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

Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 1001 posts

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#761

Post by exceptione »

hnpolicestate wrote: post #728

It's hard to respond to some of the commentary here. We truly exist mentally on different planets. The West wants Telegram destroyed because the platform permits the sharing of information and ideas that are in opposition to Western domestic and foreign policy(Israel, Ukraine, China etc). This is in addition to the West not having a backdoor to Telegram and not having it's servers on Western soil. Why do you want you…

You are distracting from the issue: when law enforcement infiltrate into criminal telegram groups (drugs, child trafficking etc), they are for once doing their fucking job by ordering the platform to give them all the details they collect, so that they can come after those criminals.

If Telegram did actually prioritize private and secure communication, they would indeed be just a data pipe and nothing could be shared with law enforcement.

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#762

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #756
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people I know use Telegram to buy drugs. The main use of Telegram in France is supporting illegal activities. The page allowing you to discover channels in your neighbourhood was clearly designed to facilitate that. Telegram has basically no market share as a chat application here outside of that. You don’t see “the West” whatever that means go after WhatsApp, Signal or Matrix. That should tell you someth…

> You don’t see “the West” whatever that means go after WhatsApp, Signal or Matrix. That should tell you something. WhatsApp is a good corporate puppy of the West; Signal is a crazy nothingburger that recently burned its reputation by going into cryptocurrencies; Matrix, like with all FLOSS, has approximately zero users and is way under the radar of authorities. Still, you do occasionally see talk and moves against t…

[flagged]

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#763

Post by oarsinsync »

mdhb wrote: post #29
codedokode wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he intentionally cooperated with criminals then it is one thing. But if someone posted something illegal, and nobody reported this, then it obviously is not Durov's fault. If you are too lazy to report illegal content then you should arrest yourselves first.

Maybe just wait a moment for things to come out through the natural course of justice rather than getting yourself all worked up here. The accusations are serious enough that it’s probably reasonable to assume that they have some serious evidence for this and if that is true then this is a good outcome that should be celebrated.

> The accusations are serious enough that it’s probably reasonable to assume that they have some serious evidence for this and if that is true then this is a good outcome that should be celebrated.

Isn’t it equally reasonable to assume the accused is innocent until proven guilty?

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#764

Post by rfoo »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #753
rfoo wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prevents people from using Signal or Matrix to distribute drugs, besides serious usability issues?

Signal or Matrix don’t openly advertise channels next to you selling drugs from directly inside the application. Telegram does. The “people nearby” feature is literally “find me a dealer close by”.

Or "find me a hook up close by", "find me the notification channel of a nearby protest" (mind you, this actually happened in Hong Kong in 2019). But yeah, what you said also makes sense.

I don't use this feature as I don't really want to send my precise location to Telegram but I can imagine it being in someone else's usability complain against Signal, too.

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#765

Post by gglanzani »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #753
rfoo wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prevents people from using Signal or Matrix to distribute drugs, besides serious usability issues?

Signal or Matrix don’t openly advertise channels next to you selling drugs from directly inside the application. Telegram does. The “people nearby” feature is literally “find me a dealer close by”.

As a lightweight user, I had literally no idea what you’re talking about.

Not saying you’re wrong, just that it’s not something in your face and you need to actively search for this (now that I know this exists, it took me a minute to find it).

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#767

Post by sofixa »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #750
hnpolicestate wrote: post #728

It's hard to respond to some of the commentary here. We truly exist mentally on different planets. The West wants Telegram destroyed because the platform permits the sharing of information and ideas that are in opposition to Western domestic and foreign policy(Israel, Ukraine, China etc). This is in addition to the West not having a backdoor to Telegram and not having it's servers on Western soil. Why do you want you…

Most of the people I know use Telegram to buy drugs. The main use of Telegram in France is supporting illegal activities. The page allowing you to discover channels in your neighbourhood was clearly designed to facilitate that. Telegram has basically no market share as a chat application here outside of that. You don’t see “the West” whatever that means go after WhatsApp, Signal or Matrix. That should tell you someth…

> Most of the people I know use Telegram to buy drugs

I'm in France. I use Telegram extensively for chatting with friends (1:1 or group chats) because its UX was vastly better than any of the alternatives when we started a few years ago (stuff like polls to decide when to meet, location sharing to find one another in a crowded place), custom bots, being able to edit messages to fix typos, etc. Nowadays WhatsApp does those too, but UX is still worse, especially on non-mobile.

Meanwhile I know people buying drugs off WhatsApp.

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#768

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

panarky wrote: post #571
walterbell wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Durov 2024 interview, https://www.happyscribe.com/public/the-tucker-carlson-podcas... [text] & https://tuckercarlson.com/the-tucker-carlson-interview-pavel... [video] > Telegram has been used by protesters in places like Hong Kong, Belarus, Kazakhstan, even in Barcelona back in the day. It's been a tool for the opposition to a large extent. But it doesn't really matter whether it's opposition or the ruling party that…

Durov is full of shit. He'd have you believe that all messages are welcome on Telegram, that no material is censored, that it's all about free expression, that they're too small to provide moderation. But when an account is flagged for spam, Telegram rapidly responds and restricts or kills the account. So they can and do moderate content. It's just that accounts can get flagged for CSAM hundreds of times and Telegram…

Spam is very easily defined and identified, no need to read anything or to look at any images. If you message someone for the first time, they can click a report button and bam it's automatic weekly spam ban for you. Do it three times, forever ban.

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#769

Post by anovikov »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #750
hnpolicestate wrote: post #728

It's hard to respond to some of the commentary here. We truly exist mentally on different planets. The West wants Telegram destroyed because the platform permits the sharing of information and ideas that are in opposition to Western domestic and foreign policy(Israel, Ukraine, China etc). This is in addition to the West not having a backdoor to Telegram and not having it's servers on Western soil. Why do you want you…

Most of the people I know use Telegram to buy drugs. The main use of Telegram in France is supporting illegal activities. The page allowing you to discover channels in your neighbourhood was clearly designed to facilitate that. Telegram has basically no market share as a chat application here outside of that. You don’t see “the West” whatever that means go after WhatsApp, Signal or Matrix. That should tell you someth…

That's weird because it's really a convenient chat app and unlike WhatsApp, works equally well on both phones and desktops (Whatsapp works great on phones but desktop client sucks, Skype in it's old days, worked fine on desktops but totally sucked on phones, Telegram was the first app that did both well).

In our company all of the work chats are on Telegram although it's 100% legal, audited, and does nothing wrong. It's just the most convenient way to communicate. We use Slack only when some client heavily insists on it.

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#770

Post by DonHopkins »

vdqtp3 wrote: post #613
anigbrowl wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free speech is not something they value. Individual rights aren’t valued. Nonsense. Of course Europeans value those things, but they're also mindful of the fact that such freedoms can be abused, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

When you support literally jailing people for speech you don't like, you don't support free speech. The clear-cut example I usually pull out - there's PLENTY more. https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/31/23004339/uk-twitter-user-...

So we can all agree that Trump certainly doesn't support free speech.

And he's AMERICAN.

Post reply on HN