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Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

latimes.com

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Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#221

Post by duskwuff »

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…

> Yes of course, without recording technology, in my view, we would not have successful type of investigative journalism that project Veritas has delivered.

Your "successful investigative journalism" is more widely recognized as a "right-wing disinformation outfit". O'Keefe and his organization have been repeatedly shown to have fabricated stories, solicited fraudulent activity, and deceptively edited recordings. Their activities are politically motivated propaganda, not journalism.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#222

Post by tptacek »

diimdeep wrote: post #98
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…

And how is Signal's protocol is not "roll their own" ? Sorry I don't know.

Signal Protocol won the Levchin Prize at Real World Crypto, which was awarded by a panel of several of the most renowned academic cryptographers in the field (including Dan Boneh and Kenny Paterson). Other winners include Bellare, Krawczyk, and Joan Daemon. The protocol has been extensively analyzed and is the current gold standard for messaging encryption.

Telegram's protocol... is not that.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#223

Post by sam_lowry_ »

nordsieck wrote: post #215
d0mine wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sample size is not everything "Literary Digest poll was also one of the largest and most expensive polls ever conducted, with a sample size of around 2.4 million people" The large size by itself does not guarantee correctness https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.h...

> The large size by itself does not guarantee correctness That's true for "reasonable" poll sizes. As your poll size increases past a certain point, it does begin to guarantee correctness. An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.

Indeed.

"Official" election results were giving Tsikhanoyskaya around half a million votes while over 1 million Telegram users with Belarusian phone numbers already said that they voted for her.

Se here https://t.me/telegrambelarus/9

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#224

Post by ClumsyPilot »

jessaustin wrote: post #196
Nasrudith wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

This is a myopic eastern-European worldview where general population are sheep and nothing ever happens unless some sort of Illuminati has planned it.

CIA does a lot of things, but they are not the only ones, and they can't be everywhere at once.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#225

Post by sam_lowry_ »

safog wrote: post #198
_-david-_ wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Official" figures have no ground in the reality. A crowdfunded campaign to check election results just produced a report, details are published in https://partizan-results.com/

People behind this campaign are starting to reveal their names at last. I know personally one of them.

My network says others are highly respectable as well.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#226

Post by democracy »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #182
democracy wrote: post #86

Actually there are reports that riot police was specifically looking at ones telegram channels to decide on the degree of your immediate punishment (yes, old school batons). And it was easily decrypted (phone unlocked) with a threat by the cops. I am in Belarus at the moment and can confirm telegram was not available without vpns/proxy just like any other resource. And why wouldn't it be?

This is why many protesters had kill swithes on their devices to whipe them out in case they are arrested.

...most of the detained people didn't have such switches and it's not easy to use it - just look at how quickly people get arrested - it happens within seconds, hardly enough time to even take the phone out of your pocket and unlock it.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#227

Post by godelski »

saagarjha wrote: post #208
godelski wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. Sure, maybe this doesn't help you in a channel, but one on one? Or small groups? Most people don't run custom apps and you're probably going to know if your friends do. The biggest use I see of bidirectional deletion is if you see your friends be picked up by a nefarious actor and you can delete the messages. This reduces the chance of self incrimination because you can…

It has everything to do with this when the conversation is if the government is going to use your messages in the unencrypted channel to come after you. If your friends are picked up by a nefarious actor, you would have to know that they were–and also, you'd have to ensure that Telegram isn't keeping some sort of deletion log.

I want to repeat

>> Sure, maybe this doesn't help you in a channel, but one on one? Or small groups? Most people don't run custom apps

The bidirectional part is helpful in the non-public channel context.

How does this help? Why does this matter? Well you can keep a public face and a private face. Private channels, group chats with friends, or one on one messages you can be more open and use this tool. But this is normal. Everyone shows a different face in public than what they show to friends (offline!).

> If your friends are picked up by a nefarious actor, you would have to know that they were

Sure. But they're your friends. I don't know how you interact with your friends, but usually when I'm out with them I'm physically near them and know what they are doing. Chances are pretty high I'd know within a few hours if they got arrested/abducted.

> you'd have to ensure that Telegram isn't keeping some sort of deletion log.

This is a different issue and FWIW that's why I don't personally use Telegram. There's no verification so no trust. But that doesn't mean that the deletion tool can be useful in certain contexts if the implementation is correct. No reason to throw the baby out with the bath water. It is about the probability of reducing self incrimination, not guaranteeing.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#228

Post by exolymph »

dmurray wrote: post #30
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.

A different interpretation is that those social media platforms keep the dissent monitorable and under control, and the powers that be are quite happy with the status quo. If that was the case, as soon as a platform that was not US-controlled gained a foothold in the US, we'd see a crackdown from the establishment. It would be painted as a tool of a foreign power and shut down or forced to be turned over to a US-base…

Democracy in the US has always been under threat, because the elites aren't stupid and realize that letting the masses rule leads to Third Positionism.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#229

Post by shawnz »

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.

Open source is not the be-all end-all of security either. Closed source apps can still be audited (with increased difficulty), and open source apps might still be impractical to audit even though they are open source.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#230

Post by jariel »

nordsieck wrote: post #215
d0mine wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sample size is not everything "Literary Digest poll was also one of the largest and most expensive polls ever conducted, with a sample size of around 2.4 million people" The large size by itself does not guarantee correctness https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.h...

> The large size by itself does not guarantee correctness That's true for "reasonable" poll sizes. As your poll size increases past a certain point, it does begin to guarantee correctness. An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.

"An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters."

Not really though.

An election is ostensibly 'perfect sample of the electorate' (assuming everyone voted), which is what makes it 'good'.

It's very easy to get a 'very large sample size' that is still 'very inaccurate'.

In this case, we're talking about potential numbers larger than literal voters, which makes it interesting - but the sample size again is not the issues if we're looking at a 'poll'.

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