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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

#691

Post by miohtama »

mihaaly wrote: post #684
BeetleB wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have no way to know this Well, other than his arrest ;-)

I did not see in the list the 'did not allow us adding backdoor to their service' charge. Did I miss something?

This is one of the charges (according to French press): refusing to give French police unfettered access to Telegram user data and moderation.

It’s French national law, not EU (though the EU will copy for sure).

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/whats-going-frances-onl...

Also now they have added “because people watch football matches illegally on Telegram”. So they are going to throw everything at kitchen sink at Durov, probably also national security issues because anti-French political groups use Telegram in Africa.

https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1827767824858931319

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

#692

Post by miohtama »

kombine wrote: post #546
smt88 wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russian govt officials are protesting his arrest. When an authoritarian govt is calling for the release of someone who runs a "private" messenger, it suggests they have a back door. Otherwise they tend to oppose all private messaging.

No, there is no logical link between the two events. Russian govt can protest that for propaganda reasons: to make a point that Western governments are restricting freedom of speech.

Durov was robbed from his previous startup at a gunpoint by Putin’s thugs, and then he had to escape, so it is unlikely Durov co-operates with Russia:

https://x.com/moo9000/status/1827651335476461813

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

#693

Post by coliveira »

marcinzm wrote: post #659
coliveira wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If his was really true for banks there would be a large number of bankers in jail. This number being close to zero, I guess the courts are very lax at charging bankers for crimes.

Banks do a massive amount of tracking and flagging. Even putting a joke “for drugs” in a Venmo field can cause issues. Plus reporting large transactions. There was a massive post on HN yesterday about how often banks close startup accounts due to false positives.

All this flagging seems to be more for "cover your *ss" reasons, because the real criminals continue doing their business everyday.

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

#694

Post by lttlrck »

walterbell wrote: post #581
medion wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal built by the US government? Is there any more actual information on this claim?

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...

funded != built ?

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

#695

Post by bitnasty »

outside415 wrote: post #322
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…

Watch his interview with Tucker Carlson and you’ll see. He doesn’t acquiesce to government requests for moderation control, censorship, and sharing private user data so they target him. He refuses to implement backdoors as well. In stark contrast to western social media companies.

Who would watch an interview being held by a crazy person and take it at face value? Anyone with half a brain would avoid watching or listening to Tucker Carlson like the plague.

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

#697

Post by mr_toad »

Infinity315 wrote: post #88
itohihiyt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a crime not to report a crime, at least not where I live. But facilitating a crime, which is something you could accuse telegram of is.

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.

Depending on the jurisdiction and the crime and the circumstances an act of omission (like ignoring a murder) would be suspicious and may get you charged with aiding and abetting.

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

#698

Post by ithkuil »

psychoslave wrote: post #303
thomassmith65 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appl…

> 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.

Yes, this happened, is happening and will happen.

I wonder however if the word "often" may perhaps be misleading or even completely wrong.

If you pick one random victim of a horrendous crime today in a western society. Feel free to pick the minority most hated by that society. What is the likelihood that that crime was commissioned by the government? It's more likely domestic violence, trafficking etc done by fellow community members.

Sure there are examples of governments shooting civilian planes in the sky or ferries in the and covering up. And it's perfectly sensible to be outraged when that happens. But jumping to the conclusion that "the government" just does those things as a matter of routine doesn't sound right to me. I don't buy it. It smells conspiratorial thinking and requires extraordinary proof.

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

#699

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jeroenhd wrote: post #124
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…

Dotcom got extradited (which was declared legal much later). Durov landed in a country that had an arrest warrant out for him. I hope his situation isn't similar to Dotcom's, as Dotcom was shown to be complicit in the crimes he was being persecuted for. Convicting the megaupload people would've been a LOT harder if they hadn't been uploading and curating illegal content on their platform themselves. As a service prov…

> Convicting the megaupload people would've been a LOT harder if they hadn't been uploading and curating illegal content on their platform themselves.

This is just a gimmick to bamboozle judges and the public. The ploy is to claim that someone is guilty of serious offense A because you proved they committed less serious offense B, even though the offenses have different elements and penalties.

They use the ploy because any large organization by definition has a lot of people in it and copyright infringement is pretty common, so by the law of large numbers somebody in the company is probably doing it even if the company doesn't want them to and then the prosecutors want to claim that the company as a whole is doing something wrong and has to be shut down. Which doesn't make any sense when another company is just going to provide the same perfectly legal service and the users are going to use it for the exact same thing.

Moreover, the obvious way for companies to prevent this -- indeed, the thing Megaupload's replacement started doing after the original was shut down -- is to encrypt everything so their employees have no access to it. Which I have no objection to, but if courts and prosecutors like to be able to issue a subpoena and actually get something back, they might want to reconsider turning the ability of a company to access data into a liability.

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

#700

Post by jjav »

Zambyte wrote: post #487
konart wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the server? Telegram is not strictly e2e.

Huh, I was going to point out that the Signal server isn't Free Software either, since for a while it wasn't being published, but it seems they have gotten back into publishing it. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

Publishing server code provides no assurance of anything (although it is still nice, for other reasons) since nobody can know if what they (for any "they") run in production is the same as the public source.

Open client code and documented protoccols are much more important. If you can compile your own client from open source code and it works fine, then you can know for sure what you're sending to the server.

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