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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

#301

Post by lqdc13 »

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.

What about the people under 18 who I assume could take the poll and also people who didn't go to vote but took a few seconds to take the poll on Telegram?

Also what about all the babushkas who most likely voted for Lukashenko but don't have a smartphone?

This is not to say that more people didn't vote for the opposition than the official numbers state. But Lukashenko still could have won.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#302

Post by kube-system »

gbrown wrote: post #291
Alupis wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is simultaneously possible for the results to have statistical issues while also being good enough to provide utility as evidence for drawing some conclusions. You can both be right.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#303

Post by eitland »

outime wrote: post #68
eitland wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to WhatsApp that is owned by a massive megacorp that bought it for over $10bn and that has already tried to start mining metadata from it I would say Telegram still has its advantages. (FWIW: I prefer Signal.)

How does attacking Facebook dismiss the fact that Telegram has your raw conversations and can monetize them?

It is only "attacking Facebook" as much as it is also just "stating again what is already publicly known about Facebook".

This was all in the news: Facebook lying about not being able to connect WhatsApp and Facebook, then trying to weasel their way out of their previous statements.

For all the problems Telegram has they don't seen to have our raw messages more than GMail has your raw emails.

Yep: unlike WhatsApp and Signal they can, technically produce them. (Edit: I forgot to mention: WhatsApp chat logs gets uploaded unencrypted to American Cloud providers. I have less against the police and Americans than many other here but lets not pretend end-to-end encryption helps for anything when you backup the data unencrypted with everyones favourite villain it seems: NSA)

And yes: like with GMail if Telegram has done exactly what they said and done it properly it would probably take cooperation of at least two sysadmins on different teams and it woumd also probably trigger alarms east and west.

At least that is my understanding.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#304

Post by kube-system »

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.

This is certainly damning data, but having a telephone in Belarus does not necessarily mean that person voted in the prior election. This is good evidence, but not a mathematical proof.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#305

Post by eitland »

VMG wrote: post #37
eitland wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to WhatsApp that is owned by a massive megacorp that bought it for over $10bn and that has already tried to start mining metadata from it I would say Telegram still has its advantages. (FWIW: I prefer Signal.)

What is the advantage when Telegram has less money and more data?

Same advantage as buying a car from someone you don't know versus buying from a known fraudster and bully?

Yes: in Telegrams case I might possibly, maybe at some time be taken advantage of.

In WhatsApps case it would surprise everyone greatly if one isn't - sooner or later - take advantage of.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#306

Post by postmodernbrute »

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…

Exactly - Telegram can be used for public gatherings precisely because one can stay anonymous. It's more like Discord in that respect.

Wire is a bit of a mess. Client is buggy, cross-platform usage is difficult. At least that's my memory of it.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#308

Post by input_sh »

BTCOG wrote: post #219
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…

This is all information in bad faith. The protocol and all Telegram is open source. Are you a cryptographer? And who "rolled" the Signal protocol, Moxie Marlinspike? Did he not design that himself?

> ...and all Telegram is open source.

This is demonstrably false. Telegram's apps are open sourced (except Telegram X for some reason), same as Signal's (no exceptions). None of the two offer you their server's code.

> And who "rolled" the Signal protocol, Moxie Marlinspike? Did he not design that himself?

It passed the scrutiny of the best cryptographers out there. This comment provides more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24237791

And again, this is completely irrelevant because even if Telegram's end-to-end encryption was absolutely the best there is, a) it doesn't work on group chats, and b) it's not enabled by default, only in Secret Chats. The vast majority of Telegram's usage is not end-to-end encrypted at all.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#309

Post by ldarby »

BTCOG wrote: post #216
stjohnswarts wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They are not going to get them, and the people saying otherwise don't use Telegram, and/or do not know what they are arguing over;pedantry. Telegram works well. Anyone can start a private chat encrypted end-to-end, those messages only stay on the device, and you can set them to auto-delete from BOTH user devices in 3 seconds, 5, 10, 30 second, 1min, 1 hour, 1 day. Nobody at all is going to get those messages. Go ahea…

> wireshark your connection

This isn't good advice for trying to show someone their messages aren't being sent in clear text. It could be encrypted using a weak cipher or have other implementation bugs that make it trivial for a nation state to decrypt it. You need to be able to look at the application's source code to tell what encryption it's using and if it's secure enough.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#310

Post by marcosdumay »

kube-system wrote: post #304
marcosdumay wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is certainly damning data, but having a telephone in Belarus does not necessarily mean that person voted in the prior election. This is good evidence, but not a mathematical proof.

The people can lie to Telegram, Telegram can lie, somebody can attack the communications, somebody can attack the telephones, somebody can impersonate the numbers, all the Telegram voters can be from those 60% that didn't vote...

There are many ways that could happen. But it's pretty good evidence to add to the context, and the pile of evidence was already quite big.

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