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

Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 557 posts

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#271

Post by newscracker »

godelski wrote: post #203
wintorez wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram has a feature that I really like. It allows you to delete your messages from other people devices as well.

I have been frustrated with Signal on this. I pitched that it is a good idea because of a scenario: > You're protesting with people. Cops pick them up, but not you. You can delete their messages and it is likely that you are able to do so before the police can clone your phone or copy the messages (screenshot, whatever). I got a few strange responses back: - Deleting messages doesn't mean they can't be saved (yeah...…

> I think they are not in touch with the needs of people.

Sadly, this has been true of Signal for a long time. Signal marches only to its own beat, and is quite slow to address real needs of most people.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#272

Post by mercacona »

nobodyshere wrote: post #54
mercacona wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that’s what their website claims. But it isn’t.

Normally I’d ask you for some kind of proof, but I know you won’t be able to output any of it.

Proof? The ICO they did isn’t enough? They act as a business, Durov keeps control, it did not create a foundation or a non-profit. What extra proof do you need?

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#273

Post by eitland »

prajjwal wrote: post #218

It's amazing that technology is empowering these protestors, but I'm not sure a vulnerable group of people such as this should be leaving identifying information on these servers. - You cannot sign up for Telegram without your phone number (even if it isn't public). - End to End encryption exists but is limited to 1-1 chats. - Telegram cooperates with data requests from law enforcements. The kind of risk this puts th…

> Telegram cooperates with data requests from law enforcements.

It is not that black and white:

AFAIK and IIRC it is more like this:

- yes: Telegram gives data about members of public groups/channels

- no: Telegram does not give out information from closed groups / personal chats, and they go to great lengths to prevent that information from becoming available. We might be sceptical all we want about the custom crypto, but I've seen no credible source that I can think of that have backs you statement except the limited example I gave above.

Happy to learn more though.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#274

Post by mercacona »

mercacona wrote: post #15
victords wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don’t think they do. I really think that’s just a personal project of a Russian billionaire that has enough free time and pretty much unlimited resources.

Yeah, that’s what their website claims. But it isn’t.

Why are the people is downvoting me? Did Durov create a non-profit or a foundation lately?

Telegram it’s currently a business and Durov keeps the control...

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#275

Post by eitland »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #160
rectang wrote: post #44

Should the revolution fail, the digital trail left by these messages will give the government everything they need to hunt down every last activist. We saw it with the Green Revolution in Iran. We've seen it several times since. So long as messages are not encrypted, messaging apps are much more naturally suited as tools of oppression than tools of revolution.

I don't understand how they will get the chats except from individual phones. The convo is encrypted between telegram app and their servers and the servers aren't available to Bealrus' government officials, so how are they going to get the messages? Obviously they can if they're monitoring public group chats because all they have to do is join, but person to person or private groups, how are they going to get to thos…

Group chats can easily be obtained as long as you have someone inside in the group.

People who join later only see messages from a while before they joined though so that helps a bit but only a bit.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#276

Post by newscracker »

heinrich5991 wrote: post #142
ConsiderCrying wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we stop using 6-year-old info for apps that get updated monthly? The problems they have with MTProto have been patched literally 5 years ago, the only other criticism comes from a direct competitor, and they recommend WhatsApp despite the fact that it's closed-source and nobody can verify if its encryption truly works. Facebook is planning to merge Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, which makes it even more awful…

Telegram still doesn't encrypt chats end to end (by default¹), which means it's not a strictly superior choice to WhatsApp. Facebook can't read your WhatsApp messages (of course they can add an update any time to do that), but Telegram has access to all your messages right now . ¹ Yes, you can select the end-to-end encrypted sessions, but they're very crippled from a usability perspective. I don't remember the last t…

> Facebook can't read your WhatsApp messages

Facebook does get your WhatsApp communication metadata, and has been for years now. As the three letter agencies showed, metadata is actually quite valuable in many respects without needing to trawl through massive amounts of content.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#277

Post by danvayn »

throwaway12992 wrote: post #267

I find myself surprised that such a large percentage of people use Telegram in Belarus. One might wonder if perhaps some government who wanted nukes on Russia's border might expend some effort into discrediting an election of somebody who was blocking that objective. Telegram accounts can be made in an automated manner, for somebody sufficiently motivated. https://social.techjunkie.com/use-telegram-without-phone-num.…

That's a reasonable concern, but considering Belarus has had problems like these for a while, and given telegram's popularity, both as a messenger and as a tool to circumvent Big Brother, I'd say that the majority of those Belarusian accounts are legitimate.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#278

Post by kube-system »

nordsieck wrote: post #215
d0mine wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sample size is not everything "Literary Digest poll was also one of the largest and most expensive polls ever conducted, with a sample size of around 2.4 million people" The large size by itself does not guarantee correctness https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.h...

> The large size by itself does not guarantee correctness That's true for "reasonable" poll sizes. As your poll size increases past a certain point, it does begin to guarantee correctness. An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.

> As your poll size increases past a certain point, it does begin to guarantee correctness.

> An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.

I think you're oversimplifying the situation. Clearly, sample size alone doesn't have that much of a correctness guarantee, or according to your own statement, we'd be able to trust the official results.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#279

Post by newscracker »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #238

The encryption is not very good in group chat. All the security services need is to find one protesters phone force the person to unlock it and they have it all. I am sure all network traffic of any kind was heavily monitored too. It also becomes entirely useless when the authority turns off the internet. There is another one that can work with a Bluetooth mesh https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/johnko…

> All the security services need is to find one protesters phone force the person to unlock it and they have it all.

This is true for all apps regardless of how good their network encryption is. With Telegram it's possible to delete messages for everyone. Not so in some other apps.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#280

Post by notahacker »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #197
notahacker wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even allowing for the fact some Belarusians have multiple mobile phone numbers, as do some people who aren't eligible to vote for perfectly normal reasons, it's quite telling that somebody polled twice as many votes on a communication channel compared with the official 'count'.

What about those who are underage? There's a surely a large internet-savy base with phone numbers who would otherwise be unable to vote.

Underage people and foreigners are in the 'unable to vote for perfectly normal reasons' bracket. Extrapolating from census figures, you'd need pretty much every single person in the 13-17 age range to vote Tikhanovskaya to make up the disparity between Telegram and official tallies though. And if she got literally every teenager in the country to register a protest vote on a web app, there's a sneaking suspicion she might actually have got more than her 10% official tally with the adults too...
Post reply on HN