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Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

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Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#461

Post by tripzilch »

asutekku wrote: post #335
vbezhenar wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, they have to decide to actually use that second number to cheat in a Telegram poll significantly more often than people of the other party.

Otherwise you can only draw your error bars equally in both ways at once, and then they need to be pretty large before the numbers stop saying what they clearly are saying.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#462

Post by maqp »

Integer wrote: post #299
shawnz wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Belarus isn't Russia however, they can most likely take down a lot more of the internet just to "bring order to chaos".

The IP-address delivery via push notification was a nice idea, if they'd only be on that level with their E2EE deployment.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#463

Post by eitland »

maqp wrote: post #447
anigbrowl wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Signal is shit for anything other than 1-1 communications. Group management is extremely cumbersome and large scale channels, while not impossible, require external assistance (with all the security implications). Signal is definitely more secure than Telegram, but the latter has a far better user interface, API, and social ecosystem, which gives rise to massive networks effects that are simply not available…

They're working on V2 groups, AFAIK it's in internal beta right now.

That's actually encouraging to hear!

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#464

Post by maqp »

literallycancer wrote: post #145
shawnz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram provides, at best, equal security and ease-of-use to previously existing solutions like Signal and Whatsapp, and in many cases worse security. Telegram didn't do anything to make this kind of technology more accessible or available. So, the fact that it happens to be a popular solution for encrypted chat right now doesn't really speak to its necessity for any revolution like you and the article seem to be im…

Show me a Signal channel with 2 million people in it. Even if it's only writeable by the channel owner. The adversary in their case is mostly limited to beating up random people and picking on those that take a public stand against the regime. Turns out it's more important that it works at all and not whether the security is perfect.

Channels != group chats != supergroups.

Supergroups and channels don't have expectation of privacy. They're not about protecting the content but about spreading sousveillance material, message etc. There only your anonymity matters so you can be safe with burner SIM + burner phone + Tor.

But immediately when you step into realm of confidentiality E2EE matters and Telegram becomes a piece of shit software. No E2EE for groups, desktop clients, or for anything by default. Small dissident groups greatly benefit from E2EE when Belarusian government can't read their conversation by just hacking a single server.

Both are important. Signal isn't about non-private mass-messaging like channels and supergroups so it's not going to offer those. Telegram could be fantastic for channels and supergroups if it used Tor by default and didn't ask for phone number. But it doesn't, and it tries to do too many things while ignoring too many security problems. Turns out that's a recipe to a disaster. See e.g. how CCA tracked Telegram users in Hong Kong, and how Telegram failed to enable the protective measures for users by default.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#465

Post by Shank »

hutzlibu wrote: post #437
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…

The problem with telegram is, what is their buisnessmodell? There is none at the moment. Signal lives off donations. WhatsApp off the Facebook datagrabbing connection Matrix/Element from support/server renting But Telegramm has invested a lot, but received no money in return yet. So, I suppose the current plan is to get dominant and then .. ROI with who knows? I also use it right now. Creating and managing groups is…

It used to be the TON Blockchain, but that got shut down. If you're not familiar, Telegram is the pet project of Pavel Durov, the founder and ex-CEO of VK, which is essentially the Russian version of Facebook. I have no idea what the future holds, but he's quite wealthy and has been really successful in the past, so I'm not fearing the future right now.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#466

Post by SXX »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #236
SXX wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real reason is simple: Russian government never actually tried to block it for real. Kremlin could easily force Apple and Google to block the application itself or it's push notification for Russian users, but they never did that. Of course there was a lot of technical shenanigans going to block their IP addresses and proxy servers, but everyone understood that's is very fruitless attempt. Oh and they fully unblocked…

Sour grapes much? They have asked Apple and Google to remove Telegram from appstore. - https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17406178/russia-telegram-... Thousands of essential services have stopped working and internet in the country came to a standstill for days. Many were pissed off and loosing money, including folks working for the government, so it was not tenable to continue. Do you have any proof for the Kremlin…

The point is: they never went through with this. They could easily pressure Google / Apple to comply, but they didn't. China pressured Apple to remove all kind of apps so it's very much doable.

    > Thousands of essential services have stopped working and internet in the country came to a standstill for days. Many were pissed off and loosing money, including folks working for the government, so it was not tenable to continue.
They banned tons of IP subnets, but that's all. If they actually wanted Google / Apple to remove the app they could easily use different ways for that: e.g blocking Google Ads income, or making Apple / Google Pay services unlawful.

   > Do you have any proof for the Kremlin visit is it as unsubstantiated as the rest of your post?
Vice president of the company was participating IT industry meeting with premier minister of Russia:

https://www.rbc.ru/business/10/07/2020/5f08406a9a7947867c1d9...

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#467

Post by maqp »

throwaway4747l wrote: post #89

Ctrl-F "Signаl": 10 instances Seriously, it'd be nice if we could have one thread about Telegram without S-advocates showing up and complaining about "security". Yes, we know Telegram isn't as secure, yadda yadda yadda. Now if only Signal provided half the features Telegram does, maybe non-cryptonerds would have heard of it.

If you'd understand security is a property of all features you'd understand that Telegram lacks even basic features like group chats and cross-platform chats. From that viewpoint Telegram is outright dangerous to use: it leaks a metric fuckton of private data to server from where it's abusable both by Durov (who might run out of money) and by anyone who hacks the server (like Belarussian intelligence establishment). I'm one of those S-advocates and I'm here for a real reason.

Also, Signal is getting those features, at slower pace sure because it's not trivial to do things securely, but at least there's zero technical debt compared to Telegram, who can't suddenly drop all insecure features, nor implement E2EE without starting basically from scratch.

Maybe if Telegram provided the security Signal does you wouldn't have concerned people telling about Signal ;)

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#468

Post by maqp »

maccam912 wrote: post #167
throwaway4747l wrote: post #89

Ctrl-F "Signаl": 10 instances Seriously, it'd be nice if we could have one thread about Telegram without S-advocates showing up and complaining about "security". Yes, we know Telegram isn't as secure, yadda yadda yadda. Now if only Signal provided half the features Telegram does, maybe non-cryptonerds would have heard of it.

Yeah honestly I just scroll right past them. I use telegram for my "Can you pick up some bananas on the way home?" messages. If I ever had a confidential tip for some investigative journalist I'd use signal. But it gets annoying if every post with the word "telegram" in the title gets the same "But signal is more secure!" response unrelated to the content of the article.

If you only use Signal for sensitive stuff, you leak extremely valuable metadata about when you discuss sensitive stuff. When you use Signal for everything, it's harder to tell if you asked for bananas or for a revolution ;)

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#469

Post by maqp »

newen wrote: post #365
maccam912 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah honestly I just scroll right past them. I use telegram for my "Can you pick up some bananas on the way home?" messages. If I ever had a confidential tip for some investigative journalist I'd use signal. But it gets annoying if every post with the word "telegram" in the title gets the same "But signal is more secure!" response unrelated to the content of the article.

Doesn't Signal give out your phone number to whoever you message?

Both sender and recipient need to have each other in contacts to message one another.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#470

Post by hutzlibu »

Shank wrote: post #465
hutzlibu wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with telegram is, what is their buisnessmodell? There is none at the moment. Signal lives off donations. WhatsApp off the Facebook datagrabbing connection Matrix/Element from support/server renting But Telegramm has invested a lot, but received no money in return yet. So, I suppose the current plan is to get dominant and then .. ROI with who knows? I also use it right now. Creating and managing groups is…

It used to be the TON Blockchain, but that got shut down. If you're not familiar, Telegram is the pet project of Pavel Durov, the founder and ex-CEO of VK, which is essentially the Russian version of Facebook. I have no idea what the future holds, but he's quite wealthy and has been really successful in the past, so I'm not fearing the future right now.

I am aware. I even suspect he might have some idealism.

But mark zuckerberg is also really successful and I still don't want him control my communication.

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