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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

#331

Post by sneak »

pvg wrote: post #101
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.

That can happen anywhere and not just with Telegram - imagine what a repressive government can do with a dump of GMail. Iran's a much bigger country with a regime much more capable and willing to use violence.

Imagine how hard it must be to run a presidential campaign in the US when your incumbent opponent in an election controls the systems that get to read any message in GMail.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#332

Post by lrem »

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 kind of a statistical bias would explain having 1 million Belariusian phone numbers claiming having voted for a candidate, that officially received around 0.5 million votes total?

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#333

Post by samat »

vasu_man wrote: post #250

For a country ruled by a 'dictator', I'm surprised the Belarus' government hasn't blocked access to Telegram yet. Non-authoritarian democracies (well, at least on paper) such as Brazil and India, in past, have blocked WhatsApp to contain protests and spread of (mis)information.

Telegram is notorious for censorship circumvention. They have successfully defeated such an attempt to block telegram by Russian government. Russia used sophisticated DPI, nuked substantial portions of AWS and Cloudflare IP subnets for Russian users and still failed. This guys know how to do censorship circumvention and they are motivated.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#334

Post by samat »

kome wrote: post #117
zzz61831 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of, there is pseudoanonimity layer in Telegram that doesn't show your phone number to others, so if you can be reasonably sure that Telegram isn't going to give you up to the police of your country - your privacy can be preserved. While Signal literally identifies contacts via phone numbers and there is no mass communication features anyway, so it's both less private and less useful for such purposes.

> Signal literally identifies contacts via phone numbers that's so stupid. why people here keeps arguing that Signal crypto is safer when its architecture is SO unsafe?

Their crypto is state of the art, but their ops sec threat model does not include “we’ll torture you or go to your mobile operator and their would cooperate fully”. So signal is good for USA, not so good for 3rd world countries. This people making decisions in Signal live in a different world then most of the people who need secure comms. Well telegram have us covered. Sadly, if you stop trusting Durov - you are screwed. Signal is much better in that regard.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#335

Post by asutekku »

vbezhenar wrote: post #328
thereare5lights wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Phone number is not an unique identifier. There are plenty of people who use multiple phone numbers. While I don't believe in Belarus official results, that Telegram evidence is not a real evidence. It's just a hint.

I very highly doubt around double the amount of ”official” voters would have a second belarussian number.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#336

Post by asutekku »

sneak wrote: post #330
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 only see praise for Telegram, which is confusing, because it is unsafe snake oil. Don’t use Telegram.

It’s no more unsafe as using whatsapp or some other similar service. To be fair, if most of my relatives would not use whatsapp, i would’ve turned 100% telegram already.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#337

Post by samat »

hojjat12000 wrote: post #18
kozak wrote: post #5

Considering that the app has been created by Russians (albeit ones who claim to oppose the current government of Russia), and it is popular mostly in countries that surround Russia, this is not surprising at all that it's the default choice for young people in Belarus. Telegram is a strong indicator of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_world these days.

To be fair. It's the best messaging app out there (feature-wise). It got banned in Iran because it was so influential in the protests. The channels are great for being up to date on the latest news and seeing what is happening in different cities. Groups are awesome for coordinating gatherings. It allows you to send huge files and documents. It has bots (which people used to get info on the current police location, o…

The word ‘platform’ is being abused so much it does not mean anything today, but telegram is a platform indeed: 1. Bots allow you to develop automations and services inside 2. Channels allow publishers to have very easy to use blogs 3. Chats (with bots! Admin bots!) allow unlimited collaboration. Have you ever seen tens of thousands people in a chat? Public chats with anonymity protections?

It is a real platform.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#339

Post by RangerScience »

myth_drannon wrote: post #162
RangerScience wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait seriously? Where can I find out more?

https://t.me/terroristybelarusi

Neat. Can't read the language, but this reminds me of a scene near the end of Doctorow's "Walkaway".

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#340

Post by fuzxi »

eitland wrote: post #275
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…

Group chats can easily be obtained as long as you have someone inside in the group. People who join later only see messages from a while before they joined though so that helps a bit but only a bit.

>People who join later only see messages from a while before they joined though so that helps a bit but only a bit.

This is customizable and can be disabled, so that new members do not see any messages from before they joined.

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