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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

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Read the founder exit letter. whatsapp is definitely not e2e encrypted for all features. You leak basic metadata (who talked to who at what time). You leak 100% of messages with "business account", which are another way to say "e2e you->meta and then meta relays the message e2e to N reciptients handling that business account". Then there's the all the links and images which are sent to e2e you->meta, meta stores the…

> with "business account", which are another way to say "e2e you->meta and then meta relays

actually its a nominated end point, and then from there its up to the business. It works out better for meta, because they aren't liable for the content if something goes wrong. (ie a secret is leaked, or PII gets out.) Great for GDPR because as they aren't acting as processor of PII they are less likley to be taken to court.

Whatsapp has about the same level of practical "privacy" (encryption is a loaded word here) as iMessage. The difference is, there are many more easy ways to report nasty content in whatsapp, which reported ~1 million cases of CSAM a year vs apples' 267. (not 200k, just 267. Thats the whole of apple. https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/202...)

Getting the content of normal messages is pretty hard, getting the content of a link, much easier.

Its not signal, but then its never meant to be.

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

#302
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Signal you trust? https://kitklarenberg.substack.com/p/signal-facing-collapse-... Anyway, while it's possible to activate a Telegram account without a physical phone (using some temporary number services) or using an (relatively) anonymous SIM card 99% of users use it via Android or iOS and that's means there is no need to grab data from Telegram, USA gov. as well as Apple or Alphabet could simply milk them from…

It's Kit Klarenberg of Grayzone. If he claims X, you should believe the opposite with much better than even odds. It could have been a hint to you when the news source of your choice attributes everything in the world to the CIA.

[dead]

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

#303

This seems like the Kim Dotcom situation again. Why are these service providers being punished for what their users do? Specifically, these service providers? Because Google, Discord, Reddit, etc. all contain some amount of CSAM (and other illegal content), yet I don't see Pichai, Citron, or Huffman getting indicted for anything. Hell, then there's the actual infrastructure providers too. This seems like a slippery s…

Why are these service providers being punished for what their users do [...] maybe I'm just being naive? In this case, the comment does strike me as naive. Back in the 1990s the tech community convinced itself (myself included) that Napster had zero ethical responsibility for the mass piracy it enabled. In reality, law in a society is supposed to serve that society. The tech community talked itself into believing tha…

This comment can itself be said to take for granted the naive view of what law it exposes.

Law is a way to enforce a policy on massive scale, sure. But there is no guarantee that it enforces things that are aiming the best equilibrium of everyone flourishing in society. And even when it does, laws are done by humans, so unless they results from a highly dynamic process that gather feedback from those on which it applies and strive to improve over time, there is almost no chance laws can meet such an ambitious goal.

What if Napster was a symptom, but not of ill behavior? Supposing that unconditional sharing cultural heritage is basically the sane way to go can be backed on solid anthropological evidences, over several hundred millennia.

What if information monopolies is the massive ethical atrocity, enforced by corrupted governments which were hijacked by various sociopaths whose chief goal is to parasite as much as possible resources from societies?

Horrendous crimes, yes there are many out there, often commissioned by governments who will shamelessly throw outrageous lies at there citizens to transform them into cannon fodders and other atrocities.

Regarding fair retribution of most artists out there, we would certainly be better served with universal unconditional net revenue for everyone. The current fame lottery is just as fair as a national bingo as a way to make a decent career.

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

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram is not E2E encrypted.

so i should be liable if it is a plain text messaging github side project?

do you really feel this is a good faith analogy? how is a side project in any way similar to a company with billions of users?

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

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're technically right (I think). However, I believe if you witness a murder and know the murderer and the police asks you: "Do you know anything about X murder?" Then I think you're legally required to tell the truth here.

I think in most modern democracies you aren’t legally required to tell the police anything. Courts are a different case though.

As a suspect. At least in court, as a completely non-involved bystander you have no right of refusal to testify in most jurisdictions.

Not sure whether that extends to police questioning though.

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

#306

My opinion would be extremely unpopular, but: 1) The guy was marketing an open-text messenger as an e2ee messenger 2) Because of (1) he was able to moderate it and help law enforcement with locating criminals but he was not cooperating 3) He was extremely cooperative with Russian "law enforcement", as multiple deanonymised activists with leaked chats, contact lists and location history found out So, a hypocrite got w…

Telegram within Russia and outside Russia are two completely different apps with completely different featureset and visible channels.

The only "anti-war" sentiment on Russian Telegram is ultra-nationalistic whining about the warfare not being efficient and brutal enough.

But outside Russia there are even pro-Ukrainian Russian-language Telegram channels.

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would imply that just E2EEing everything would give you a free pass not to moderate anything, which seems very naive. I doubt the judges would care about their self-imposed technological limitations.

I agree with you, but also sympathize with the technical issues of moderating encrypted information. Thinking a bit about it, there would need to be a global man in the middle or a requirement for all applications to decrypt/re-encrypt centrally for moderation.

Such global man in the middle could be abused by bad parties.

That's why the authorities ask for the squaring of the circle.

Don't break encryption but make it readable.

That's "Let's make PI = 3" level of ignorance

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

#308

He very likely refused to play ball with NATO, and the software is working as intended, meaning no backdoors. I think we should have and open and decentralized version of this kind of "criminal" communication system. We should show them what Streisand effect really means.

https://matrix.org/ ?

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

#309

This seems like the Kim Dotcom situation again. Why are these service providers being punished for what their users do? Specifically, these service providers? Because Google, Discord, Reddit, etc. all contain some amount of CSAM (and other illegal content), yet I don't see Pichai, Citron, or Huffman getting indicted for anything. Hell, then there's the actual infrastructure providers too. This seems like a slippery s…

> Specifically, these service providers

I’m not a fan of this arrest and I don’t believe service providers have a duty to contravene their security promises so as to monitor their users.

But it seems pretty obvious that governments find the monitoring that Google / Reddit / etc do acceptable, and do not find operation of unmonitorable services acceptable.

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Signal for mobile and Signal for desktop are different apps with different code bases. Neither is as good as Telegram's, in my opinion.

Signal is fine for messaging. Not bad, not amazing. I'd have a much easier time convincing people to switch to Signal if it would've had a client as good as Telegram's, especially for the desktop application.

That said, Telegram has been adding more and more annoying premium features that distract and annoy.

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