81–90 of 130 posts
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> it is not part of governmental control Isn't that a pretty dangerous assertion in itself? It's a private company running private servers that you have no control over and no ability to tell whether or not an external entity has accessed your data.
Whom should I be afraid of? A private company who or my government?
FTFY
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You are judging it by Western standards. They may have nothing on him and don't actually mean to arrest him etc., it's just intimidation tactics
Yeah it definitely sounded like an intimidation attempt, though a rather ill-conceived one. If they had a search warrant, it seems odd to me that they chose not to force entry. If they didn't have a warrant, I would think they would have a plan if consent was not given to enter -- getting punked out when intimidation was your goal is a pretty embarrassing result.
"[General] Zhukov had always been notified about meetings so this impromptu one worried him. The night before the meeting, three men came to Zhukov’s home for a random search, but they had no warrant. Zhukov threatened to use weapons, forcing them off his property. After they left, he did not sleep the entire night, fearful of the next morning."
https://huhtaj.wordpress.com/scholarly-writing/power-struggl...
He pulled a rifle against NKVD functionaires and they walked away. Was it THAT soft under Stalin's regime? No, it's just toying. Cat and mouse. It's about sending a message: we can get you any time we want, even if you're a world famous general or Russian Zuckerberg etc.
American, or, in general, Western commentators often don't understand this type of moves because they belong to a different political vocabulary, so to speak. "Hah! They even had no warrant, how amateurish of them" - no, that's the POINT.
This could likely be part of some behind-the-scenes "negotiations" between Kremlin and the owner of VK...
Police brutality and abuse in the West (or probably anywhere, for that matter) is a fact of life, but this is not the same thing.
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Totally bogus. TextSecure-enabled WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted using a widely-respected cryptographic messaging scheme. Telegram isn't. The point of serious end-to-end encryption is that it doesn't matter who runs the servers . TextSecure-enabled WhatsApp beats Telegram on a pure engineering level; we don't even need to reach politics to prefer it.
I cannot use TextSecure on Android because my friend uses iOS. So there is no TextSecure for me.
https://whispersystems.org/blog/a-whisper/
(Just replace "Whisper" with "Signal" :)
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> it is not part of governmental control Isn't that a pretty dangerous assertion in itself? It's a private company running private servers that you have no control over and no ability to tell whether or not an external entity has accessed your data.
Whom should I be afraid of? A private company who or my government?
There's been a lot of controversy over the Telegram encryption protocol. Any cryptographer that looks at it cringes, but Telegram has deep pockets and has done a decent job building hype. Beyond doubts with the protocol itself, I think the more important consideration is that most people never use it . Telegram is not encrypted by default. Users have to create a special "secret chat" with contacts that is ephemeral,…
> Telegram even stores plaintext copies of everyone's entire message history on the server for multi-device sync. Really? In their FAQ [1] they state: > ordinary chats use client-server/server-client encryption and are stored securely encrypted on our servers What's your source? [1] https://telegram.org/faq
https://core.telegram.org/methods#working-with-messages
...where's the encryption on message histories? There is none. If the data is encrypted server-side, it's with keys that live on the servers. In other words, the encryption provides no value and the servers are "trusted." The point of end to end encryption is not to have to trust servers.
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Totally bogus. TextSecure-enabled WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted using a widely-respected cryptographic messaging scheme. Telegram isn't. The point of serious end-to-end encryption is that it doesn't matter who runs the servers . TextSecure-enabled WhatsApp beats Telegram on a pure engineering level; we don't even need to reach politics to prefer it.
It is not all that. Lets say you are planning the next protests with your friends over WhatsApp using TextSecure. The security agencies cannot view your message content but they can view whom you are talking with with a warrant which will show you that you are a terrorist. Now try to explain why you encrypt your messages if you are not a terrotist. Oh, you are polititian with wife and texting secretly to this woman..…
Because the widely used chat app I happen to be using does that for all communications without any special direction from me. I didn't even know they were encrypted, it just happened!
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Downvote all you want but please share your perspective also.
That's just it - there is no privacy. You've got a client which stores plaintext messages server side, just waiting to be broken into by (hackers/government agents/kiddies). The messages are being sent unencrypted unless you enable the "secure" (it really isn't) mode anyways, so we can also add "people who can sniff your traffic" to the list of adversaries. That's pretty much the polar opposite of "private".
There was a contest held by Pavel, with $200k prize who will break this "weak security". No one succeeded.
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Yeah it definitely sounded like an intimidation attempt, though a rather ill-conceived one. If they had a search warrant, it seems odd to me that they chose not to force entry. If they didn't have a warrant, I would think they would have a plan if consent was not given to enter -- getting punked out when intimidation was your goal is a pretty embarrassing result.
It's sort of a Russian tradition, valar_m. Even the most powerful were harassed like that, and even in Stalin era the police would just back off sometimes. It's not them punking out; it's showing contempt. "We are not in a rush, little one". The purpose is to wear the victim down. "[General] Zhukov had always been notified about meetings so this impromptu one worried him. The night before the meeting, three men came…
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But how you can be sure about that if WhatsApp code is not opensourced? Telegram has at least iOS and Android code opensourced.
Source code doesn't really matter as much as you'd think. In fact, it can be deceptive in some cases. I would call source code a nice-to-have. In contrast, observing the network traffic, debugging the application, and examining the decompiled binary will tell you exactly what's going on.
A few weeks later, he and other VKontakte executives folded 5000-ruble notes — worth about $155 at the time — into paper airplanes and threw them out an office window, sparking a fight in the street below. I'm wondering if that can be qualified as "mean". Doesn't look like a nice thing to do. I also can't see what was the motivation other than "Look, I'm rich".
I believe this was after a VK executive received a bonus from the company and someone had made a joke along the lines of "look you've made it". The employee responded to say that money wasn't his motivation. Instead, it was the idea of creating and building stuff. To prove his point, he threw the bonus money out of the window in paper planes. This could imply that money really wasn't/isn't the motivation. Maybe this…
Thanks, that seems like a valid explanation.