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Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

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Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because those providers cooperate with authorities and moderate their content to a fairly large degree?

How does Meta cooperate with the authorities? Isn't Whatsapp supposed to be end-to-end encrypted?

You can report people and have their messages sent to Meta for review.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#92
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E2EE is optional. Telegram does have it, but you don't need to use it.

Telegram also only supports E2EE in one-to-one chats, so any bad guys operating out of group chats / channels are definitely doing so in the clear.

What are the downsides to telegram providing default E2EE? Seems like a no brainer to have it as a default feature for the product.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#94
post #49
post #6

Telegram is genuinely the best general communication platform I have ever used, by far. I really hope he has a good lawyer and this doesn't end up getting essentially murdered for creating it. When you create something that is objectively great, everyone will use it - including bad actors.

I use telegram for some group chats, but I'm not sure why tech-savvy people would like it so much – messages are not end-to-end encrypted which makes it an inferior choice compared to even whatsapp

Same reson people choose macbooks for work over running Linux, it's just a nicer product

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#95

I'm genuinely curious to what would happen with Signal if the same bad actors moved to their platform. Would France also be arresting its creators for not properly moderating and giving backdoors?

Signal always sounded like they have better lawyers and are not as antagonistic. Police work is not only about encryption. But a lot of it involves metadata. And you know, just booting bad actors from the platform. They also don't have public groups with questionable material, as far as I know

If I were Moxie Marlinspike I would not be traveling to Europe any time soon....

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#96
post #79

I'm generally very pro EU, but this anti-encryption stuff they try to pull these last couple of years needs to stop. If it's proven that Pavel Durov is facilitating bad actors with purpose, that's a different story, but creating a secure messaging platform by itself should not constitute a crime.

Telegram is not a secure messaging platform. By default Telegram is not encrypted at all. Only "secret chats" in Telegram are encrypted. Telegram groups are not - and those can be made public and basically are just Telegram hosting content on their servers for you.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer Signal and it provides encryption.

Signal has the better protocol and the better organisation behind it, but inferior apps and UX. It's unfortunate, really.

Apps? I just use it for messaging.

I haven’t noticed any major UX issues but I use it for one thing only

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#98
Telegram has always been just one slip away from this kind of stuffs because it's a centralized service. Depending on how laws are read, it could be seen as complicit in various crimes, and it's politicians who decide how to read those laws, not tech people. It might be the end of those good days where things were so simple and easy.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#99
A lot of really terrible takes in this comment section. Telegram didn't have encrypted groups by default, and telegram possessed a lot of content on their servers that they had been made aware was illegal and didn't cooperate. Nothing more, nothing less.

The comparisons to other providers is off base because either other providers are cooperating more when they possess actionable, unencrypted information and taking steps to detect or prevent such recurrences or they are like Signal and do not have access to the underlying material in the first place or store it for very long anyway.

One cannot legally run a hosted, unmoderated content platform in the developed world, one will always be required to remove illegal materials and turn over materials in cooperation with law enforcement.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#100
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use telegram for some group chats, but I'm not sure why tech-savvy people would like it so much – messages are not end-to-end encrypted which makes it an inferior choice compared to even whatsapp

> which makes it an inferior choice compared to even whatsapp I'd rather have a good privacy policy with a good enough server-side encryption than some closed-source implementation of E2EE, that we can never audit. WhatsApp actually disallows you from reverse-engineering the app and looking into the algorithm. That begs the question, what percentage of E2EE is it really? 20%? 50%? 100%? Because there's still no way t…

This is no longer true, whatsapp have taken steps [0] to make their e2ee auditable and honestly I disagree with the idea that no e2ee is better than closed source e2ee. I'm not sure why you would trust a privacy policy more than you would trust encryption, with a court order Telegram would provide your chats to law enforcement, while Whatsapp would not be able to.

[0]: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/04/13/security/whatsapp-key-...

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