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Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

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Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#151

Post by zamnos »

kelnos wrote: post #6
alwayslikethis wrote: post #3

Good luck. They tried to block it in Russia, but it simply broke their own internet for a while and the effectiveness was spotty until they gave up. To this day I believe there is quite little cooperation between the Russian government and Telegram, despite not being E2EE by default, if we don't consider conspiracy theories, unlike all the other services used in Russia which are basically all backdoored by the state…

> I don't think Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil though. How are they going to enforce the fine? I'm sure they are banking on the idea that Telegram cares more about having users in Brazil than about the money. The Brazilian government can decide not to unblock Telegram until they pay the fines. Of course, if it's that difficult to block Telegram as you suggest, they may eventually give up on both the fines an…

It's not about the money. The fines are because Telegram won't reveal who's operating (neo-Nazi) accounts on their platform, with an added bit of political shenanigans to muddy the waters on top of it.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#152

Post by xinayder »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #112
sofixa wrote: 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?

[flagged]

I don't want to counterargument all of your points because they are totally paranoid and just feeds the disinformation that Bolsonaro and his followers spread throughout the election year.

You could use any number of arguments, you could say that the current government is actively pushing for censorship and state-wide surveillance, you could criticize the fact that the supreme court judge had the power to decide what was allowed and what wasn't during the election (which is a huge red flag and surprisingly Moraes only acted towards content that had little to no truth to it) and he's now pushing for TSE (Supreme Electoral Court) to have this permanent power to decide what is allowed and what isn't on the internet.

> Last year the brazilian armed forces released a report saying that the voting machine software's makefiles download unaudited proprietary libraries straight off the internet and links them against the final binary. I'm sure the HN community can appreciate the insanity of that. Brazilian journalists didn't.

The same Aremd Forces that was heavily politicized and most of them, if not all, were supporting Bolsonaro and all the stupid shit he spat out during the election year, the same armed forces that celebrated when that stupid Oswaldo Eustaquio said the voting machines had a huge security flaw in it and he couldn't even write proper code, which turned out to be a SIMULATION of the voting machine obtained from a repository on GitHub.

The voting machines are audited every election year, TSE invites the political parties to audit them and strongly recommends them to invite over technical people to find issues with them. They found a couple of issues in the last year which had no impact on the election and wouldn't have.

EDIT: as someone pointed out in another comment, the armed forces didn't participate in ANY of the public auditing sessions and were pushing for their own audit just so they could come up with something to feed the lie Bolsonaro was spreading that the voting machines aren't secure and shouldn't be used for elections.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#153

Post by xinayder »

bhk wrote: post #29

Doesn't this sound like a dictatorship?

Not yet but Congress is trying to approve a "fake news" package which tries to put more responsibilities on the hands of Big Tech regarding monitoring online content.

When I put it like that it doesn't sound so bad, but then you read the text and find out the government and its judiciary institutions have the absolute power of determining if something is deemed as fake news or not.

Then you can say it's actually good because it will prevent or reduce disinformation from spreading. Okay, I wouldn't mind anti-vax statements being blocked, but what if I have information that an authority is corrupt? They would try to censor me, it happened in the past, in 2018 I guess, where a reputable newspaper wrote an article that one of the Supreme Court judges was implicated in the major corruption scandal in Brazil, and a few days later the Supreme Court ordered the takedown of said article. When other mainstream outlets heard about this they just shared the original article to make it more difficult to censor this information.

A couple of weeks later the Supreme Court initiated a long process in which it's the judgy, jury and executioner, a thing that lots of citizens protested, but if you did it back then you'd be called a "bolsonarista" or people would say you're supporting fake news.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#154

Post by germanier »

bee_rider wrote: post #81
matheusmoreira wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil though. How are they going to enforce the fine? You're commenting on the news of their enforcement. They are completely fine with blocking Telegram nation-wide until they reveal the user data and pay the fine. Don't give me that "good luck" speech either. The article mentions the same judges blocked Telegram last year. I submitted news of that here and people he…

Paying the fine could be a reasonable decision, depending on their priorities. Paying the fine and providing the user data basically renders the whole service pointless, right? It is better to be blocked in Brazil than to be useless everywhere I guess.

Although Telegram still claims

> To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments. https://telegram.org/faq

and the Telegram transparency bot states when queried from Germany

> No transparency report is available for your region. If any IP addresses or phone numbers are shared in accordance with 8.3 of the Privacy Policy, we will publish a transparency report within 6 months of it happening and will continue publishing semiannual reports.

German prosecutors seem to have received such information

> There were then some direct talks between representatives of the Ministry of Interior and the Telegram founder and boss, the Russian Pavel Durov. It was said that a willingness to cooperate was signaled. Telegram even named a direct contact person for the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). ... The BKA has requested such data as email or IP addresses in "230 exemplary cases" so far. Only in slightly more than 60 cases was there even a response, and only in 25 cases was data actually transmitted. translated from https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/wdr/telegram-justiz-1...

So someone is lying and I doubt it's the German government which is trying to pressure them to give up even more data.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#155

Post by xinayder »

bmarquez wrote: post #59
NayamAmarshe wrote: post #53

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…

Yeah people keep trying to push the "Russian connection" when it isn't being supported by Durov's actions. It almost feels like a conspiracy theory encouraged by users of competing apps. There are legitimate reasons to doubt Telegram like the lack of default end-to-end encryption but the Russian thing as a criticism of the app itself is overblown.

There's reason to believe that specially when you realize VK is actively monitored by Russia and Pavel doesn't care about it at all.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#156

Post by matheusmoreira »

xinayder wrote: post #152
matheusmoreira wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't want to counterargument all of your points because they are totally paranoid and just feeds the disinformation that Bolsonaro and his followers spread throughout the election year. You could use any number of arguments, you could say that the current government is actively pushing for censorship and state-wide surveillance, you could criticize the fact that the supreme court judge had the power to decide what…

Well, are they wrong? When we filter out all the noise, that's what it comes down to. Are they wrong?

> They found a couple of issues in the last year which had no impact on the election and wouldn't have.

"A couple of issues" ?

Does the voting machine software's build system NOT download unaudited proprietary manufacturer shared objects from the internet? Because that's the conclusion I came to after I read that document. That's a clear supply chain attack vector. The same type of attack vector that plagues Javascript and Python developers, many of whom post here on this very site. Yet this is supposed to be "conspiracy theory".

Am I wrong about this? So far I haven't seen anything to make me think I am. Do you have any critical information I'm missing?

When faced with this, the TSE judge just archived it with some "thanks for the code review" comment and that was the end of it. Then he says the system's "unquestionable". Then he fines Bolsonaro's party 22 million for the "bad faith" of questioning it. I don't trust it for a second.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#157

Post by NayamAmarshe »

xinayder wrote: post #155
bmarquez wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah people keep trying to push the "Russian connection" when it isn't being supported by Durov's actions. It almost feels like a conspiracy theory encouraged by users of competing apps. There are legitimate reasons to doubt Telegram like the lack of default end-to-end encryption but the Russian thing as a criticism of the app itself is overblown.

There's reason to believe that specially when you realize VK is actively monitored by Russia and Pavel doesn't care about it at all.

Pavel has no control over VK. He sold all his stake when he left Russia.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/31/5363990/how-putins-cronie...

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#158

Post by xinayder »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #156
xinayder wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to counterargument all of your points because they are totally paranoid and just feeds the disinformation that Bolsonaro and his followers spread throughout the election year. You could use any number of arguments, you could say that the current government is actively pushing for censorship and state-wide surveillance, you could criticize the fact that the supreme court judge had the power to decide what…

Well, are they wrong? When we filter out all the noise, that's what it comes down to. Are they wrong? > They found a couple of issues in the last year which had no impact on the election and wouldn't have. "A couple of issues" ? Does the voting machine software's build system NOT download unaudited proprietary manufacturer shared objects from the internet? Because that's the conclusion I came to after I read that doc…

https://www.gov.br/defesa/pt-br/centrais-de-conteudo/relator...

they said they couldn't point to any security risks that would invalidate the whole process.

I would like to read more about these findings, I can't find them anywhere and feel like I can only find them in alternative media sites.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#159

Post by eitland »

xinayder wrote: post #149
alwayslikethis wrote: post #3

Good luck. They tried to block it in Russia, but it simply broke their own internet for a while and the effectiveness was spotty until they gave up. To this day I believe there is quite little cooperation between the Russian government and Telegram, despite not being E2EE by default, if we don't consider conspiracy theories, unlike all the other services used in Russia which are basically all backdoored by the state…

They can and they have blocked it. There's a law for the internet in Brazil, called Marco Civil, which literally states that ISPs can be blocked and forbidden from providing services if they don't comply with takedown requests issued by the authorities. They were blocked quite a few times in the past 4-5 years. If I remember correctly there was a time that it was blocked for up to 2 days because they were deciding if…

> Pavel Durov, its CEO, is an absolute weirdo that tries to play god because he owns huge social media platforms, one of them being VK, which is heavily monitored by the Russian government.

VK was stolen from him and given to people who were friends with the regime.

So yes, VK is heavily monitored and controlled by Russian authorities and it seems a good deal of effort went into preventing that from happening again.

Re: Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram

#160

Post by eitland »

karp773 wrote: post #21
mehanig wrote: 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.

[flagged]

> In fact, he was and is, seen numerous times in Russia.

Care to add some links?

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