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Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

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Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#231

Post by johnchristopher »

godelski wrote: post #203
wintorez wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram has a feature that I really like. It allows you to delete your messages from other people devices as well.

I have been frustrated with Signal on this. I pitched that it is a good idea because of a scenario: > You're protesting with people. Cops pick them up, but not you. You can delete their messages and it is likely that you are able to do so before the police can clone your phone or copy the messages (screenshot, whatever). I got a few strange responses back: - Deleting messages doesn't mean they can't be saved (yeah...…

I was pitching the following idea to a friend of mine yesterday:

- the UI should hide e2e/“reallyprivate” conversations by default - as in "not visible anywhere" (edit: unless the app is in the foreground and you are chatting of course)

Unless you:

- do the “add a new user/conversation" - then instead of adding mail/GUID/phone you add a whatevercanberemembered number/emoji/sentence that unlocks the private conversation you initiated long before

There should be no trace in the UI that private conversations are going on.

What does HN think ? Why hasn't it been done before ?

Edit: there could even be notifications disguised as another app (news subscriptions, medical reminders, battery low, etc.)

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#232

Post by baybal2 »

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.

> > Facebook can't read your WhatsApp messages

> Are we sure it can't?

Google can remotely uninstall, and install a trojaned version of any app regardless of app signature on an official Android distribution.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#233

Post by jariel »

kolinko wrote: post #214
jariel wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qu…

Even in the worst case scenario, where each and every opposition voter took part in the poll, and literally everyone else voted for Lukashenko, this still prpves that the true result was at least 17% for opposition, which is more than the official results claim.

Teenagers don't have phones?

Did all the eligible voters who phone-polled actually vote?

Did they poll the way they actually voted?

Some people don't have two phones?

Can we trust that telegram doesn't have a flaw in the means by which it is measured? (i.e. register again with the same SIM, or something like that?)

It's nice that there is a phone number as validation, but this doesn't 'prove' anything.

Edit: I should add, apparently people are registering photos of their votes, which don't jibe with the tally, which is probably a much better indication of problems with voting [1]

[1] https://belarus2020.org/

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#234

Post by shawnz »

wintorez wrote: post #82
rectang wrote: post #44

Should the revolution fail, the digital trail left by these messages will give the government everything they need to hunt down every last activist. We saw it with the Green Revolution in Iran. We've seen it several times since. So long as messages are not encrypted, messaging apps are much more naturally suited as tools of oppression than tools of revolution.

Telegram has a feature that I really like. It allows you to delete your messages from other people devices as well.

Whatsapp also has this useful feature, and it also provides always-on E2E encryption unlike Telegram.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#235

Post by elsjaako »

jariel wrote: post #195
huhtenberg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qu…

According to the official numbers, of the 7.8 million eligible voters, 40% voted, and 7% of those voted for Tikhanovskaya. That's 218400 people.

According to the telegram poll, 1.184 million people voted for Tikhanovskaya. That's over 5x as many as according to the official numbers.

The sample size doesn't matter here, were talking absolute number. It seems pretty unlikely 5x more people (absolute number, not fraction) voted for her in a poll than in the real elections.

(I have not checked the source for the numbers, I've just assumed the above poster used the right ones)

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#236

Post by ClumsyPilot »

SXX wrote: post #177
nitrogen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Real reason is simple: Russian government never actually tried to block it for real. Kremlin could easily force Apple and Google to block the application itself or it's push notification for Russian users, but they never did that. Of course there was a lot of technical shenanigans going to block their IP addresses and proxy servers, but everyone understood that's is very fruitless attempt. Oh and they fully unblocked…

Sour grapes much?

They have asked Apple and Google to remove Telegram from appstore. - https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17406178/russia-telegram-...

Thousands of essential services have stopped working and internet in the country came to a standstill for days. Many were pissed off and loosing money, including folks working for the government, so it was not tenable to continue.

Do you have any proof for the Kremlin visit is it as unsubstantiated as the rest of your post?

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#237

Post by saagarjha »

godelski wrote: post #227
saagarjha wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nor…

I certainly do not know what my friends are doing 24/7, perhaps not even within a day or two. And that's plenty of time for law enforcement to install a third-party client on their phone, or just read the messages. I agree that having it is better than not having it, but I would not put too much faith in it being useful against law enforcement. Perhaps retracting a mistakenly sent message, but not much more than that.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#238

Post by ThinkBeat »

The encryption is not very good in group chat.

All the security services need is to find one protesters phone force the person to unlock it and they have it all.

I am sure all network traffic of any kind was heavily monitored too.

It also becomes entirely useless when the authority turns off the internet.

There is another one that can work with a Bluetooth mesh https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsi...

That Bluetooth is easy to notice and I’m the past was easy to listen in on. I presume that is better now.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#240

Post by throwaway4747l »

dang wrote: post #205
throwaway4747l wrote: post #89

Ctrl-F "Signаl": 10 instances Seriously, it'd be nice if we could have one thread about Telegram without S-advocates showing up and complaining about "security". Yes, we know Telegram isn't as secure, yadda yadda yadda. Now if only Signal provided half the features Telegram does, maybe non-cryptonerds would have heard of it.

The problem with a comment like this is that it adds to what it is complaining about. While I have you: Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Ot…

I try to maintain some consistency (as you probably noticed) but as I switch devices I honestly can't be bothered to remember the throwaway handle I last used. If that's really an issue, I'll try to stick to a handle that's easy to remember, or keep this one.

Out of honesty however, I should tell you that I value my anonymity and don't want an extensive posting history to be used to track and identify me. As pg said, keep your online footprint small, yadda yadda. So I can space out the intervals at which I make accounts but I can't promise I won't vanish the identity I created after a while.

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