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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

#291

Post by gbrown »

Alupis wrote: post #284
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.

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.

You’re ignoring the finite population and the actual numbers involved.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#292

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

Biases are irrelevant. If you look a the numbers, there are more people saying they voted for the opposition on the Telegram pool than votes on the official pool. About 5 times as many.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#293

Post by postmodernbrute »

prajjwal wrote: post #218

It's amazing that technology is empowering these protestors, but I'm not sure a vulnerable group of people such as this should be leaving identifying information on these servers. - You cannot sign up for Telegram without your phone number (even if it isn't public). - End to End encryption exists but is limited to 1-1 chats. - Telegram cooperates with data requests from law enforcements. The kind of risk this puts th…

You can cloak your phone number & not allow others to reach you via your phone number. Which means that the authorities cannot match your phone number to your Telegram identity, even if you posted in a public chat. This feature was implemented last year during Hong Kong protests to protect against government efforts to identify protestors by enumerating the limited phone number space in HK. There is also a password option to protect against SMS surveillance.

As to whether Telegram itself would cooperate with data requests from your government - that depends on which government it is, and in the end is up to personal judgement. I don't think there's any reason that Telegram would betray me to the Chinese government, for example, while I won't at all trust Facebook for that. Facebook, and Zuckerberg himself (for how long did he stick to that Wuzhen avatar?), tried hard to appease the Chinese government for such a long time.

International megacorp are generally the worst to trust in that respect. To many of us in authoritarian places, the illegality of Telegram is itself an attraction.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#294

Post by thereare5lights »

Alupis wrote: post #284
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.

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.

What does that have to do with the fact that the number of telegram users that voted for the opposition candidate exceeds the official number of voters that voted for the opposition candidate?

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#295

Post by throwawaynow716 »

Relatively long time Signal user (2+ years) from Belarus. Was in the city when internet blackout arrived.

I don't want to waste your time on how i moved 30 people to Signal and preached about security and signal being the best pick on the market. Hell, even my family is on Signal.

Now, let me tell you this. The `anti censorship switch` did not work during the internet hiccup. In a moment all that fancy stuff just ended up being.... useless.

So check this out, i have family members living outside Belarus, they have Signal installed. But i am not able to message quite blatantly simple phrase "i am all right!".

Next thing happened i fired up Telegram, hooked up SOCKS5 proxy and was capable to reach out my family members and asked friends to go on Twitter and get @signalapp's attention same evening outage started. Zero reaction.

Signal was and is dead silent. This makes me think that, come on, people Signal caters to the USA users only. They won't care for others. Moxxie denouncing american police for their brutality, you've been to Chernobyl, you know what Eastern bloc looks like. Guys over here are three times more fierce than yours. But your company somehow makes a statement to accommodate local protesters, now what have you done to aid anything outside of cozy California?

Lesson i've learned, that on the verge of something Belarus experienced last week, Signal has zero value.

I even own the debug logs to send 'em so they will figure why the censorship circumvention wasn't working, but i'm drop dead sure i won't hear from them. Not being a hothead to get rid of Signal straight away but definitely i have to tell you my trust in Telegram's resilience grown

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#296

Post by kube-system »

nordsieck wrote: post #283
kube-system wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 act…

Yes, this is the point I am making. Sample size is but one of many factors that influence the reliability of a poll, and it is not the only consideration for good polling technique. A large sample does not mitigate those factors.

If there is an issue with the underlying polling technique, making the sample larger does not guarantee more correctness. You simply end up with a larger set of bad data.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#297

Post by laksdjfkasljdf »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #160
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 don't understand how they will get the chats except from individual phones. The convo is encrypted between telegram app and their servers and the servers aren't available to Bealrus' government officials, so how are they going to get the messages? Obviously they can if they're monitoring public group chats because all they have to do is join, but person to person or private groups, how are they going to get to thos…

sadly, very easy:

1. arrest person.

2. torture until you get the chat app unlocked. (which is readily verifiable and very practical to get with torture).

3. arrest everyone else based on the chats after cross-referencing telegram accounts and phone company records.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#298

Post by smnscu »

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…

Using Telegram is my guilty pleasure for sure. They just added video calling and it, like most of their other features, Just Works™.

Just don't send your passwords or whatever to your Telegram buds and you should be alright. Funny enough, here in the UK Telegram is mostly associated with shady stuff like drug dealers.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#299

Post by Integer »

shawnz wrote: post #178
renewiltord wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you guys always miss the important things. It's that Telegram has social features. It's that Telegram operates under harsher network conditions. It's that other people have Telegram for these reasons. This is the rsync v Dropbox of messaging applications.

> It's that Telegram has social features. Yes, unencrypted social features that could just as easily be serviced by any other social networking app which hasn't been explicitly banned yet (and that could happen to Telegram at any time). > It's that Telegram operates under harsher network conditions. So their operators claim. But it's not clear why that would be true and I haven't seen any numbers to demonstrate it ei…

>So their operators claim. But it's not clear why that would be true and I haven't seen any numbers to demonstrate it either. Have you?

Telegram had to survive Russia's attempt to ban it, so it evolved a number of strategies: using push notifications to deliver IP-adresses of not-yet-blocked servers, using socks-proxies, the evolution of the MTProto Proxy encrypted protocol, and finally resorting to steganography to mimic ordinary https traffic, thus evading the DPI.

The attempts of the state censorship agency to block the telegram servers were hilarious to watch: at one point they had 0.5% of the IPv4 address space banned, and broke a lot of stuff (AWS, Google, DigitalOcean, OVH, etc). Telegram was still working, of course.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#300

Post by iagovar »

marcosdumay wrote: post #292
dstick wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Biases are irrelevant. If you look a the numbers, there are more people saying they voted for the opposition on the Telegram pool than votes on the official pool. About 5 times as many.

Exactly, this is impossible to reconcile. Either there has been vote fraud or this people didn't actually go to the poll station. Or people can vote more than once.
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