351–360 of 557 posts
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.
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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…
Sure they can encrypt E2E but they don't. Most chats on Telegram are unencrypted. Huge channels like the one mentioned above are full of agents and nothing prevents them from taking screenshots.
Don't spread false security.
Telegram created Belarus language public channel. And posted poll to vote for new president with some clever restrictions. Anyone can vote, but you can't choose options with candidates if your phone number is not Balarusian. "I am not from Belarus" is only available poll option to make your vote if your phone number is not Balarusian. There is currently 736'000 votes with that option. Telegram poll https://t.me/s/tel…
To be fair though, Telegram users aren't exactly an unbiased sample.
They have a massive audience but Ron Paul and Bernie still weren't anywhere near the presidency.
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Telegram has a feature that I really like. It allows you to delete your messages from other people devices as well.
I have been frustrated with Signal on this. I pitched that it is a good idea because of a scenario: > You're protesting with people. Cops pick them up, but not you. You can delete their messages and it is likely that you are able to do so before the police can clone your phone or copy the messages (screenshot, whatever). I got a few strange responses back: - Deleting messages doesn't mean they can't be saved (yeah...…
Every single person I know who uses Telegram does it for either porn or piracy or both. So using what you already have for protests if they occur makes sense. Trying to get ppl to install a different app is much more complicated at this point. Sometimes may even be prevented by the regime.
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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…
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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.
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> 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.
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…
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.
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.
Russia basically trained tg and more importantly it's users to work this way to the extent when further blocking would harm the network infrastructure itself.