Please note that Telegram is not a Russian company; it is registered in Great Britain. Russian government doesn't have any jurisdiction over it. Also, russian users are less than 10% of Telegram userbase. So now Apple is putting sanctions upon a British company just because Russia says so. This sets a dangerous precedent. What will we see tomorrow? China, Thailand, Iran and North Korea kicking apps they don't like ou…
Apple already does ban apps on political grounds, even pretty innocuous just-the-facts type apps: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just... And yes, I think you are likely right: we will see apps banned at the behest of the Chinese government, given the size of their market. (North Korea, perhaps not.) Apple painted themselves into this corner when they decided to become the gatekeeper of what i…
Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
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Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#222Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whilen I entirely agree with your point, I don't think that a comparison between the Apple and Twitter is suitable. One is a company that publishes an operating system, which is locked down and requires software installation through their Monopoly App Store ( which I find highly distasteful), the other one is a web-based social media thing. iOS as a product is in no way similar to twitter.
What’s distasteful about that? That’s their key differentiator that enabled a lot of their advantages. And there's also Android anyone could use if they’d want to.
The fact that if you do not control the product you do not actually own the product.
You never buy a Apple device, you pay alot of money for the permission to use the device temporarily
That is distasteful to many people.
>That’s their key differentiator that enabled a lot of their advantages.
This is complete rubbish, there is no reason Apple could not have the App Store, have all the their "advantages" and by default lock their OS down, but still have a path for people that choose to break out of the wall garden, to do so.
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#224Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Telegram isn't E2E encrypted by default. You need to choose an "encrypted" chat. They have been criticised over this for many years now.
Also desktop telegram client doesn't have e2e, only mobile one.
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of those in any way support your comment, whatsoever. And calling Chechnya Russia is similar to calling Peurto Rico the United States. It's a subject of Russia, but is not what you'd call Russia. It's a 95% Islamic nation that waged a lengthy war of terror attacks against Russia and has its own independent government, rules, and laws which are driven primarily by Islamic law. You'll find nations driven by Islami…
There is no Russia in Russian Federation at all, because original Russia (Rus`, Русь) renamed itself into Ukraine to avoid any associations with bloody Russian Empire. So Chechnya is the same region of Russian Federation as any other region. PS. Look at folk culture, especially at folk songs. You will found that each region of Russian Federation has it own language for folk songs and none of them are in Russian langu…
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? If they make it so obvious of course there will be outrage. What everybody with some brains would actually do is slow down the approval process and really look for all kinds of unimportant small details that the update doesn't fulfill "yet".
Why? That still makes no sense - banning updates globally is not even what Russia wants, let alone a reasonable goal.
So for Apple that is either a good way to get rid of an unwanted app, or a way to do a favor for a competitor, or a way to put pressure on Telegram developers to do something that the devs haven't done yet for some reason (e.g. give access to user data).
Now I'm not saying that Apple does anything like that. It couldn't be proven by simple people like us anyways. I'm just providing possible explanations for what's maybe going on and why it might happen. It is for instance just as possible that Telegram is not updating themselves, because they want to achieve some kind of hidden agenda, e.g. in a subgroup of people they care about users would very much be willing to switch phones just to stay with their secure chat app and they might have a better deal with Google than they have with Apple. Nothing can be said for sure without insider information.
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#228Apple has now entered dangerous territory. Over the last month they seem to have banned apps because some government out there didn't like that app. To make matters worse, those very same governments weren't happy with the app being removed from their regional app store but they demanded it removed from all app stores. The VPN issue was a wake up call for a lot of developers. These apps were on the app store for year…
I don't know what exactly has happened though. Is Apple defying China's government in secret now? Or are Chinese regulators only concerned with GFW bypass on some special days that has passed?
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#229I'd given this challenge some thought in the recent past, specifically the challenge that the big app store owners are each generally susceptible to coercion by large nation-state actors in spite of being multinationally distributed. There was a project I was involved in rather heavily (cyph // resulted in a pair of neat conference talks) where we'd accounted for the risks of apps being banned by making the entire ap…
I'd be interested to see any slides or "work product" containing your conclusions if it's available and you don't mind. I'm working for a startup that has had to pivot to web-only applications specifically because of Apple and their frustrating nervousness around anything involving applied blockchains.
The specific device we put into production (and patented because of its criticality to Cyph) worked through the use of localized denial of service to pin signature validation logic into the local store of the browser to verify payloads received from other endpoints; in our case, we pin bad keys for the maximum permitted duration. That said, there are many different ways to use HPKP suicide that don't have to do with adding signature validation for client-side application logic, and they still come fairly close to achieving the goal of reducing how often you have to trust the server. The pattern described in this paragraph allows for Cyph to deploy new builds of the full messaging application whenever by just signing new builds such that they're validated by the pinned service worker, but if that flexibility is not a necessity, keep reading.
Since you can effectively pin any code into the browser through HPKP suicide, one different approach might be to pin a key for a more reasonable amount of time, such as two weeks, in order to stick e.g. critical application logic in the browser and rest assured that each user will use a certain build for at least two weeks time. This has the effect of reducing the exposure of an application's userbase in the event of a service compromise—at the expense of possibly committing some users to a bad build (or possibly even a compromised build) unless they manually clear pins. If you're writing a light application, this'll serve you pretty well. If you're writing a heavier application, you can outsource most of the heavier dependencies through SRI (the code pinned as the service worker would use SRI to validate the supporting libraries). The nuance here is that you're not implementing signature validation; you're just relying on that local DoS to ensure that certain code stays in the browser for as long as the bad keys are pinned and just confirming that any separate resources hash as what you'd expect them to. You're still certain to see that code--and any hashes you bake into it for SRI, should you choose to go this route--persist for as long as the invalid pins are live in your users' browsers.
HPKP still works in Firefox, so we intend to continue to research this pattern and related implementations of it. However, considering the browser with the largest market share just deprecated it while publicly mentioning the risk of footgunning via the standard, I'm not sure how much you stand to gain by implementing anything like the pattern we fleshed out two years ago. I'd love to build support to keep/fix the protocol rather than bin it, but the team that created is the team that gave up on it.
If you're curious, the private reason I've heard voiced to others by a person closely connected to the standard is that the protocol was not anticipated to be used in any manner other than what was documented, hence why termination of support for HPKP was preferred in Chrome over revision of the standard. I'm deliberately delicate with my words here because 1) it's hear-say, 2) it was expressed both off the record and in confidence to someone other than myself, and therefore 3) I can't be certain that it was expressed at all. However, key pinning--or any other TLS DoS--should always support what I described above as long as the DoS doesn't interrupt local code from executing in-browser, a behavior I doubt will change for the foreseeable future. You wouldn't want a TLS error to forcibly refresh an offline Google Docs instance just to show you said TLS error (resulting in loss of data from that offline GDocs instance), would you?
TL;DR: you can research alternatives based on the general pattern we described, but using HPKP specifically might be a dead-end for you.
But if you're keen on talking about it in more depth, I'm on keybase.io/bryant
Re: Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me rephrase- yes they can impose a fine, harass employees, ban imports of iphones, but what can they do that will work - ie force apple to ban a well known app from the app store innsuch a blatant fashion. Apple would be insane to comply with these demands, because it just opens the door for every other regieme to do the same. So ... is Apple stopping Telegram from sending the updates? Are they doing it because o…
>Apple would be insane to comply with these demands, because it just opens the door for every other regieme to do the same. But they already did in China, right?