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Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

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Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#121
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Durov don't operate from Russia and wasn't operating during those "blockings", so this theory does not hold up.

Durov operates from the UAE which is a strong ally of Russia (despite them spending a lot of money to convince people otherwise). It's not like he emigrated to Europe or something.

Eh, the Emirates are more of a wild west than an ally of anybody; kind of like Switzerland back in the cold war. Honestly if there's a single foreign interest in charge it's the Lahore/Mumbai underworld.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#122
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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>> To call PT a communist organization is just another laughably stupid conspiracy theory.

> There are videos of Lula saying his plan is to literally implement socialism in Brazil

You know those are not the same thing right?

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#123
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because SSL is SSL. They sure tried to block a lot of it. I guess they could collect public keys and block them, but blocking itself is still done by ISP on Roskomnadzor's orders, and they didn't include this capability. That would be another cat and mouse game anyway, you can cut new keypairs faster than you can block them.

India does DNS and SNI (which exposes the hostname) based TLS blocking, I wonder why Russia couldn’t do the same.

Domain fronting used to be quite effective at getting past SNI blocking. Extracting github.com out of a TLS packet is trivial but actually verifying the certificate requires compute power.

Major cloud providers have stopped making domain fronting an option (mostly because it was never supposed to happen anyway) but ISPs are never going to try to validate every single TLS certificate to see what traffic to block and what traffic to let through. The overhead would be enormous and people using custom certificate authorities (businesses and private persons) would get their communication blocked for no good reason.

It's also possible to get around SNI by using session resumption instead of doing a full handshake. 0-RTT TLS needs special attention because of replay attack risks, but it can speed up the network while at the same time avoiding SNI blocking once a session has been set up. QUIC offers a similar solution.

As far as I can tell, the tools normally used for traffic interception don't grow as fast as the tools for new communication. Support for certain protocols can take days to implement on the client side but weeks on the middlebox side, and that assumes your middleboxes get regular updates.

Worst case scenario, people just turn on a VPN to a place that doesn't block their apps and you lose all visibility of their network traffic. Implementing this stuff at scale isn't easy.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#124
post #26

I'm fairly certain it is deeply connected to Russia. People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats. They have money when Telegram is expensive to run, not to mention they can easily threaten Durov's life. The Russian network block and letting people use Telegram again was the government squeezing their biggest source of users and income until they acquiesced.

> I'm fairly certain it is deeply connected to Russia. Just as Signal, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp are deeply connected to the USA? > People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats. The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers. > They have money when Telegram is expensive to run They literally raised money (a billion dollars) by…

> The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers.

Yes, and they all agree it's crap. Just look at this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6915741 (Feel free to ignore Moxie, but listen to tptacek). In addition, it doesn't even matter since (a) it's not turned on by default and (b) it can't be turned on for group chats.

That said, I agree that Durov probably is not closely collaborating with the Russian state.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#125
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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>> To call PT a communist organization is just another laughably stupid conspiracy theory. > There are videos of Lula saying his plan is to literally implement socialism in Brazil You know those are not the same thing right?

I know, I just don't care. To me they're both synonymous with misery, famine, rationing, forced labor under penalty of death and mass genocide when people inevitably revolt. If people are so big on banning destructive ideologies, one would think they'd start with this one.

Since these communists are allowed to walk the soil of my country unimpeded and not only hold political office but have literal organized undeniably communist political parties with communism in the name like the Communist Party of Brazil, I have no ideological objection to extending the same freedoms to literal nazis and fascists either. They're all the same to me, I don't see any reason to prefer one over the other.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm fairly certain it is deeply connected to Russia. Just as Signal, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp are deeply connected to the USA? > People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats. The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers. > They have money when Telegram is expensive to run They literally raised money (a billion dollars) by…

> The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers. Yes, and they all agree it's crap. Just look at this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6915741 (Feel free to ignore Moxie, but listen to tptacek). In addition, it doesn't even matter since (a) it's not turned on by default and (b) it can't be turned on for group chats. That said, I agree that Durov probably is…

The thread you linked is talking about a totally different algorithm, not relevant to our discussion.

MTProto 1.0 had flaws and proven vulnerabilities. Telegram ditched the algorithm after 2013.

MTProto 2.0 is much secure and has been audited multiple times already without fail. The security is solid, that's the consensus.

Also, there are 2 types of MTProto 2.0 algorithms. One is cloud encryption and the other is end to end encryption.

Cloud encryption is enabled by default on all chats but for those who need end to end encryption, they can use secret chats.

You can read more about it here: https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-does-server-client-e...

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#127
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Brazil used to at least pretend to be a democracy with a constitution and rule of law What do you mean? Didn't they have an election that the incumbent lost (for very good reasons I might add, anyone who bungles the Covid response that bad doesn't deserve to remain in power regardless of anything else (and there was a lot of "else")) recently, implying democracy and all that?

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I've read similar theories that the CIA were behind Lula's original ban on running for election.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I guess it's possible both are true.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I've read similar theories that the CIA were behind Lula's original ban on running for election. I'm not saying you're wrong, I guess it's possible both are true.

Another theory I have is the CIA leaked the Jan 8 recordings to CNN. Security camera recordings that implied he and his people staged a false flag terrorist attack operation in Brasilia in order to justify censoring the internet and persecuting the opposition.

They made those recordings confidential and stalled official attempts at investigation as much as possible. I actually thought they were going to just memory hole all this. Then Lula allies himself with Russia and China and openly says Ukraine was responsible for the war and that they should just cede the territory in order to have peace. In the next few days those confidential recordings are somehow "leaked" to the media and now people are literally angling to impeach him. Looks like Brazil is a country of coincidences.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers. Yes, and they all agree it's crap. Just look at this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6915741 (Feel free to ignore Moxie, but listen to tptacek). In addition, it doesn't even matter since (a) it's not turned on by default and (b) it can't be turned on for group chats. That said, I agree that Durov probably is…

The thread you linked is talking about a totally different algorithm, not relevant to our discussion. MTProto 1.0 had flaws and proven vulnerabilities. Telegram ditched the algorithm after 2013. MTProto 2.0 is much secure and has been audited multiple times already without fail. The security is solid, that's the consensus. Also, there are 2 types of MTProto 2.0 algorithms. One is cloud encryption and the other is end…

Apparently they didn't learn much, given that MTProto 2.0 still uses IGE. Or still derives the IV from a hash of the message.

The article you link does not mention "cloud encryption". What is that? TLS?

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