If anyone here is interested, I started on a new project called Chatdog (https://chat.dog) to create an alternative to Telegram, et al. Telegram forces you to download their app and provide your phone number to join a room. Chatdog doesn’t require any personal data and can even be used anonymously!
Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
21–30 of 254 posts
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#22This is likely a false accusation. If Apple acquiesced to Russia’s demands, Apple would have: 1) removed Telegram from the App Store in Russia, and 2) prevented Telegram from using the Apple Push Notification Service to distribute non-blocked IP addresses to clients. More likely, updates are being rejected for another infraction. Telegram should publish the App Store reviewer’s criticisms publicly, and provide more c…
> More likely, updates are being rejected for another infraction. Telegram should publish the App Store reviewer’s criticisms publicly, and provide more context before making public denouncements.
Well, that's one of Durov's powerful weapons. Cry in public and blame others, while he is the one who messed it up.
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#23I'd given this challenge some thought in the recent past, specifically the challenge that the big app store owners are each generally susceptible to coercion by large nation-state actors in spite of being multinationally distributed.
There was a project I was involved in rather heavily (cyph // resulted in a pair of neat conference talks) where we'd accounted for the risks of apps being banned by making the entire application operate exclusively in a web context. To at least somewhat mitigate the related risks stemming from having to trust the cryptographic logic delivered by a web server every time you use the service, trust-on-first-use was achieved by mangling the living daylights out of HPKP in tandem with service workers in order to persist barebones codesigning logic used for validating cryptographic packages delivered from the web service. Alas...
All of this is to say that there have been multiple parties involved in addressing this challenge, each one thinking from novel angles in an effort to mitigate the risks posed by the threat of sanctions against secure messaging. As it stands, it appears there's now a rather glaring weakness: if a nation-state decides as much, they can just twist the arms of the walled gardens supporting your secure messaging client in order to:
1) deny access generally, reducing or eliminating the growth of the target space and improving target acquisition,
2) persist known vulnerabilities just long enough to exploit against a target.
Telegram has been criticized again and again for their security hygiene and for their architectural decisions. Signal's seen some of that heat quite recently, and I raise both of these because they speak pretty strongly to the bullets above: there's a chance we're seeing a live demonstration by a preeminent world power against one of the few tools dissidents are using to literally stay alive.
If this demonstration succeeds without any sort of significant blowback (in the form of corporate or popular resistance or some other subversion or mitigation of the attack), there's nothing to stop any other major party from trying it, regardless of whether they're a nation-state.
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Anyway, I'm keen on a deeper discussion here. Maybe the tinfoil hat's been a bit corrosive to my brain; counter-arguments are welcomed.
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#24This is likely a false accusation. If Apple acquiesced to Russia’s demands, Apple would have: 1) removed Telegram from the App Store in Russia, and 2) prevented Telegram from using the Apple Push Notification Service to distribute non-blocked IP addresses to clients. More likely, updates are being rejected for another infraction. Telegram should publish the App Store reviewer’s criticisms publicly, and provide more c…
Or Apple not decided yet how to proceed and is buying some time.
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#25If anyone here is interested, I started on a new project called Chatdog ( https://chat.dog ) to create an alternative to Telegram, et al. Telegram forces you to download their app and provide your phone number to join a room. Chatdog doesn’t require any personal data and can even be used anonymously!
What UI library are you using if any? Looks great on mobile!
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#26I'm surprised that nobody is talking about how Telegram raised pre-ICO of billions of dollars even when it was obvious that this type of censorship will be possible. Mobile apps should not do ICO, period. It's irresponsible for someone to try stealing uneducated people's money while promising something that's impossible to achieve. Realistically speaking there are only two players in the market: Google and Apple, bot…
You can side-load apps on Android.
I'm afraid this makes your rant false.
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#27This is why I will never own an Apple phone. No one should have the power to decide what can and can't be installed on your devices.
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#28If anyone here is interested, I started on a new project called Chatdog ( https://chat.dog ) to create an alternative to Telegram, et al. Telegram forces you to download their app and provide your phone number to join a room. Chatdog doesn’t require any personal data and can even be used anonymously!
What UI library are you using if any? Looks great on mobile!
Thanks! No UI library—I just wrote the CSS from scratch.
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Installing apps outside an app store also introduces other risks, it's not exactly one better than the other. Personally I'd love to sideload apps, but seeing how big of a mess that was on desktops leads me to believe most users are better served by a gatekeeper.
I should have specified, I meant risk to freedom/censorship.
Well it has those risks too. Tainted copies of messaging apps shipped by hostile governments. If you download from the App Store you know you're getting the app that was signed by the developer.
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#30This is why I will never own an Apple phone. No one should have the power to decide what can and can't be installed on your devices.
So you've never owned a game console either?