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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

#631

Post by walterbell »

threeseed wrote: post #628
walterbell wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal's early funding source is public record, https://www.opentech.fund/projects-we-support/supported-proj... Double Ratchet [1] is also used by WhatsApp (2B+ users) and IETF MLS [2] standard for E2EE group messaging. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ratchet_Algorithm [2] https://www.ietf.org/blog/mls-secure-and-usable-end-to-end-e...

I don't understand. Nothing in this comment is about the US government funding Signal's encryption.

   Click link -> About -> About our funding

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

#632

Post by alexey-salmin »

alwa wrote: post #594
alexey-salmin wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Should you remove e.g blasphemy which is illegal in many countries including some of what I assume you call "developed world"?

You should certainly have a formal process to respond to those countries’ requests, and you might consider technical architectures that don’t leave you in direct custody and control of that content in the first place.

> You should certainly have a formal process to respond to those countries’ requests

Mere responding is evidently not enough, you need to cooperate.

> you might consider technical architectures that don’t leave you in direct custody and control of that content in the first place.

This rules out the "public channel" feature.

Essentially what you say boils down to a global publishing platform being impossible nowadays without random and contradictive censorship acts.

While this is probably true, I definitely don't share the "yeah throw him to jail" sentiment. On the contrary, I miss very much the truly global Internet of early 2000s. If this was possible back then, it must be, generally speaking, possible? Are we going to see anything like this again in our lifetimes?

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

#633

Post by golergka »

mpeg wrote: post #49
pathless wrote: 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

WhatsApp doesn't save my history. And secret services of governments of certain counties are not a realistic adversary that I'm trying to defend myself against. The usual scammers which are going to steal my identity are not the people Durov will sell admin access to his server to.

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

#634

Post by holoduke »

dtquad wrote: post #306
pshirshov wrote: post #245

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.

Please source for this. As far as I know there is zero difference. From within Russia you can access all pro UA channels. Same for in Ukraine.

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

#635

Post by hananova »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #422
mazambazz wrote: post #29

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…

Let’s just say I encrypt illegal.content prior to uploading it to Platform A. And share the public key separately via Platform B. Maybe even refer Platform A users to a private forum on Platform B to obtain the keys. Are both platforms now on the wrong side of the law?

If either platform doesn't remove the content after having been made aware of it, yes.

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

#636

Post by vik0 »

d0mine wrote: post #323
vik0 wrote: post #241

By all accounts, this looks to me like it's nothing else but a politically motivated decision - and it gives ever more credence to my take that there is no freedom of speech in Europe As a side note, this is somewhat reminiscent of how the Catholic Church operated at the height of its power - do what we say or burn at the stake. We should then not be surprised that no longer does technological innovation happen in Eu…

It is unrelated to technological innovation (in the short run). I expect the same result in US. Europe is not united enough to have a separate from US opinion.

I really hope the US doesn't become like Europe (Europe in general, as I know it's not an actual untied enough polity at the moment) when it comes to free speech, and, come to think of it, in many, many other aspects as well.

It may sound funny to read, especially if you're an American, but I do still see America as the city upon the hill. I've lived in America, and I'm currently in (sigh) Europe, but I wish to return to that shining city in the future. It may also sound even funnier to read, but I probably love America more than a surprising amount of Americans (not a dig directed to any obvious or non-obvious group within the country currently), even though I wasn't born there. The US has just left a huge impression on me.

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

#637

Post by hananova »

mazambazz wrote: post #335
brookst wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

All right, what about logless VPN providers like Mullvad? > do not find operation of unmonitorable services acceptable. Sounds like something straight out of a dystopian surveillance state novel, very bad outlook if true.

There are several jurisdictions in the world where the government has the power to force a provider to keep logs, and actively lie about it. We simply have no way to know if mullvad or any other logless provider is actually logless, because they can be legally forced to lie about it.

Aside, warrant canaries have never been actually tested in court and the common consensus is that they wouldn't fly in reality if they were ever contested.

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

#638

Post by memer426 »

breezeTrowel wrote: post #566
mazambazz wrote: post #29

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…

Regarding Kim Dotcom, the government allegetions aren't about what users do. You can read them here: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-charges-le... Granted, he's moved on to being a Kremlin propagandist and is now shilling anti-Semitism. See: https://x.com/KimDotcom/status/1825187568834753021

Yeah he has become a Russian shill and likes to boot lick Elon Musk now that he is as well. (Hell Elon is funded by Russia now!)

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

#639

Post by exceptione »

OP's article is from a crypto blog and I think it misses the big picture. The Spectator [0] is imho more enlightening:

  There has been speculation that Durov’s arrest is linked to his most recent 
  trip to Baku, Azerbaijan, where he reportedly attempted to meet with Vladimir 
  Putin during a state visit last week. In recent weeks the Kremlin has begun 
  suppressing access to Youtube and WhatsApp in Russia in the wake of Ukraine’s 
  Kursk incursion. There is speculation that Durov may have been attempting to 
  persuade Putin to leave Telegram alone – but the Russian leader refused to meet 
  him. The fact that Durov flew from Baku to Paris in his private plane, knowing 
  that the French had a longstanding warrant out for his arrest, is one of the 
  unanswered mysteries of this story.
So it seems the mystery has a reasonable explanation. There are lots of accidents in Russia, and Pavel probably chose France as the safest option.

There are now also rumors that Russian officials got instruction from above to delete all their communication from the platform.

We will have to wait for more information.

EDIT: I will add that Pavel already lost control over VKontakte in 2014 to the state. By then he had already started Telegram, and so he left Russia back then. (Being denied a meeting with Putin gives Prigozhin saga vibes.) I think he knew the net is closing.

___

0. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-arrest-of-pavel-duro...

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

#640

Post by sudosysgen »

Illotus wrote: post #516
whimsicalism wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely my point - moderated messaging in the modern era will ultimately be unenforceable. Which is why I don’t see why certain services should be legally penalized just because they don’t happen to be E2E encrypted. Like if Telegram was instead e2e encrypted, why should that be legal if what they were previously doing wasn’t?

So essentially what you are saying that because we couldn't catch the smart criminals who use e2e encrypted services we shouldn't catch the dumb ones either?

If you ban the non-E2EE services unless they ban criminals, then dumb criminals will end up using E2EE services anyways
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