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.
https://www.wired.com/story/europes-moral-crusader-lays-down...
https://www.statewatch.org/news/2024/july/police-should-have...
"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.
You speak to people in Sweden and they tell you about the crime and rapes happening.
It's a bizarre lie, not the least because it so obviously does not hold up to even the most basic scrutiny.
I think that facts are facts. There are no facts that are not worth knowing. Banning collecting statistics is a sure way to make sure you are blind and ignorant and reality will smack you hard until you wake up. The young teenagers throwing bombs and executing people on the street is that reality.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Which every company does more or less. The fact that Telegram doesn't reach this extremely low, very low bar is quite something.
Do yeah that includes ROM hacking, speed running, etc.
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".
Does it?
The EU usually takes 3 steps forward, 1 to 2 steps backwards.
> 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
>we've got to save democracy by restricting free speech and enforcing laws and regulations created by unelected officials
This is definitely a "grass is always greener" situation.
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...
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.
Typical modern law enforcement incompetence. They don't care about you. They just want to protect their access to your data.
[1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/early-hints-and-encrypted...
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
My pet tinfoil-hat theory is that he decided that staying in a French prison is safer for him than being out in the open and get some polonium, or whatnot.
Why would he get some polonium? There are endless official Russian state telegram channels. Putin clearly has no issue with it or he would have banned it.
Politics is complicated.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-telegram-ban-idUSK...
This is probably the most ridiculous theory I’ve read all year.
FWIW, France do not extradite its citizen and Pavel Durov is french. He may have been arrested but that doesn't mean he will stay in detention depending on the nature of the charge and his eventual cooperation. Who knows, maybe he called before landing in France so that he was arrested and seen as cooperative.
People do that.
Recently, the Bulgarian drug lord nicknamed Brendo not only surrendered, but somehow bribed border control to let him in the country so he can show up directly in front of Sofia Central Prison, with a duffel bag, ready to be taken in. He wanted to skip the bureaucracy and go behind bars ASAP.
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
Why?
Just shoot the case down. It's stupid, it's dangerous, and it's evil.
I don't want to be interested about it. I don't want tax money spent on this. I don't want these nanny-state fascistic technologically illiterate ideas to be legitimized on any level, much less EU wide by people with no accountability for the consequences of their actions.
It’s really chilling to see the steps EU gobs are taking against free speech. In some ways they seem more authoritarian than even China and Russia. It’s like “free world” is becoming a farce.
Considering how he's tarnished Signal, there is absolutely no reason for them or anyone else to back him up.
What will be very funny is the fact that Telegram is pretty much not encrypted (yeah ok, "secret chats", whatever sure) and now that investigators probably have access to Durov's phone, that lack of encryption might come back to bite him in the ass. Can't wait to know what they find and if they do find something, it might be interesting to see if he finally changes his stance.
Basically only Signal + Whatsapp.
> claiming they don't do anything for privacy.
Well, Signal is kind of a scam in that regard.
Mandatory phone number exposure? (or did they finally implement usernames?)
A joke of a "registration lock pin" instead a proper 2FA to protect against sim-swap?
They received $3 million from the open technology fund, which is a government sponsored fund for censorship circumvention projects. https://www.opentech.fund/about/congressional-remit/
tl;dr: Lots of claims, lots of support.. but very little to back it up once you scratch the surface.
people in this field tend go overboard with security when really nobody cares about what they have access to.
What did he have to say about Matrix?
If you don't uphold the principles all you have to do is wait until it bites you too.
What happened to "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Nothing. It still is the same fake Voltaire quote used to con overly idealistic adversaires into giving you some situational supprt against their better interest. No institutional actor ever followed it.
So was Moxie - or do we forget that Signal is doing cryptocurrencies too?
Yes, that includes people from Russia, China or the US believing they are the ones who are truly free, and everything else are totalitarian shitholes. Each one of them is even kind of right in their own regard.
In Russia, China or North Korea - nobody believes that.
Well of course, they're all actually super miserable and are secretly begging the government of your country or her stronger allies to liberate them and wisely lead to a glorious bright westernized future.
Don't be naive. It's probably worth exploring where'd you get such a maximalist idea in the first place and measure just how much empirical evidence you have to back it up.
No, they are not.
Nobody in Europe disappears for six months because they have offended the government before mysteriously reappearing like in China. No one dictates single handedly what’s going to happen without any form of oversight like in Russia.
Heck France currently has an interim government because they voted out the previous one and the US had a decisive election coming in a few months.
The people who want to convince you otherwise generally have a vested interest in undermining democracy and pushing for a form of autocracy.
Not even close. You are just poorly informed about the situation in Russia or China.
HN: NO! free speech.
Sincere advice: get out of those libertarian echo chambers, and think about real consequences.
IF you let LEO's access group chats THEN you absolutely need civilian accountable honest transparent clear oversight to avoid mission creep.
The task isn't as clear cut as "known criminal is part of OC groups", there's a clear Sorities Paradox asking when does an OC group chat become a neighbourhood watch | knitting group chat.
If our criminal of interest is part of RealMafiaChat, PrepperLifeStyles, CamThePolice, GuideDogsForVets, etc. etc. et al. then how many of these should be surveilled .. and how many other group chat members should also be surveilled ?
Yes. Take down real criminals.
Yes, it's an actual problem that real innocents get swept up Kafka-esque for being unwittingly criminal adjacent.
What's the cost benefit number and trade off for actual innocent lives ruined?
I am pretty much against surveillance in the form of drag nets, but none of that applies here. Instead, this is exactly how a functional state should work.
(And note that no exceptions are made for Pavel because he is rich and well-connected. Contrast that with brittle countries where politicians rely on tech billionaires to fund their campaigns.)
I sympathize with you being an Aussie; I can see where your allergy comes from, but in this case it is misplaced.
Yes, functional states should have extremely good oversight .. in reality they "mostly do" but with cracks that allow unwanted behaviours to sneak through and sometimes become normalised.
eg. recent revelations that SASR types are "blooding" new members with unsanctioned kills in war zones. Or regular joe LEO types using surveillance powers to stalk ex's. Or total innocent gets railroaded by tangential "evidence" simply because they chance to tick all the boxes for a needed arrest and the actual perp was overlooked | unseen.
> I would be very concerned if your knitting grandma was an active member of a drugs and arms dealergroup.
And yet an actual sergeant at arms type of an organised biker gang based in Australia used knitting terminology key phrases in just such a group to organise international transfers of "packages".
The person in question was a NZ background stone cold killer with a special forces background.
( Yes, most crims are "dumb" | "lazy" and yet a good few understand covert messaging, not all can be caught with a fake encrypted phone honey net trap )
These are all real concerns and examples of things that have actually happened.
This is also why the US did not inherit a real, solid concept of personal privacy. Instead, ordinary people are increasingly becoming sort of property of corporates. You can see that if you contrast the Rheinland model (state reigns in corporates, protect people rights) with the Anglo-sphere, which is much more suited to a few select capital holders extracting value from the workforce (compare holiday allowance, fire at will etc).
This doesn´t mean that in Europe the Rheinland model is not under active threat, far from it. And look at collective self harm: watch this space (HN) if the EU sometimes takes measures against abusive monopolies. It is a very difficult fight.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It’s become centralized and controlled by the hands of the few.
This is not an improvement.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
Supposedly that's not his quote though?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 )?
> "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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.