Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests • Hacker News Board

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#191

Post by dalbasal » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

It's disappointing that this kind of thing is possible in relation to the sophistication and competence of a regime.

Or maybe I should say that 2020 is a disappointment, from a 2005 perspective. The internet was supposed to be free. The ability to use it for political change democratically was supposed to be built in, innate.

This wasn't supposed to be a rare and fortunate blip, a soon-to-be-closed loophole in an app that . Internal security office around the world are currently reviewing their susceptibility to Telegram-based "attacks."

Even in democratic countries, we're increasingly seeing the internet's ability to lead to political organizing as dubious... something that must be controlled.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#192

Post by shawnz » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

JosephHatfield wrote: post #158

ddorian43 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhhh how did it work when the internet went down ?

I believe the Telegram app has a peer-to-peer feature that allows communication to be routed through other devices rather than requiring communication with the Telegram servers

That is not the case. It is a plain old client-server architecture.

You might be thinking of FireChat.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#193

Post by anigbrowl » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

aborsy wrote: post #14

Why not Signal? It’s the way to go as far as messaging apps are concerned.

Because Signal is shit for anything other than 1-1 communications. Group management is extremely cumbersome and large scale channels, while not impossible, require external assistance (with all the security implications).

Signal is definitely more secure than Telegram, but the latter has a far better user interface, API, and social ecosystem, which gives rise to massive networks effects that are simply not available in Signal.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#194

Post by shawnz » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

skyyler wrote: post #127

shawnz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the journalist who gets paid to write a nice article about Signal will surely get a quote from the protestor who happened to use Signal and not Telegram.

I'm not sure why you've brought up Signal, they're completely different platforms. Signal focuses on secure communication, Telegram has a secure communication feature... But also a social network of group chats and channels that link to each other; and that's the focus of this article.

It was just an example of a product which could be touted as enabling protestors.

The other use cases of Telegram could be serviced by other apps. There are plenty of non-E2E social networks available just like Telegram.

EDIT: Unfortunately postmodernbrute I am not able to reply to your comment. But I am not trying to deny that Telegram has caught a wave of popularity among Belarusians and others. What I am saying is that Telegram likely only has that trust because of puff pieces like this. It is not because of any technological superiority or unique feature that it provides (since it isn't/there aren't any).

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#195

Post by jariel » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #128

HPsquared wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair though, Telegram users aren't exactly an unbiased sample.

2.3M voted in a poll, 59% from Belorussian phone numbers. That's 1.36 M or 17% of the eligible voter pool. 51% of these are for the secondary candidate. This doesn't reconcile with the official numbers regardless of how you massage them.

It's good people have a way to communicate beyond the reach of the authorities ...

... but doesn't really matter how big the poll sample was if the sample was not representative - the results don't have a lot of meaning.

And it's pretty fair to say it was not representative.

In fact, you don't even need remotely that size of a sample if the sample is representative.

Polling is not about sample size, it's about the quality of the sample.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#196

Post by jessaustin » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #112

jessaustin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 certain…

It's certainly true that politicians can be unpopular for entirely local reasons. For instance, most politicians in USA, for at least the last decade. They are corrupt and incompetent, so they are unpopular.

However, both TFA and other things I've read about Belarus have a very "Euromaidan"/"Kong Tsung-gan" flavor to them. This is the sort of thing CIA does. They publicly claim this is the sort of thing they should do. Why would they be sitting this one out?

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#197

Post by xyzzy_plugh » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #168

stjohnswarts wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would that blow someone's mind? Obviously if you're on an "anti" communication channel with a revolutionary mindset of course the majority will be overwhelmingly high against the dictator. That's by definition what they are revolting against.

Even allowing for the fact some Belarusians have multiple mobile phone numbers, as do some people who aren't eligible to vote for perfectly normal reasons, it's quite telling that somebody polled twice as many votes on a communication channel compared with the official 'count'.

What about those who are underage? There's a surely a large internet-savy base with phone numbers who would otherwise be unable to vote.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#198

Post by safog » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

_-david-_ wrote: post #181

jetzzz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Official election results give Tikhanovskaya 500k votes, Telegram poll - 1M votes, 2x more.

We don't know how many people who voted in the Telegram poll actually voted. Maybe only a quarter of the people in the Telegram poll actually voted. Its possible that some of the people in the Telegram poll are not eligible to vote (due to age or whatever). There could be other issues like people changing who they voted for in the election after previously voting in Telegram.

It's a fair point, not sure why there are downvotes. I still think it's extremely likely that the official numbers are bogus but you can't really accept the Telegram numbers as truth either.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#199

Post by heinrich5991 » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

ConsiderCrying wrote: post #169

heinrich5991 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram still doesn't encrypt chats end to end (by default¹), which means it's not a strictly superior choice to WhatsApp. Facebook can't read your WhatsApp messages (of course they can add an update any time to do that), but Telegram has access to all your messages right now . ¹ Yes, you can select the end-to-end encrypted sessions, but they're very crippled from a usability perspective. I don't remember the last t…

> Facebook can't read your WhatsApp messages Are we sure it can't? Because WhatsApp is closed-source, its GDrive backups are unencrypted and Facebook's whole profit model is based around snooping. Unless they make the app open-source, I'm not trusting them even with a grocery list. People act like E2E is the be-all and end-all but trusting an incredibly shady company on its word is not something I'm comfortable with.

Yes, people are reverse engineering the app. You can check the discussions on HackerNews when security of WhatsApp is discussed.

GDrive backups are not readable by Facebook, they're readable by Google. End-to-end, if properly implemented is the be-all and end-all. Except for metadata, which is a problem, but a different one, and Facebook definitely abuses that. But they don't/can't read the contents of chat messages (for now).

It's not merely trusting that shady company, but also realizing that the news of FB not having E2E-encrypted messages would definitely make the news, you'd be aware of it.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#200

Post by heinrich5991 » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #165

heinrich5991 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram still doesn't encrypt chats end to end (by default¹), which means it's not a strictly superior choice to WhatsApp. Facebook can't read your WhatsApp messages (of course they can add an update any time to do that), but Telegram has access to all your messages right now . ¹ Yes, you can select the end-to-end encrypted sessions, but they're very crippled from a usability perspective. I don't remember the last t…

Can’t Facebook read most people’s WhatsApp messages because cloud backups of chats are enabled by default, and only the tiny minority of users who disable that feature will get truly end-to-end encryption?

No, that's not true as far as I'm aware. The backup is to Google, not Facebook.