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Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

prestonbyrne.com

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Re: Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

#171

Post by pjbyrne »

sofixa wrote: post #42
hackcasual wrote: post #7

Trying to understand his legal situation by analogizing with US law understanding strikes me as some real Dunning-Kruegering. Surely someone like Preston Byrne has someone he can reach out to to get a better understanding of the actual French legal situation Durov is in.

Yeah, a lot of people, commentators, HNers, Redditors invoke US laws and procedures as reasoning and for comparison. Which is bordering on the useless - okay, you think he wouldn't have been arrested in the US, cool, what does that actually tell us about him being arrested in France? Nothing? You didn't even bother to look up how warrants and arrests and criminal proceedings work in France? Thank you for wasting my t…

The article was written for the benefit of Americans with business operations in France, so understanding why America is way better than France to run a social media company is relevant information.

That the article wound up being circulated to a bunch of Europeans who thought it was an article about French law after someone posted it on HN is something of an accident; the article isn't for them (unless of course they're planning on starting a social media company, in which case leaving Europe and setting up shop in America on a permanent basis would be recommended). The very fact of his arrest is enough for Americans to know to steer clear of the EU going forward.

Re: Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

#172

Post by mr_mitm »

jiiam wrote: post #156
emptysongglass wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That user and the user you are replying to are not misinformed. They are perfectly correct. Telegram does not store messages in plaintext. Period. No matter how shrill the cries from Moxie Marlinespike and his adherents, E2EE is not the only form of encryption. MTProto 2.0 is fully documented and everything the user linked described is true.

There is quite a large amount of people believing that Telegram stores messages in plaintext. I would like to know how they got that idea. So far the best I've got is something along the line of: if you can get your chats when you log in with a new device, then so can a Telegram employee. With no proof of the claim of course.

Somehow they must transfer the chat history from their servers to the user. Either it's plain text, or encrypted and they either use the keys to decrypt or send the keys to the user along with the encrypted content. In all cases they can simply access the contents themselves.

Re: Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

#173

Post by sofixa »

pjbyrne wrote: post #171
sofixa wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a lot of people, commentators, HNers, Redditors invoke US laws and procedures as reasoning and for comparison. Which is bordering on the useless - okay, you think he wouldn't have been arrested in the US, cool, what does that actually tell us about him being arrested in France? Nothing? You didn't even bother to look up how warrants and arrests and criminal proceedings work in France? Thank you for wasting my t…

The article was written for the benefit of Americans with business operations in France, so understanding why America is way better than France to run a social media company is relevant information. That the article wound up being circulated to a bunch of Europeans who thought it was an article about French law after someone posted it on HN is something of an accident; the article isn't for them (unless of course the…

> so understanding why America is way better than France to run a social media company is relevant information

Without any information on the legal background for France, how can anyone seriously make that claim?

Re: Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

#174

Post by aftbit »

vizzah wrote: post #155
cperciva wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am confident that if I sent a message like that, the top application security and cryptography experts in the world would collectively descend on the Tarsnap source code to figure out what changed.

Colin, have you thought to decrease storage pricing, it hasn't been reviewed for ~10 years and Tarsnap costs are currently very prohibitive.. :(

Agreed.

Honestly, I really wish the Tarsnap server was open source. I imagine it has not been released as such because that would probably hurt the business a lot, especially given that the costs per GB are currently approximately 50 times more than I would pay for simple object storage on B2.

I built our company's first backup solution on Tarsnap, but when I projected out what deploying that to our entire fleet would cost, I rebuilt on Restic. We currently pay something like $250/mo for our backups, as opposed to the approximately $12,500/mo they would cost on Tarsnap.

Re: Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

#175

Post by tptacek »

dragonwriter wrote: post #162
tptacek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His point is that he can't backdoor it: you can read the code before you install it. I'd go further, and say that this is true of anything end-to-end encrypted, open-source or not, because it's not 2002 anymore and reversing ordinary client software is table stakes. (I'd still rather run something open source, ceteris paribus).

Not being able to "backdoor it" (presuming this means "exploit a backdoor the torturer presumes you have already put into it") does not prevent you from getting tortured to backdoor it. All it does is, should that occur, prevent you from giving the torturer what they want to end the torture. OTOH, convincing the torturer by, among other means, public statements in advance that you have failed to consider this anhd be…

Tarsnap is software you compile and install yourself. He literally can't backdoor existing installations of it.

Re: Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

#176

Post by tptacek »

aftbit wrote: post #174
vizzah wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colin, have you thought to decrease storage pricing, it hasn't been reviewed for ~10 years and Tarsnap costs are currently very prohibitive.. :(

Agreed. Honestly, I really wish the Tarsnap server was open source. I imagine it has not been released as such because that would probably hurt the business a lot, especially given that the costs per GB are currently approximately 50 times more than I would pay for simple object storage on B2. I built our company's first backup solution on Tarsnap, but when I projected out what deploying that to our entire fleet woul…

Colin, if you've ever hoped to compete with your own software and providing support to people running your whole stack so they can avoid paying you anything, you should give some serious thought to open-sourcing the whole thing.

Re: Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

#177

Post by pjbyrne »

sofixa wrote: post #173
pjbyrne wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article was written for the benefit of Americans with business operations in France, so understanding why America is way better than France to run a social media company is relevant information. That the article wound up being circulated to a bunch of Europeans who thought it was an article about French law after someone posted it on HN is something of an accident; the article isn't for them (unless of course the…

> so understanding why America is way better than France to run a social media company is relevant information Without any information on the legal background for France, how can anyone seriously make that claim?

There is plenty of legal background for France (and Europe more broadly, eg the German NetzDG) there if you'd care to read the piece, including reference to numerous censorial provisions of French law which make France suboptimal vis a vis the U.S. for social media operations including Loi no. 2020-766 du 24 juin 2020, the EU DSA, and the applicable French aiding and abetting statute, the last of which would not have been usable against Durov in the U.S. absent specific intent to commit an unlawful act.

The conditional immunity under the DSA is also not as comprehensive as the broad immunity under Section 230, but that was out of scope so I didn't get into it. I do admit the piece assumes some familiarity on the part of the reader with the existing problems around the EU regulatory schemes relating to speech and content removal.

If you have any constructive suggestions I'll be happy to consider including them and giving you appropriate credit, just chuck them in the comment section. tl;dr though, in my view, France is not a great place to incorporate and run a social media company.

Re: Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

#178

Post by BlueTemplar »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #153

> if they just passively host the content But specifically, the issue with the likes of today's Facebook and Twitter (no idea about Telegram) is that they do NOT «just passively host the content», in fact they started to actively engage into its editorializing as soon as they switched to using «algorithmic feeds» ! This has even been a pretty big legislative battle in EU a few years ago, when there were attempts to t…

Huh, I really did not expect US courts to agree with me that soon :

https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/tiktok_blackout_chall...

Re: Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

#179

Post by aftbit »

tptacek wrote: post #176
aftbit wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Honestly, I really wish the Tarsnap server was open source. I imagine it has not been released as such because that would probably hurt the business a lot, especially given that the costs per GB are currently approximately 50 times more than I would pay for simple object storage on B2. I built our company's first backup solution on Tarsnap, but when I projected out what deploying that to our entire fleet woul…

Colin, if you've ever hoped to compete with your own software and providing support to people running your whole stack so they can avoid paying you anything, you should give some serious thought to open-sourcing the whole thing.

Yeah I get it, if one wants to make money off one's software, one shouldn't give it away for free, right? I'm just highlighting why I do not recommend Tarsnap professionally. It's great if you're going to be storing under 1 TB of total backups. Otherwise, you're paying 50x as much as you need to. Back when it was released, the alternatives were not as good. Today, restic seems to work just as well (and yes, I've done restores, both as a test and under real data loss circumstances) and supports object storage natively.

By the way, I absolutely love spiped. It beats the pants off stunnel in both stability and performance. Maybe Colin should close-source that and start charging $0.25/GB for traffic that flows through there too? :P

Re: Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

#180

Post by tptacek »

aftbit wrote: post #179
tptacek wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colin, if you've ever hoped to compete with your own software and providing support to people running your whole stack so they can avoid paying you anything, you should give some serious thought to open-sourcing the whole thing.

Yeah I get it, if one wants to make money off one's software, one shouldn't give it away for free, right? I'm just highlighting why I do not recommend Tarsnap professionally. It's great if you're going to be storing under 1 TB of total backups. Otherwise, you're paying 50x as much as you need to. Back when it was released, the alternatives were not as good. Today, restic seems to work just as well (and yes, I've done…

Consider that Colin's target customers might be paying for things other than raw storage, that most products are poorly marketed with cost-plus pricing, and that trying to make everybody happy is usually a bad plan. Make something that some people love, not something that everybody likes.

He's been doing this long enough, I'm not even prepared to dunk on him for picodollar pricing anymore.

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