Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 557 posts

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#111

Post by postnihilism »

ROARosen wrote: post #81
dgellow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram has some distinct features that makes it quite good during protests: - location based chats, you see people around and can start a local group. So you can easily get in contact with other protestors around you. - Broadcasting channels - Not by default, but you can creat encrypted chats, with auto destruction - Since a few days, encrypted video calls - Not owned by Facebook

>- Not owned by Facebook "nine out of ten Egyptians and Tunisians responded to a poll that they used Facebook to organise protests and spread awareness" [1] "During the Arab Spring the number of users of social networks, especially Facebook, rose dramatically in most Arab countries, particularly in those where political uprising took place, with the exception of Libya, which at the time had low Internet access preven…

Given the relationship the current US administration has with Russia, it seems like Facebook would be a less welcome alternative for a pro-democracy Belarusian protestor.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#112

Post by Nasrudith »

jessaustin wrote: post #25
paganel wrote: post #9

Similar thing is happening in the States with different social media platforms (FB, Reddit until recently) which have empowered political views not reguarded as “good” by the mainstream media, but you don’t see congratulatory articles about this phenomenon, with FB even seen as Satan itself when it comes to politics.

CIA encourages lots of friendly articles about social disruptions they've planned and funded. It seems likely they didn't plan BLM and related recent American protests, but definitely they are behind anything going on in Belarus.

That sounds like taking the claims of every strongman that their internal opposition is an external malevolent actor. The CIA would only be needed for sufficent state level resources such as training or large quantities of munitions beyond what they could source without intervention.

Dissent is very damn cheap with modern communications infastructure and can exist with and without it.

The only funding the CIA certainly provided was historical general purpose funding of computers and cryptography research. Calling it planned would certainly be a stretch.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#114

Post by brosinante »

75dvtwin wrote: post #108
soufron wrote: post #10

It's never "the work of a long-preparing revolutionnary crowd" revolution, but always a "latest fashionable technology" revolution. Tech propaganda at its best.

@soufron, I agree with you. It is shameful, to call uprising of suppressed -- against systemic unfairness -- as 'Telegram revolution'. This is akin to stealing valor (basically stealing medals and pretending to be the honorable). This type of valor stealing, is also happening when people call US border detention facilities as 'Nazi concentration camps'. For people whose family members went through a Nazi concentratio…

Calling a detention facility a Nazi concentration camp is not the same as calling a grassroots effort a "telegram revolution". One is making an analogy to history, the other is using a vapid phrase to market a mobile app.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#115

Post by conception »

baby wrote: post #8
1023bytes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal doesn't make money either.

Signal is a non-profit though no?

Non-profits can and should make money. That’s a common misconception and a big problem for charities are people think they are being greedy if they are making money regardless of the impact of that money.

A non-profit just means profit isn’t their goal.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#116

Post by iillexial »

nitrogen wrote: post #90
iillexial wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They tried to block it but didn't really succeed. It continued working although with some glitches.

If any technical details of that block and why it failed emerge, they would be fascinating reading. It also kind of makes one wonder if there's a non-technical reason why blocking it failed.

They tried to block all IP-addresses that Telegram app uses. It failed and many of other services also stopped working(Google, Github, Twitter, FB).

What Telegram did: 1. Started sending pushes from Google services with new IP addresses for their app. 2. They started using IPv6, turns out gov cannot detect them. 3. Also, they added support of SOCKS5 proxy to their app.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia Russian version has more details.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#117

Post by kome »

zzz61831 wrote: post #97
ourcat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't they both require handing over a mobile phone number to use them? This is what has always confused me (and turned me off) about these privacy-focussed messaging apps.

Sort of, there is pseudoanonimity layer in Telegram that doesn't show your phone number to others, so if you can be reasonably sure that Telegram isn't going to give you up to the police of your country - your privacy can be preserved. While Signal literally identifies contacts via phone numbers and there is no mass communication features anyway, so it's both less private and less useful for such purposes.

> Signal literally identifies contacts via phone numbers

that's so stupid.

why people here keeps arguing that Signal crypto is safer when its architecture is SO unsafe?

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#118

Post by diimdeep »

Telegram created Belarus language public channel.

And posted poll to vote for new president with some clever restrictions.

Anyone can vote, but you can't choose options with candidates if your phone number is not Balarusian.

"I am not from Belarus" is only available poll option to make your vote if your phone number is not Balarusian. There is currently 736'000 votes with that option.

Telegram poll https://t.me/s/telegrambelarus/9

In Belarus there is only 7.8 million eligible voters.

Poll shows that 1,184 million choose to vote for new president Tikhanovskaya.

Only 85'000 votes for current president Lukashenko.

While official results is 80% for current, 7% for new, with 40% participation.

This is obviously mind blowing picture for citizens.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#119

Post by input_sh »

ConsiderCrying wrote: post #92
input_sh wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By default it's no more encrypted than HN (as in, traffic to their servers uses TLS, messages on the server are not encrypted at all). There's Secret Chats feature which they claim to be end-to-end encrypted, meaning that it's no more secure than Facebook's Messenger (also end-to-end encrypted in Secret Conversations). Even less so considering that they roll their own encryption (MTProto), while Facebook's Messenger…

Can we stop using 6-year-old info for apps that get updated monthly? The problems they have with MTProto have been patched literally 5 years ago, the only other criticism comes from a direct competitor, and they recommend WhatsApp despite the fact that it's closed-source and nobody can verify if its encryption truly works. Facebook is planning to merge Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, which makes it even more awful…

Fair point, but from my perspective, even if it was absolutely the best end-to-end encryption there is, it wouldn't mean much unless everyone's using Telegram for 1-to-1 communication using Secret Chats feature.

> Some of its channels helped unconnected, scattered rallies mature into well-coordinated action.

This line alone makes their encryption rather meaningless for this use case, since Secret Chats only work between two people.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#120

Post by seanieb »

mauflows wrote: post #63
mbowcutt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know too much about Telegram but isn't it encrypted?

I'm pretty sure Signal at least doesn't encrypt at rest on your phone. So the drive would have to be encrypted as well, which is not default on Android

Signal is encrypted at rest. It uses a special encrypted version of Sqlite. https://www.zetetic.net/sqlcipher/
Post reply on HN