Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests • Hacker News Board

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#311

Post by bagacrap » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 9:12 PM UTC

laksdjfkasljdf wrote: post #297

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…

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.

doesn't work if they've enabled disappearing messages

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#312

Post by dirtnugget » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 9:12 PM UTC

Still don’t trust them. Loads of shady things, from them rolling their own encryption to the fact, that is not possible to encrypt group chats.

IMHO red flags. However I still have not encountered a messaging app which does group chats with somewhat complete feature set in groups.

Signal won’t let you moderate groups for example. (No admin role where you can ban somebody or delete messages)

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#313

Post by StreamBright » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #128

HPsquared wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair though, Telegram users aren't exactly an unbiased sample.

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.

Same story when people predicted Hillary’s chances 99.9% based of Twitter polls. Your sample selection gives misleading predictions too easily.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#314

Post by exabrial » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

Telegram needs a p2p mode via wifi or bluetooth. If the government forces an outage or implements a great firewall, they'd be dead in the water.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#315

Post by troyvit » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

_-david-_ wrote: post #181

jetzzz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Official election results give Tikhanovskaya 500k votes, Telegram poll - 1M votes, 2x more.

We don't know how many people who voted in the Telegram poll actually voted. Maybe only a quarter of the people in the Telegram poll actually voted. Its possible that some of the people in the Telegram poll are not eligible to vote (due to age or whatever). There could be other issues like people changing who they voted for in the election after previously voting in Telegram.

Right, although the telegram results are still interesting enough to warrant a second look at the election from interested third parties (the media if that is free in Belarus, or the UN)

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#316

Post by ashtonkem » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

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.

Especially if your poll is showing extremely lopsided results.

If a poll shows 80% for candidate A, you’d only need to hit 62.5% of the population to guarantee that candidate A would hit 50% of the vote even if the remaining 47.5% voted for other candidates.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#317

Post by AsyncAwait » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

ConsiderCrying wrote: post #92

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…

Can we stop using 6-year-old info for apps that get updated monthly? The problems they have with MTProto have been patched literally 5 years ago, the only other criticism comes from a direct competitor, and they recommend WhatsApp despite the fact that it's closed-source and nobody can verify if its encryption truly works. Facebook is planning to merge Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, which makes it even more awful…

> The problems they have with MTProto have been patched literally 5 years ag

Really? I haven't seen a single credible audit, nor a clear reason for rolling their own

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#318

Post by muzika » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

exabrial wrote: post #314

Telegram needs a p2p mode via wifi or bluetooth. If the government forces an outage or implements a great firewall, they'd be dead in the water.

Yes!

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#319

Post by read_if_gay_ » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #222

diimdeep wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how is Signal's protocol is not "roll their own" ? Sorry I don't know.

Signal Protocol won the Levchin Prize at Real World Crypto, which was awarded by a panel of several of the most renowned academic cryptographers in the field (including Dan Boneh and Kenny Paterson). Other winners include Bellare, Krawczyk, and Joan Daemon. The protocol has been extensively analyzed and is the current gold standard for messaging encryption. Telegram's protocol... is not that.

But the standard we should apply to secure chat protocols isn't how many awards it won, but whether it's watertight. Obviously winning a prestigious prize means it's watertight, but the converse doesn't follow. A protocol can be safe for practical use without winning any prizes.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#320

Post by 75dvtwin » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 9:40 PM UTC

duskwuff wrote: post #221

75dvtwin wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@soufron, I agree with you. It is shameful, to call uprising of suppressed -- against systemic unfairness -- as 'Telegram revolution'. This is akin to stealing valor (basically stealing medals and pretending to be the honorable). This type of valor stealing, is also happening when people call US border detention facilities as 'Nazi concentration camps'. For people whose family members went through a Nazi concentratio…

> Yes of course, without recording technology, in my view, we would not have successful type of investigative journalism that project Veritas has delivered. Your "successful investigative journalism" is more widely recognized as a "right-wing disinformation outfit". O'Keefe and his organization have been repeatedly shown to have fabricated stories, solicited fraudulent activity, and deceptively edited recordings. The…

Oh, that 'politically motivated propaganda' argument.

That's what Lukashenko is using to imprison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siarhei_Tsikhanouski .

Who ran a blog and youtube channel, recording, often without the knowledge of the person he was talking too.

It is the same style of investigative journalism as Project Veritas, O'Keefe are using to show the true colors of the people, actions and ideologies hiding, conveniently, behind a banner of a 'legitimate' political party (who also, unlike Lukashenko, have access to far greater resources, including Wikipedia to 'clean up')

I hoped to get across 3 points with my previous post:

a) what's happening in Belarus is systemic, medieval-style suppression of the populous, voter abuse, and political imprisonments.

And the argument that used by Lukashenko, is the same as @dukswuff is used against Project Veritas...

b) One of the imprisoned leaders, exposed the methods of the tyranny, using the same approach as investigative journalism (involving recordings) as Project Veritas, O'Keefe is doing in US.

Technology is important there, but not more or equal to the heroism of the people doing it. And, at least for me, the more dare the retribution, the more heroic actions are of the journalist.

c) Telegram marketing spin manipulating words, trying to assigning the heroism and suffering of the victims -- to their platform.

Just like some in US are using heroism and suffering of the victims in Nazi concentration camps (who did not choose to go there), equating that to people crossing US border illegally and being detained.

This is stealing of valor.

It is being perpetrated in western media daily for many years, and often spills over to events like Democratic National Convention.

====

I am also going add one more point.

The statements Lukashenko is making about Byelorussian's duty to support him, so not dissimilar to the argument Biden is making about the duty of African-Americans to to support his candidacy.

The marks are that similar.