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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

#281

Post by t0astbread »

voxic11 wrote: post #131
t0astbread wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from that, regardless if you're on Signal or Telegram if authorities get hold of a protester's identity on such an app and have the power to access the app's servers they can gradually uncover social networks by reading metadata (if I'm not mistaken).

I think you are mistaken. Before your text is sent to Signal your sender information is encrypted with the receiver's public key. So while Signal's servers can see who to deliver the message to they cannot see who sent it. Only the receiving client can decrypt and authenticate the message. This feature was rolled out in late 2018 and is called "sealed sender". It was developed to prevent leakage of any social network…

Oh, that's nice! I didn't know that.

Ammendment to my above statement: This does not apply to Signal.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#282

Post by newscracker »

newsbinator wrote: post #243
ThinkBeat wrote: post #238

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/johnko…

Yeah it's pretty annoying that group chat displays real names and profiles. Also group chat has a search feature for all time.

> Yeah it's pretty annoying that group chat displays real names and profiles.

Don't use real name in profiles. You can also set Telegram to show your profile picture only to your contacts and also choose to not share it with specific users or groups in the privacy settings.

> Also group chat has a search feature for all time.

This is managed by the group administrator when setting up the group to either limit history to new members or provide all history to new members.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#283

Post by nordsieck »

kube-system wrote: post #278
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.

> 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. I think you're oversimplifying the situation. Clearly, sample size alone doesn't have that much of a correctness guarantee, or according to your own statement, we'd be able to trust the official results.

> Clearly, sample size alone doesn't have that much of a correctness guarantee, or according to your own statement, we'd be able to trust the official results.

People are not complaining because the election is a biased sample of the population (not possible because by definition an election is open to all eligible voters).

People are complaining because they believe the government is not truthfully reporting the actual election results.

Good polling technique cannot mitigate fraud.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#284

Post by Alupis »

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.

What we have here is a Sample, and in statistics (of which Polling is a discipline) you require a Randomized Sample of the Population before you can draw any meaningful conclusions.

Telegram users are not going to pass any "Randomness" scrutiny. For all we know, Telegram User A asks Telegram User B to take the poll, etc. That's not random, and can introduce all sorts of statistical bias.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#285

Post by BTCOG »

DavideNL wrote: post #94
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…

> There's Secret Chats feature But secret chats are only for 1-to-1 chats, not for groups as far as I know (or has that changed?)

Correct. What anyone in an oppressive regime could do though is to make sure settings are set to "share your phone number with no one," as well as delete their own messages from the channel in their entirety after having been read 15-30 min later or whatever arbitrary time they'd like. They would do best to not use an @username or account name which could identify them. Beyond that, there's no way anyone in Belarus can do a thing besides physical violence and take an individual's or a group of people's phones.

There are also options for invite only channels ( I manage several TG channels, public and private) in which nobody can join without having been given the invite link, or added to the channel if their settings permit other users adding them to channels.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#286

Post by ffpip »

newscracker wrote: post #264

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 ch…

I love telegram. Great UI, feels natural to use it. And SO MANY features, it's hard to keep up.

Unlimited storage helps too.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#287

Post by danlugo92 »

dalbasal wrote: post #191

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…

https://gun.eco/

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#288

Post by sam_lowry_ »

jariel wrote: post #251
elsjaako wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fractio…

Your numbers don't match Wikipedia [1] which indicates that there was 85% turnout, Tikhanovskaya got 10% ~600K votes. But maybe I missed something. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Belarusian_presidential_e...

The turnout was high indeed. As for the rest of the Wikipedia article, it is woefully incorrect. I will add up-to-date information to the "Voice" section and I hope others will fix factual errors in the Death section and other parts of that article.

Bear in mind that Wikipedia's policy is use "official" sources when in doubt. According to Wikipedia, Assange is a criminal. Snowden is a traitor.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#289

Post by [deleted] »

biscotti wrote: post #253

The Belarus protests work to unseat a President who resisted bribes to impose a strict lockdown. Lukashenko was offered a sum of USD 940M, initially by the WHO & raised by the World Bank. It’s a foreign led insurrection that we should all oppose. That people in this thread label it a revolution just goes to show how easily truth can be perverted. Seems to me he’s a threat to their Corona agenda, that's why he must go…

[deleted]

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#290

Post by newscracker »

dgellow wrote: post #56
echelon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. Calling it "{arbitrary brand} revolution", when pretty much every messaging platform is indistinguishable feels crass and tacky. The brand isn't the one in the trenches making the sacrifices. It could be called a smart phone revolution instead. A revolution of the people.

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

> Since a few days, encrypted video calls

Careful though, since video calls are currently in alpha.

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