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Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app

telegra.ph

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Re: Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app

#31

Post by echelon »

jeroenhd wrote: post #14
echelon wrote: post #4

This is why apps suck. Steve Jobs got us into this mess by trying to monopolize the iPhone processor (and only allowed the web to bootstrap his platform). Complete control can be strong armed by dictators, and our spineless capitalists will bend to their will. The W3C needs to develop a standard for non-DOM, immediate mode painted, fully WASM apps that can access all of a device's hardware. Storage, cameras, network,…

What's even the point in making native apps work over the web? Just use native apps, period. You can install native applications on most operating systems already (iOS notably lacking support for persistent "sideloading"). If you want, I'm sure you can cross-compile WASM into some kind of native application or even just leverage a WebView component to make your "app" an HTML page with just a . All of this is already…

Native apps aren't a cross platform standard, when the truth is that they should be. They do the same things on all platforms.

They're also tightly controlled and taxed, which they shouldn't be.

Re: Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app

#32

Post by jeroenhd »

jefftk wrote: post #13

This is why the web is so important: no app stores to pressure. It looks to be like this particular telegram bot could have been a web site?

A website which would get blocked instantaneously. Russia has an extensive censorship toolset available. They've blanket blocked a whole range of Cloudflare IPs at some point because they wanted a certain website behind Cloudflare shut down and didn't care about the collateral damage.

Of course, such a block is easy to circumvent with a VPN, but if you need a VPN to access it then the service is essentially unavailable to non-techs, greatly reducing its effectiveness.

There is a website[0] and I don't know why they didn't just launch a similar web app. Running on Google's appspot.com, the website would probably be dealt with the same way the apps were dealt with. No big hosting company (Amazon, Google, OVH, you name it) wants to risk being banned from the Russian internet, after all. A TOR hidden service would probably survive attempts at censorship, but at that point the whole effort is probably not worth the effort because you're not reaching many people locking the information behind TOR.

[0]: https://votesmart.appspot.com/

Re: Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app

#33

Post by thevinter »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #8
noxer wrote: post #2

There was recently comments about this with questionable reasoning. There is an official statement now so everyone can make their own educated opinion. Please don't start a "telegram is not encrypted by default" shitstorm like in every other comment section about anything related to Telegram.

I think for open group chats it doesn't really matter. Because anyone can join anyway. Nobody complains that IRC isn't E2E encrypted and still many people use it every day :) That usecase doesn't benefit from it at all. For closed (invite only) group chats and 1:1 chats I think it should be encrypted by default though. Like WA and Signal. There's the secret chats of course but they only work on one device and not on…

I would like to point out that key management is hard when, like telegram, you can seamlessly access your account on multiple devices. See Signal or WhatsApp asking you to be on the same network with your phone etc. This is the only reason I didn't move to Signal yet and I don't think there's (yet) a clear solution.

Re: Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app

#34

Post by LegitShady »

raman162 wrote: post #24
Y_Y wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Telegram doesn't distribute apps, they blocked a "user" related to the app from using their network. The article does seem very reasonable, but I'd disagree that it's objective, since the author, Durov, runs Telegram and is writing to justify their actions.

Not the OP but I would say it's "objective" from telegrams perspective. They shared their decision making process which I agreed with, not too sure what would have been a better choice in that situation.

> it's "objective" from telegrams perspective.

that's another way to say subjective if you aren't willing to admit it. the whole point of objective/subjective is that its supposed to be POV neutral.

Re: Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app

#35

Post by LegitShady »

echelon wrote: post #15
echelon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is downvoting you? We should never support censorship or the erosion of privacy. Preservation of these two is essential for our democracy and freedom.

I've just lost the ability to edit posts. I was in the middle of an edit to add more commentary, and it failed. This hasn't ever happened to me on HN before. Can a moderator explain what is going on or why I'm being targeted? Edit button is completely gone on the above post. https://i.imgur.com/BnYuqx6.jpg

HN has a time limit on how long you can edit posts after they go up - its not special its for everyone. You'd know about it but HN also has terrible design in terms of telling users what the heck is going on.

Re: Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app

#36

Post by jefftk »

jeroenhd wrote: post #32
jefftk wrote: post #13

This is why the web is so important: no app stores to pressure. It looks to be like this particular telegram bot could have been a web site?

A website which would get blocked instantaneously. Russia has an extensive censorship toolset available. They've blanket blocked a whole range of Cloudflare IPs at some point because they wanted a certain website behind Cloudflare shut down and didn't care about the collateral damage. Of course, such a block is easy to circumvent with a VPN, but if you need a VPN to access it then the service is essentially unavailab…

If your adversary is happy to block arbitrary network requests, why do they need to get the app removed from the app store? Can't they just block all requests it makes?

Re: Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app

#37

Post by echelon »

LegitShady wrote: post #35
echelon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just lost the ability to edit posts. I was in the middle of an edit to add more commentary, and it failed. This hasn't ever happened to me on HN before. Can a moderator explain what is going on or why I'm being targeted? Edit button is completely gone on the above post. https://i.imgur.com/BnYuqx6.jpg

HN has a time limit on how long you can edit posts after they go up - its not special its for everyone. You'd know about it but HN also has terrible design in terms of telling users what the heck is going on.

The post was less than five minutes old. I can still edit other posts which are older.

Right now it's 19 minutes old (and uneditable), yet I can still edit a different 27 minute old comment.

I crafted an edit URL for the post using its id, and I still can't edit it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=28656231

Re: Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app

#38

Post by cnst »

Y_Y wrote: post #19
cnst wrote: post #12

A very objective article, actually, and goes well to explain how this request to block the "voting app" isn't at all as controversial as portrayed in the Western MSM: > Second, this particular demand of the Russian authorities wasn't obviously unconstitutional, as they referred to a law that restricts campaigning after people start casting their votes. Laws against political campaigning while voting is underway exist…

But Telegram doesn't distribute apps, they blocked a "user" related to the app from using their network. The article does seem very reasonable, but I'd disagree that it's objective, since the author, Durov, runs Telegram and is writing to justify their actions.

But why do you think any justification is needed in the first place?

It's basically the same law as in many other countries. The only difference is that citizens of most other countries don't dare to do these tricks, because there are severe consequences for playing with election integrity in the Western world. For example, look at what happened with Dinesh D'Souza when he tried donating to a campaign of a friend more than what the law allowed, using another friend as a lame duck to make the donation to avoid personal limits.

Re: Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app

#39

Post by LegitShady »

echelon wrote: post #37
LegitShady wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN has a time limit on how long you can edit posts after they go up - its not special its for everyone. You'd know about it but HN also has terrible design in terms of telling users what the heck is going on.

The post was less than five minutes old. I can still edit other posts which are older. Right now it's 19 minutes old (and uneditable), yet I can still edit a different 27 minute old comment. I crafted an edit URL for the post using its id, and I still can't edit it: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=28656231

I think its supposed to be 2 hours.

Re: Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app

#40

Post by GekkePrutser »

vbezhenar wrote: post #18
GekkePrutser wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for open group chats it doesn't really matter. Because anyone can join anyway. Nobody complains that IRC isn't E2E encrypted and still many people use it every day :) That usecase doesn't benefit from it at all. For closed (invite only) group chats and 1:1 chats I think it should be encrypted by default though. Like WA and Signal. There's the secret chats of course but they only work on one device and not on…

I trust Telegram E2E implementation more, than Whatsapp. I'm sure that there are no cloud backups (for me and for other person), I'm sure that there's no sync happening (any sync is potential threat to security). All data stays on device and that's about it. It's true end-to-end. Whatsapp and Signal implementations are not End to End. They're something like User to User or Account to Account, with some encrypted copi…

The 'many ends' are really needed to make E2E viable IMO. It's the #1 reason I rarely use the secret chats in Telegram.

And if a security feature has so many drawbacks that nobody uses it, you end up with less security. I'd rather have a flawed E2E implementation than one that is not used at all. For example I recently sent passwords to our Makerspace users in secret chats but half of them didn't see them because they were either on another device or they weren't online (also seems to be a requirement for secret chats). So many of them asked to 'stop being difficult' and send them in a normal chat. This is what I mean. And those people are mostly geeks. If they give up on it, what will normal people do?

If it's not seamless enough, only us crypto geeks will use it and the rest will roll their eyes. It has to work for grandma just as easy as it does for us. And Signal and WhatsApp do really pull that off.

I agree that backups were WhatsApp's weak spot but they are making some good modifications that allow users to store the key themselves.

It would help if the key management could be checked though.. I totally agree with you there. Right now it's not transparent enough, even for those of us who know what they're doing it's not really possible to check with WhatsApp. Signal is another story as it's open source.

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