall userbase. But most importantly, whatsapp and viber are end to end encrypted. Whatsapp uses signal. Viber uses a signal inspired encryption format. The common ground between both is that every single message is encrypted using a different secret key that is deleted after the message is received and decrypted on the device. Whatsapp and Viber have no way to give chat details even if they wanted to. Provided that they follow the protocol, and all accounts seem to point to the fact they do, then there is no backdoor or secret key they can give to any government.

Telegram in contrast uses a set of master keys to encrypt the conversations using RSA and aes256 as they travel through the servers. The keys are split across multiple servers residing in multiple jurisdictions so that legally, a government would have to seek permission to obtain each part of the key from a separate state.

Basically, this means that at the end of the day, if telegram ever forgoes its integrity (based off its public statements), every message will suddenly become decryptable.

That last point is what seems to really make telegram worth targeting.

Just wanted to note that Telegram still supports E2EE in their secret chats. It's just less convenient.

For unknown reason user verification (for secret chats) is awful and almost useless in practice. Telegram itself reimplemented this specific bit much much better - for video chats

WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. They probably have a data-sharing agreement with Russia.

Not yet. Moreover, the head of russian regulatory says this year Facebook probably might be blocked as well if they will not receive all data they need.

That's what's going to happen. Various localities will shut off encrypted passageways altogether because they control the pipes. They will create a corporate-like intranet where they monitor everything.

they know how bad an open internet can hurt them because they do it themselves to other countries. can't blame them that they don't want to be on the receiving end of the weapon they created.

So basically like China?

It's just that Telegram is the most used one in Russia so they proceed by targeting this one first but don't worry they will target the other ones after.

>Telegram is the most used one in Russia

Not even close. Whatsapp and Viber are much more popular. Telegram was barely 3rd before the ban. [1]

Viber moved their data to Russia, they won't get a ban.

Not sure about Whatsapp.

[1]: https://leonardo.osnova.io/bf345b20-423b-c508-cbc2-15963a7af...

WhatsApp is probably backdoored though, so your end to end encryption will only keep your internet café from spying on you, not the governments Facebook is friendly with: https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/01/13/whatsapp-backdoor...

You mean the the one reported by theGuardian? The one where they could not find a second security researcher to agree about? The one this public letter was about? https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/20/security-researchers-call-...

Oh, never saw that retraction even before when I Googled it.

Good catch!

Is Viber even End to End encrypted at all?

Supposedly.

https://www.viber.com/blog/2018-01-28/your-data-is-protected...

https://www.viber.com/blog/2016-04-19/giving-our-users-contr...

Just one remark: Viber/WhatsApp client's code is closed, where is the guarantee that they do not have some "backdoor" to the client's chat right in the application?

Ah apologies, I thought Telegram was more used than that there.

The rumor is the director of the agency that initiated Telegram ban is the puppet of Facebook lobbyists. Typical Russian shit.

Well, due to a huge ban of Amazon addresses Viber is currently experiencing some connectivity issues in Russia too.

The FSB wants encryption keys. Telegram won't share, so is blocked. Therefore, Whatsapp and Viber gave up their keys, I suppose. Or provided backdoors.

We know from Snowden leaks that Microsoft (Skype) & Facebook (WhatsApp) are already freely handing info to any government that asks. Search Wikipedia for: PRISM (surveillance program) Other programs have probably superseded it (and include Japanese ecom giant Rakuten who owns Viber), but you can be sure the user info still flows.

Telegram's independence is what separates them from other services, what allowed them to deny the demand for crypto keys, and why they were targeted.

Signal is non-federated. I'm not sure it would be possible to easily block Signal.

Wait. non-federated is simpler to block, no?

Because the Russian government can read all non-E2EE conversations (so 99% of them) on Telegram and is hoping to drive adoption overseas with this PR stunt.

None of the other messengers you mentioned are designed to work like this (not 100% sure about Viber), the ability of operators to read most of the conversations on the platform is very much unique to Telegram.

It's really not a coincidence that the Russian government is choosing to ban the worst "encrypted messenger" on the market.

Do you have any proof?

What would you like me to prove?

That Telegram has handed their keys to the Russian government? Difficult, but unnecessary.

That Telegram was deliberately designed in a manner which enables its owners to easily hand over the keys to the government? Easy to prove, Signal and Whatsapp do not share the same surveillance features.

Since you seem to like WhatsApp:

Who pays for it now that it is free?

I for one refuse to think that Facebook bought it for a number of billion USD and keep operating and improving it for no good reason.

We also know, based on what they had to tell EU and based on their new EULA - that they tried to introduce by default - that they wanted to harvest metadata from it.

Attacking Telegram while simultaneously praising WhatsApp seems really strange to me.

As for Signal, that's another story. They have their own issues but I personally believe it is better than both Telegram and WhatsApp.

>Attacking Telegram while simultaneously praising WhatsApp seems really strange to me.

Look at them both from a purely technical perspective.

WhatsApp has made an effort to ensure that they're limited to only monetizing the metadata of the chats, Telegram by design does not share this limitation.

Even if you don't trust Whatsapp, you know that they'd have to push a backdoored app to everyone in order to intercept your chats. Telegram is backdoored by default.