Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

decripto.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 878 posts

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

#721

Post by ajross »

nomdep wrote: post #509
ajross wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know your services are going to be used to commit a crime, then yes, that makes you an accessory and basically all jurisdictions (I know basically nothing about French criminal law) can prosecute you for that. Crime is, y'know, illegal.

I'm appalled that you would argue in good faith that a tool for communicating in secret can be reasonably described as a service used to commit a crime. Why aren't all gun manufacturers in jail then? They must know a percentage of their products are going to be used to commit crimes. A much larger percentage than those using Telegram to commit one.

> I'm appalled that you would argue in good faith that a tool for communicating in secret can be reasonably described as a service used to commit a crime.

That's because you're assuming facts not in evidence and painting the broadest possible argument. Obviously we don't know the details yet, but it's not unlikely that this situation was a bit more specific.

Consider:

  F: "We want you to give us the chat logs of this terrorist"
  T: "OK!"
  F: "Now we need you to give us the logs from this CSAM ring"
  T: "No!  That's a violation of their free speech rights!"
You can't put your own moral compass in place of the law, basically. That final statement is very reasonably interpreted as obstruction or conspiracy, where a blanket refusal would not be.

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

#722

Post by kemayo »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #262
kemayo wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comment in subreddits without those restrictions for a bit. E.g. this list: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/wiki/index/newusersubs/ I can see how it's frustrating, but the communities you're trying to post in are essentially offloading their moderation burden onto the big popular subreddits with low requirements -- if you can prove you're capable of posting there without getting downvoted into oblivion, you're p…

That's silly. I gotta go shitpost in subreddits I have no interest in as some sort of bizarre rite of passage? I'd rather just not use the site at that point.

I think that shitposting would be the opposite of what you want to do, insofar as doing things that get you downvoted would lower your karma.

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

#723

Post by octacat »

golergka wrote: post #629
outside415 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which government? There has been a lot of mysterious deanons of protesters in Belarus in 2020. You know, the kind of deanon where armed people break down you door and you're going to be beaten and tortured for several days in the very least.

In practice it is very easy to deanon using social engineering. It is enough to open a shared link to expose your IP. A lot of people would click something like "Belorussian protestors got deanonized" or "10 ways to keep you safe" in a group chat. Just get it a catchy title. And this link is specially crafted to lead to the exposer server.

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

#724

Post by notallowedhere »

chuckadams wrote: post #449
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, HN has a much better system. Comments from new accounts, like your throwaway, are dead by default, but any user can opt in to seeing dead posts, and any user with a small amount of karma can vouch those posts, reviving them. Like I just did to your post.

New account comments are not dead by default, they just render the author name in green.

[flagged]

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

#725

Post by mmis1000 »

lfmunoz4 wrote: post #526
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 don't understand why anyone uses Telegram if it there is no proof that it is secure. Their code isn't open source?

There is no random hassle that get your account/group/channel deleted(unless you are doing real CP, which is a giant red line of telegram) or random limit for size of the group. And easy to use. That's it.

Also the apis are almost completely free, so you can do lots of creative projects for fun.

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

#727

Post by redthnb »

miohtama wrote: post #692
kombine wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's just the half of the story and Pavel isn't an innocent victim

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

#728

Post by jmb99 »

fsflover wrote: post #668
zarzavat wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram always elicits bizarre reactions from the public. On one side there’s actual security professionals saying don’t use Telegram because it’s not fully E2E encrypted, and on the other side there’s people who are convinced that it’s secure because Marketing and that there’s this big conspiracy to stop people from using Telegram. The real conspiracy theory is: Telegram have never made any attempt to either implem…

> Telegram have never made any attempt to either implement full E2E or to dissuade their users for using it It's probably true. There are still no e2ee chats on desktop, which includes my smartpon running GNU/Linux.

Does iMessage not count and E2EE (with the caveat of disabling iCloud) to you? It’s available on desktop.

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

#729

Post by bosco_mcnasty »

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…

kim dotcom ran basically a pirated game/book/music/movie site. Telegram (what I have seen) is mostly hacking leaks although rumored to have CSAM (to those not familiar with the acronym, it means cheese pizza).

Of course you can find both somewhere in the walled planetary garden of googlotron in facebooks sure. But they clamp down on it hard as they can. They clamp down on anything marginally offensive much less illegal. Have you tried the facebook "report post" interface? there are 3,000 various types of offensiveness you may report. That's their bar, their standard, that's 1,000 miles away from definitely illegal content. If their censorship apparatik is so bold as to be wiping out vast swaths of totally valid free speech, anything illegal has no chance.

If the question is "what's a great place to go for piracy" - megaupload, pirate bay, etc, then any common answer to that question is a target... "where to I go for data breaches" - breachforums, telegram, etc. Don't get worked up, all those places were destroyed by the feds and no longer exist.

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

#730

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #72
Infinity315 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because those services don't get shown reports of CSAM and then turn a blind eye to it and do nothing about it. A person witnessing a crime by itself is not a crime. However, a person witnessing a crime and choosing not to report it is a crime.

> A person witnessing a crime by itself is not a crime. However, a person witnessing a crime and choosing not to report it is a crime. That’s generally not true, at least in the Anglo legal system.

If we're doing US criminal law, failing to report crimes is a red herring here, right? I'd assume the accusation would turn on accomplice liability, on Durov both knowing about the crime and, in that knowing state of mind, doing something concrete to help it (like concealing it from inquiring authorities).

Obviously this is French criminal law, which is, well, wow.

https://www.debevoise.com/-/media/files/pdf/20190521_10_thin...

Post reply on HN