...authorities shut off the internet, leaving Belarusians with almost no access to independent online news outlets or social media and protesters seemingly without a leader. That’s where Telegram — which often remains available despite internet outages, touts the security of messages shared in the app and has been used in other protest movements — came in. Some of its channels helped unconnected, scattered rallies mature into well-coordinated action.
Or these folks can coordinate with protestors in other parts of the world, to raise awareness and stop consumers from buying from a dictatorship.
Usually, the way this problem is overcome is that rioters show up to peaceful protests and engage in a sort of signalling game to other would-be rioters. The usual trigger to begin the riot is the sound of shattering glass. Until someone is ready to throw that first brick, you aren't likely to see much of anything.
Authoritarian countries know all this and they try very hard to prevent riots by banning all peaceful protests. Much harder to start a riot when there aren't any people on the streets to give cover.
- Keyboard warrior? This is a crime in any country including the the US. Can you imagine what it will do to you in a country like China?
>"Or these folks can coordinate with protesters in other parts of the world, to raise awareness and stop consumers from buying from a dictatorship."
- What prevents you from not buying from a dictatorship now? Do you need to be directed by people from Tibet about it?
So, the fact that it happens to be a popular solution for encrypted chat right now doesn't really speak to its necessity for any revolution like you and the article seem to be implying. Easy access to encryption technology in general, sure, but that doesn't specifically need to be Telegram.
This is the rsync v Dropbox of messaging applications.
Yes, unencrypted social features that could just as easily be serviced by any other social networking app which hasn't been explicitly banned yet (and that could happen to Telegram at any time).
> It's that Telegram operates under harsher network conditions.
So their operators claim. But it's not clear why that would be true and I haven't seen any numbers to demonstrate it either. Have you?
Telegram had to survive Russia's attempt to ban it, so it evolved a number of strategies: using push notifications to deliver IP-adresses of not-yet-blocked servers, using socks-proxies, the evolution of the MTProto Proxy encrypted protocol, and finally resorting to steganography to mimic ordinary https traffic, thus evading the DPI.
The attempts of the state censorship agency to block the telegram servers were hilarious to watch: at one point they had 0.5% of the IPv4 address space banned, and broke a lot of stuff (AWS, Google, DigitalOcean, OVH, etc). Telegram was still working, of course.
The IP-address delivery via push notification was a nice idea, if they'd only be on that level with their E2EE deployment.
The adversary in their case is mostly limited to beating up random people and picking on those that take a public stand against the regime.
Turns out it's more important that it works at all and not whether the security is perfect.
Supergroups and channels don't have expectation of privacy. They're not about protecting the content but about spreading sousveillance material, message etc. There only your anonymity matters so you can be safe with burner SIM + burner phone + Tor.
But immediately when you step into realm of confidentiality E2EE matters and Telegram becomes a piece of shit software. No E2EE for groups, desktop clients, or for anything by default. Small dissident groups greatly benefit from E2EE when Belarusian government can't read their conversation by just hacking a single server.
Both are important. Signal isn't about non-private mass-messaging like channels and supergroups so it's not going to offer those. Telegram could be fantastic for channels and supergroups if it used Tor by default and didn't ask for phone number. But it doesn't, and it tries to do too many things while ignoring too many security problems. Turns out that's a recipe to a disaster. See e.g. how CCA tracked Telegram users in Hong Kong, and how Telegram failed to enable the protective measures for users by default.