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Russia Bans 1.8M Amazon and Google IPs in Attempt to Block Telegram

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Re: Russia Bans 1.8M Amazon and Google IPs in Attempt to Block Telegram

#161

Post by netzone »

abhiminator wrote: post #152
huhtenberg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may also mean that Facebook is complying with the Russian government demands for at-will access to WhatsApp and Messenger content.

> WhatsApp and Messenger content. (emphasis mine) Isn't WhatsApp supposed to be end-to-end encrypted making it next to impossible even for developers (Facebook Inc. in this case) to access the transmitted messages' content?

Wasn't it WhatsApp that sent a key back to Facebook servers? Technically it's end-to-end encrypted, but Facebook could decrypt it if they really wanted to.

Re: Russia Bans 1.8M Amazon and Google IPs in Attempt to Block Telegram

#162

Post by MrDisposable »

Russian here. Good job Roskomnadzor. You just taught quite a few people to use VPN -- including me. And, as a side benefit, you created another image problem for Putin's regime (as if he needed any more of that).

I already had Bitlocker on all my PCs, 2FA everywhere, moved from Gmail to Fastmail, and VPN was one of the last privacy-related things I procrastinated on. Now I have VPN on all my desktops and on my phone, turned on by default. And I also switched to 1.1.1.1 for DNS.

Thank you government, I guess?

Re: Russia Bans 1.8M Amazon and Google IPs in Attempt to Block Telegram

#163

Post by falcolas »

vetinari wrote: post #160
falcolas wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the ID is not unique for each message, then they are still tied to a specific person. At best, the identity is obfuscated. As a practical example, would you say that bitcoin wallets are anonymous, given that they use random IDs?

Yes, it is obfuscated, the pairing of real person and random id would be much more work, than pairing phone number with real person, and you can throw away and generate as many as you want, whenever you want - unlike your phone number. Still beats using your phone number for chats, or your SSN in place of bitcoin wallet.

Honestly, I'd say it's much worse than using your phone number or SSN. Sure, an SSN makes it easier to tie an identity to a person, but it doesn't instill a false sense of anonymity in the user.

Again, for the practical example, people bought and sold bitcoins with the broad assumption that it was anonymous. It's a widely understood falsehood, yet new people almost universally believed it was anonymous and safe from law enforcement/the tax man.

Pretending that a random yet static ID adds any level of anonymity is simply dangerous. At best, it keeps honest people honest; like locking your door but not the bay window next to it.

Re: Russia Bans 1.8M Amazon and Google IPs in Attempt to Block Telegram

#164

Post by pmlnr »

jeremyjh wrote: post #88
SXX wrote: post #13

Just in case previously when same thing happened with service called Zello and back then Amazon cease to provide them service (forbid to change IPs) before actual subnets were banned. Soon we'll see how Amazon / Google will react on Kremlin bullying this time.

If they don't cancel Telegram's service, their other customers who are also being affected by the ban will flee to other services. I don't think they can sit and watch that happen.

> will flee to other services

That's not something you can do very fast, especially not from google's compute engine or AWS.

Yes, eventually, they will, but that's a massive task for most companies.

Re: Russia Bans 1.8M Amazon and Google IPs in Attempt to Block Telegram

#165

Post by baq »

petercooper wrote: post #137

The founder of Telegram has just put this in his public Telegram channel - https://t.me/durov : "For the last 24 hours Telegram has been under a ban by internet providers in Russia. The reason was our refusal to provide encryption keys to Russian security agencies. For us, this was an easy decision. We promised our users 100% privacy and would rather cease to exist than violate this promise. Despite the ban, we haven…

statement like that is an easy way to get yourself in sights of the CBP PФ i guess

Re: Russia Bans 1.8M Amazon and Google IPs in Attempt to Block Telegram

#166

Post by pmlnr »

Keloo wrote: post #147
nh2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One argument might be "because Signal * has (almost) no tests, * has no CI (at least I could find none), * lacks some basic features competitors have, * sometimes doesn't ring when you call, and * they just closed all 1100 open issues without reading their contents [1]." Don't get me wrong, I think Signal is a great idea and have contributed some code to it, but these look like some red flags to me. Obviously hard to…

Good points, but I think it's good to mention that Telegram is actually open source: https://telegram.org/apps#source-code

No, it's not. Telegram clients are; telegram, as a service - the server component - is not.

Re: Russia Bans 1.8M Amazon and Google IPs in Attempt to Block Telegram

#168

Post by pmlnr »

maxerickson wrote: post #142
x220 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal isn't anonymous. You need a phone number. Why did the all-knowing Moxie require this? No one has ever provided a good reason.

He's written about the why. It's a tradeoff to make it easier for people to switch. https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/ (not just individual people obsessed with privacy, the large numbers of people who can see the advantage of privacy but may not invest a lot of effort to achieve it)

XMPP could utilize your existing email address as XMPP address - that's a solution as well.

Re: Russia Bans 1.8M Amazon and Google IPs in Attempt to Block Telegram

#169

Post by nh2 »

falcolas wrote: post #159
nh2 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tests and CI help you make sure that functionality actually works, that buttons you press have the desired effect, and that if I as a contributor ship you a pull request for a UX/feature improvement, both your and me can check that it doesn't break anything before merging. The grandparent poster also wrote about security/privacy, for which I think tests are pretty important. Finally, having CI would allow the develop…

This is still looking at it from a developer's or contributor's point of view. Developer velocity has no practical impact on the user experience. In a way, the constant addition of features or tweaks to the user experience is a net negative, since the user has to re-learn how to do things in the app. This also makes the assumption that since there are few automated tests, that there are no tests done on a build at al…

> Developer velocity has no practical impact on the user experience.

This may be true in a megacorp. I doubt it's true in a project like Signal where resources are limited and a few developers are the single bottleneck for everything, UX or otherwise.

Re: Russia Bans 1.8M Amazon and Google IPs in Attempt to Block Telegram

#170

Post by pmlnr »

BubuIIC wrote: post #57
jstanley wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Telegram client is available on F-Droid, so you can still use it even if you opt-out of the walled garden.

Unfortunately Telegram-FOSS from F-Droid doens't have GCM support so won't be notified about DC updates via push messages. I this particular case the centralization around the push service of google actually helps.

DC updates via push messages? Isn't this what's DNS is for in the first place?
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