Live data from Hacker News

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

bleepingcomputer.com

211–220 of 228 posts

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

#211

There's a pull request with 127.0.0.1 in it. https://github.com/zapret-info/z-i/pull/10/commits/8394b2026... Wonder if they'll merge it.

They already blocked it once. As they normally block domain and IP, they ran into issue when owner of blocked domain set the A record to 127.0.0.1.

The same "hack" was used to block Google and other huge sites. Once they found out this "hole", they introduced a white list of resources which shouldn't be blocked.

These guys are really "smart" )

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

#212
post #143

There's a pull request with 127.0.0.1 in it. https://github.com/zapret-info/z-i/pull/10/commits/8394b2026... Wonder if they'll merge it.

It a repo of "leaked" blacklist. Roskomnadzor don't publish it to public and share it only with ISPs.

They do publish it, but here: http://eais.rkn.gov.ru

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 W…

>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.

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

#215
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you actually care about security/privacy, why not just use Signal?

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.

Because there isn't a good reason to do this. They could have easily given each new signup a UID like ICQ and it would have been near perfect.

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

#216
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads like FUD, there are reasons for and against telegram and I won't get into them here. But truth is often stranger than fiction[0] and there are actors with something to gain from making telegram look poor. [0]: The story of Karl Koch for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koch_(hacker) who's death was ruled a suicide, and his history is... "colourful".

If you actually care about security/privacy, why not just use Signal?

Or XMPP+OMEMO which adds things like multi-client support and encrypted group chat:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13396083

I'm running this on my own server (using ejabberd [1] as Prosody - which I used previously - still has problems with some of the required XEPs[2]) using several different clients (Conversations [3] on Android, Pidgin on Linux, etc).

The one weak link in OMEMO is the difficulty of verifying the authenticity of the device key signatures used by communication counterparts. These signatures are 64-character hexadecimal strings which the user is supposed to verify being authentic before initiating encrypted communications. Humans as not very good at this task, computer can help but they can also be tampered with. There are ways around this problem - e.g. meeting up in person before initiating communications (viz. PGP key signing parties), sending Q-codes off-line, using algorithms to turn those numbers into things which humans are better at recognising (e.g. the coloured emoji used by Telegram etc.). Encrypted group chat only works if all participants have all other participants in their address lists. Then again, it does work and it is fully standardised with several compatible implementations.

[1] https://github.com/processone/ejabberd

[2] https://xmpp.org/extensions/

[3] https://github.com/siacs/Conversations

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you actually care about security/privacy, why not just use Signal?

Or XMPP+OMEMO which adds things like multi-client support and encrypted group chat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13396083 I'm running this on my own server (using ejabberd [1] as Prosody - which I used previously - still has problems with some of the required XEPs[2]) using several different clients (Conversations [3] on Android, Pidgin on Linux, etc). The one weak link in OMEMO is the difficulty of verifying…

we should take a leaf out of the signal/telegram book and convert the hex strings to emoji thumbprints.

It's "good enough" for 90% of cases, but it depends on clients supporting emoji.. :(

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

#218
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I this particular case the centralization around the push service of google actually helps. No, it does not, and you even argued why. This centralization makes it harder to make the system more resilient. We need an alternative to GCM.

BTW, microG GmsCore does GCM (although I'm not sure if it also implements FCM APIs), while being pure FLOSS.

My problem with GCM is not the implementation on the client, but the fact that Google sees traffic. I don't want Google to see my data nor my metadata.

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

#219
quote from https://github.com/aspnet/Docs/issues/5832 : "That's not about the Azure's sites only. Almost each of Microsoft's sites is absolutely unusable in Russia now, like: Docs, MSDN, Visual Studio, Office, Windows, Xbox, all of them and many others are almost dead now."

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

#220

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…

sadly Telegram seems down right now
Post reply on HN