Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus

#461

Post by CydeWeys » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

zepto wrote: post #435

extropy wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a way more difficult target to hit. People can follow a 3 step instruction easily enough. That's kinda the point that having a single controlling entity makes the ecosystem vulnerable to this kind of pressure.

People don’t follow 3 step instructions easily enough. That’s exactly why Apple is so successful. I wish it weren’t so.

Motivated users (which protesters definitely count as) will absolutely manage to successfully sideload an Android app. Especially seeing as how they are all routinely physically meeting up with many other protesters, so all it takes is running into someone who helps them get set up. Back in my Ingress days I had a similar situation where we were doing a big operation using a command and control coordination sideloaded app. Most of the people were able to figure it out ahead of time, but the last few had others help them download, install, and configure it when we met up for the op. Protests would be exactly the same thing.

Re: Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus

#462

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

RangerScience wrote: post #459

thatjamesdude wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst I agree with the specifics here, the problem is the general case. I don't agree that you should be allowed to post people's private, identifying data to a public forum without consent. This HAS to apply equally, because the idea that there is a universal set of right and wrong is incredibly naive. A better argument here is how the laws aren't applied equally. TrueCaller was used by the Chinese to harass and at…

> This HAS to apply equally No, it really doesn't. IMO it has to apply consistently . And it's easy to maintain cohesion / consistency here: If you have different rights, you get different rights. Police have additional rights, particularly when acting in the course of their jobs - specifically, they have the right of violence. Seems reasonable to give up the "right" of protection-from-griefing.

> Police have additional rights

No, police exercise and are protected by powers of government, these are not the same kind of thing as rights, and do not belong to the individual the way rights do. Moreover, the legitimacy of such powers is exactly dependent on the legitimacy of the government and the extent to which it observes the rights of the people subject to it's powers.

Re: Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus

#463

Post by CydeWeys » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #12

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #6

Through what right or means can Apple demand this, though? Telegram is a platform for user-generated content and it seems odd for Apple to single-out those 3 channels/groups specifically - what about the hundreds of thousands of other objectionable groups on Telegram? And why Telegram in particular? Why doesn't Apple give the same ultimatum to Facebook to pressure them to block access to militant ethnonationalist gro…

Can you point me to similar Facebook/Whatsapp groups ? Because they are usually pretty aggressive about acting on inciteful content.

The worst ones are all private, so they can't be pointed to. But we do find out about their existence after they're broken up (by law enforcement action, not Facebook). E.g. the domestic terrorists that were planning to overthrow the Michigan State government were coordinating via private Facebook group. So there's one example for you.

Re: Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus

#464

Post by toyg » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

uzakov wrote: post #449

toyg wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just beef with Telegram. That’s where the content is hosted. Apple as a distributor should have NO relevance to this. Apple is like a landlord who legally rented his shop to people who run it as a bar in which some people might meet to discuss protests. Should the police even call the landlord? Should the landlord act on this info?

Depends on the rent contract. If, as you say Apple is like a landlord, Apple can demand specific things in the contract (ie no pets) and the person renting needs to comply. Not getting into the moral side of the argument of Apple Vs Telegram but want to point out that the landlord example isn't applicable in my opinion.

I don’t think there is anything about impeding political protesters in the Apple EULA. Even if there were something, certain things are typically protected in law; in most western countries, for example, a landlord cannot forbid a shop from serving members of a specific religion or of a specific ethnicity.

Re: Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus

#465

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #314

barry-cotter wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not know this but the fire in a crowded theater case was about criminalizing opposition to the draft during WWI. Criminalizing speech always ends with the powers that be using it to stop people saying things inconvenient to them. One year it’s Obama prosecuting whistleblowers, the next it’s Trump. Any power the government has will be used and “abused” almost immediately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting…

> One year it’s Obama prosecuting whistleblowers, the next it’s Trump I agree with you, but I hope you're not making a false-equivalence between Trump and Obama, or that the Obama administration's actions against free-speech had the same motivations - and lack of conscience - as the Trump administration's. It would be much fairer to compare Bush Jr to Trump - it was under Bush Jr we got "free speech zones", for examp…

I don’t care about their motivations. I care about what they do. Trump is a vulgarian, a clown, a walking affront to civility while Obama was born and raised to the haute bourgeoisie but one fanned the flames of war in Libya and Syria and the other has burned no nations. Obama dedicated his adult life to the quest for power and he’s a liberal at heart. Trump has no principles, just a lust for adulation. They were still both the executive. Seek power, accrue power, use power. Stamp on any inconvenient speech.

> Obama's war on whistleblowers leaves administration insiders unscathed

> Since Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, his government has waged a war against whistleblowers and official leakers. On his watch, there have been eight prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act – more than double those under all previous presidents combined.

> And yet other apparent leaks have gone entirely unpunished or have been treated, as in the case of General David Petraeus, as misdemeanors. As Abbe Lowell, lawyer for one of the Espionage Act eight, Stephen Kim, has argued in a letter to the Department of Justice, low-level officials who lack the political connections to fight back have had the book thrown at them, while high-level figures have been allowed to leak with “virtual impunity”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/16/whistleblowe...

Re: Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus

#466

Post by jlokier » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:44 PM UTC

john_minsk wrote: post #409

jlokier wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the video, on the one hand, I can see why that could be a sort of public service against the most egregious of brutal policing. On the other hand... that AI/ML looks like it has immense potential for wrongful identification . "AI hallucinating" the wrong person's face into the scene using totally convincing feature interpolation. In a high stakes scene where people feel the need to fight back, it's not har…

Noone was killed. They are safe. We have peaceful protests. Noone even using something like a bat and we don't have weapons in the arms of regular people

Fair enough. Based on news I completely agree with you. I found no evidence online of any Belarus police being killed or even harmed. (I'd edit my GP message to clarify that if I could but the time limit has passed.)

In referring to identified people being killed I contemplated a worst case scenario, following up on comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737255 "in Hong Kong similar channels were used to kill police" and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737546 "possibly leading to innocent people being lynched or killed by the mob because almost no one will verify whether that someone was really to blame".

However, a bit of Googling later and I haven't found any confirmation that any police in Hong Kong were killed either. Perhaps the HN commenter was a bit overzealous to say so. Only death threats to them... and their children (which is pretty bad in its way).

Meanwhile, the same Googling revealed a lot about Belarus: Shooting protestors with live ammo, horrendous abuse, medical abuse, torture, and some death; it sounds pretty bad there. I can see why doxxing them is compelling and perhaps moral.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/15/belarus-systematic-beati...

Some police resigning in disgust too. That's good to hear.

The possibility of innocents getting harmed due to false identification remains though. Those AI face recognition and deep fake reconstruction techniques really are prone to errors that look convincing. I hope the committed doxxers have high standards of review and understanding, and are able to correct mistakes. I've read enough stories about innocents being attacked and sometimes killed in the past due to an angry vigilante group's lack of care that I think it's a genuine concern if AI-assisted doxxing ever escalates to violence.

I found this article about Hong Kong interesting for how doxxing and counter-doxxing are evolving: https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Hong-Kong-protesters-are-nam...

> "There is power in being able to name those who have wronged you. Doxxing may not be good practice -- the pro-democracy camp has the moral high ground right now -- but few condemn it while the police operate with impunity. Right now, the police doxxing channel on Telegram has more than 242,000 subscribers. As a comparison, the movement's fact-check channel has 60,000."

> "Unsurprisingly, the police have found ways to hide their identities. Since late June, their helmets have had one-way-mirror privacy film adhered to what were see-through visors. Almost none wear their warrant cards or produce them when requested, even under circumstances where force regulations compel them to."

Re: Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus

#467

Post by zootboy » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #457

thatjamesdude wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst I agree with the specifics here, the problem is the general case. I don't agree that you should be allowed to post people's private, identifying data to a public forum without consent. This HAS to apply equally, because the idea that there is a universal set of right and wrong is incredibly naive. A better argument here is how the laws aren't applied equally. TrueCaller was used by the Chinese to harass and at…

> I don't agree that you should be allowed to post people's private, identifying data to a public forum without consent. The problem with that belief is enforcement. Because illegal numbers [0] are trivially shared, the only viable enforcement to prevent their sharing must have incredibly broad reach. This ultimately collapses down into "users cannot be allowed to own and operate their own general purpose computer."…

I disagree that the only viable enforcement is preemptive blocking. Plenty of offenses in the physical world only have after-the-fact punishments. There aren't spike strips physically preventing you from parking in the red zone.

Re: Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus

#468

Post by WilTimSon » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

class4behavior wrote: post #280

rzwitserloot wrote: post #229

This keeps being posted and keeps disappearing, so I'm going to not link to it, but when you search around, a post on telegram by Pavel Durov explains that apple has in fact made 2 demands: Take down the private information __and__ in addition to that, do so silently: Do not replace it with a notice explaining which part of apple's guidelines were breached, because that would be 'irrelevant' info. Apparently, whilst…

Here's Durov's response: ``` Apple released a statement saying they didn't want us to take down the 3 channels run by the Belarusian protestors, but just specific posts "disclosing personal information." This sly wording ignores the fact that channels like @karatelibelarusi and @belarusassholes consist entirely of personal information of violent oppressors and those who helped rig the elections – because that is why…

I take no issue with wanting to remove content that doxxes people, even if those people are doing bad things. I do, however, take issue with Apple pushing this idea that they can decide what information you can and cannot give users. Barring people from saying "Hey, we didn't delete this because we wanted to, Apple asked us to" is a bit suspect as it leads to people associating the act with the app by default. It takes away agency from companies while giving Apple free reign to rule without being blamed for any mistakes.

Re: Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus

#469

Post by ethbr0 » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:50 PM UTC

zootboy wrote: post #467

ethbr0 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't agree that you should be allowed to post people's private, identifying data to a public forum without consent. The problem with that belief is enforcement. Because illegal numbers [0] are trivially shared, the only viable enforcement to prevent their sharing must have incredibly broad reach. This ultimately collapses down into "users cannot be allowed to own and operate their own general purpose computer."…

I disagree that the only viable enforcement is preemptive blocking. Plenty of offenses in the physical world only have after-the-fact punishments. There aren't spike strips physically preventing you from parking in the red zone.

Preemptive blocking or omnipresent monitoring.

Both of which are contingent on end users not being allowed to possess strong encryption.

Re: Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus

#470

Post by salimmadjd » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:50 PM UTC

OT - Apple should have removed Telegram months ago.

Telegram has been used to share some very bad COVID disinformation.

My father who is older and lives in Iran shared with me this video about how to treat COVID. It was produced really nicely in the Farsi (Persian) language.

Anyone who has ever read the book "Made to Stick" (highly recommended) would immediately that this video was designed to be a viral disinformation campaign.

The video started so credibility talking about the virus, the family of virus it belongs to, it talked about genetics similarities, etc. All seem very credible. Then it comes the disinformation gotcha:

To defeat COVID (with some beautiful inside the lungs animation ) talking about alveoli and how they function, when you are indoor you need to laugh deeply and very hard. This laughing hard gets rid of the virus, etc. etc.

Great idea, right? Seems like a way to exacerbate the spread of a deadly virus.

To me the quality of video made me think it was probably produce by a state or entity working for a state with budget.

If that is so I considered this incident as one of the first examples of using disinformation to commit genocide.

The problem with Telegram team working from the United Arab Emirates, it's unclear to me if it's being used to weaponize disinformation for evil means or not. From what I have seen, I believe, Telegram is being misused and it needs to be removed from the App Store.