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

261–270 of 557 posts

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#261

Post by upofadown »

voxic11 wrote: post #124
mauflows wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 does encrypt your messages locally. Also Android supports file encryption you don't need to use full disk encryption anymore. Also I think the policy has changed in Android 10. > All compatible Android devices newly launching with Android Q are required to encrypt user data, with no exceptions.

Signal traditionally had an easy to get encryption key for the local encryption. Now there is a PIN but I don't think it is any protection against having access to the disk. The signal people would prefer that that you deal with the end point security yourself, because they really can't do much there.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#262

Post by jariel »

pixelbash wrote: post #242
jariel wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can't tell if you are arguing that the original vote was less likely to be skewed than this one, or just that this one doesn't pass the highest bar that could be set for it.

I'm arguing it's an 'online poll' and subject to all sorts of possible issues. It's probably a decent indication of what seems to be some otherwise obvious fraud at the polls, it's just not 'proof' of anything really.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#263

Post by rectang »

Balgair wrote: post #244
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.

I agree that the danger is tremendous, but that is all the more reason to participate in changing the government. If you fear such a reprisal then in being afraid you have only your life to save. If you try and make it succeed then you have everything to gain. It is total gamble, but there seems to be little choice now for the Belorussian people: a chance at freedom or worse reprisals.

Let's differentiate between the heroic individual activists striving against all odds, versus the technologists whose market-driven decisions ensure that the activists are betrayed to their oppressive governments.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#264

Post by newscracker »

It's not surprising that every time Telegram pops up here, many comments miss the fact that Telegram has a great UX, a great feature set and also provides the kind of privacy protestors value, i.e., not having their phone numbers flashed to every random stranger in groups or to random channel owners whose channels you've subscribed to. With Telegram you cannot even do a phone number enumeration attack (this can be changed in settings) by adding phone numbers to your contacts list to find out who's using it.

And nope, Signal doesn't make the cut for the above reasons because it exposes your phone number to everyone else. WhatsApp is the same in this respect. Neither of them prevent enumeration attacks (they may slow that down a bit, but not sufficient enough to protect against state actors).

Wire and Element (Matrix) are comparatively better than Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp because you don't need a phone number to sign up and they also have end to end encryption for all chats (with Element it's a bit more recent). Hopefully more people can soon ditch phone number based apps that cause them to be vulnerable because of that vector.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#265

Post by godelski »

indigo945 wrote: post #256
johnchristopher wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conversati…

This doesn't give you plausible deniability if law enforcement gets their hands on your unlocked phone, as they can see that the file size of the encrypted message logs doesn't match the visible content. If the phone is jailbroken and the key for the message logs is leaked, it doesn't help at all. Security by obscurity is never a win.

Wouldn't the solution here just be to allocate a larger disk space and encrypt that? Then when the space is filled up you expand again? I've seen this done before.

Rather I'd change the GP's solution to having a secret vault in an already encrypted chat system (so you can do the above), essentially making it two layers. Just the second layer isn't a button that says "look at me, I'm where all the real secret shit is."

I agree that security through obscurity isn't a winning solution, but it is part of the toolkit. It would just be dumb to rely on your security solely being obscurity. Encrypted steganography is still a powerful tool, hackers obscure code, and real spies use obscurity all the time. It just isn't the dominant factor.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#266

Post by throw38474 »

robjan wrote: post #172
ceeniwer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why is it that folks in Hong Kong, xinjiang and Tibet can’t effectively work together using telegram to start a massive nation wide riot. There are so many Folks in those regions who are oppressed (millions) and they are being organ harvested, forced to work in factories as slave labor, held in concentration camps, disappeared without trials, and tortured for democratic ideals. Or these folks can coordinate…

The protests in Hong Kong are organised over Telegram but there is not much appetite for rioting thankfully.

[flagged]

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#267

Post by throwaway12992 »

I find myself surprised that such a large percentage of people use Telegram in Belarus.

One might wonder if perhaps some government who wanted nukes on Russia's border might expend some effort into discrediting an election of somebody who was blocking that objective.

Telegram accounts can be made in an automated manner, for somebody sufficiently motivated.

https://social.techjunkie.com/use-telegram-without-phone-num...

https://www.voiplid.com/belarus-did-virtual-phone-number/

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#268

Post by boring_twenties »

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

Android has encrypted storage by default since a few years ago. Of course, by default it uses a default key. But, the point is, enabling "encryption" just means changing that key, not reencrypting the entire device.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#269

Post by kube-system »

dstick wrote: post #220
nordsieck wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah I think Telegram, like Whatsapp, is adopted broadly enough not to bias too heavily in one direction. Definitely not 90%, and especially not if that “bias” matches the word on the street.

Telegram? 5% of the world uses Telegram. And I bet the 50+ age demographic is heavily underrepresented in that subset. Significant sample bias shows up in US polling using mediums that are exponentially more widespread.

Nonetheless, I don't doubt the validity of these particular results, because I think we have enough corroborating evidence. We don't have to justify the rigorousness of a Telegram poll to come to that same conclusion.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#270

Post by johnchristopher »

indigo945 wrote: post #256
johnchristopher wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conversati…

This doesn't give you plausible deniability if law enforcement gets their hands on your unlocked phone, as they can see that the file size of the encrypted message logs doesn't match the visible content. If the phone is jailbroken and the key for the message logs is leaked, it doesn't help at all. Security by obscurity is never a win.

> This doesn't give you plausible deniability if law enforcement gets their hands on your unlocked phone, as they can see that the file size of the encrypted message logs doesn't match the visible content.

Hmmm. What about from the get-go saying that the app allocates 100Mbytes of space and fills it randomly at regular time until some encrypted content is generated. That'd put a 100Mbytes log/message limit to conversations but that'd be by design and nobody could be sure those bytes are random or genuine messages.

> If the phone is jailbroken and the key for the message logs is leaked, it doesn't help at all.

Why would the key get leaked if it's never stored ?

Post reply on HN