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Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

theguardian.com

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Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#901

Post by bcherny »

arctics wrote: post #891

Facebook has many illicit groups and Mark Zuckerberg was never charged with anything. I assume this is more related to privacy where US government has backdoor to Facebook while doesn't have one to Telegram.

FB actively takes down groups and blocks users that (1) break FB’s community standards or (2) do really bad stuff (share child porn, recruit terrorists, etc.). There are manual and automated ways to do this. Users have a way to report bad stuff to FB and to group admins, and FB has a way to send really bad stuff to authorities when complying with a warrant. IIRC the majority of Meta’s employees (tens of thousands of people) work on these safety systems.

So yeah, Meta takes it really seriously. It doesn’t work perfectly because the scale is mind-boggling, but it’s probably the best system of this kind at this scale, and it is constantly being evaluated, red teamed, and improved.

Source: I used to work on FB Groups.

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#902

Post by birksherty »

andybak wrote: post #851
can16358p wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment you put even the option of backdoors, some governments will abuse it heavily. What might be essential right to human communication might suddenly become "illegal" according to the government. So there should never ever be, under no circumstances, even the code and infra to be there to provide backdoor/censorships, otherwise it _will_ be abused by limiting people's communication in the moment they literally…

GP didn't mention backdoors.

That's exactly what control by gov is, otherwise they can already see public channels groups.

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#903

Post by which »

rchaud wrote: post #875
which wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a criminal mastermind pay $1000 for an anonymous Telegram account when they could buy a burner phone with a prepaid SIM included for like $20 to register and throw it out? In my experience the people who buy those are more Durov superfan than Keyser Söze. And evidence of criminality on Telegram predates the Fragment numbers by a while - for instance in like 2014-2015 pretty much the only time Telegram was i…

"Burner phones" are a TV trope of the 90s and 00s. In most countries you cannot get a phone number without registering your ID with the telecom provider.

I’m referring to tracfones or similar prepaid devices which you can buy in the US for very cheap. In other countries if you apply yourself just a little bit you can get the same result. Greece has SIM card registration yet you can buy pre registered ones off the street in Athens. Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Estonia, UK, and other countries have no SIM card registration at all and roaming works good across the EU. And you only need the number once to sign up.

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#904

Post by nephanth »

nis0s wrote: post #900

I don’t know how much this founder is personally complicit in any of the charges brought against him, but if he’s just being held accountable for running a service where others did nefarious things, then this should be a chilling effect for all founders. Why would anyone want to innovate and develop privacy technologies if this is what happens? So, your best bet is to work with government agencies if you want to work…

To clarify:

According to the TF1 link, the charges being brought against him are

1. No moderation and refusal to cooperate with government forces on a bunch of cases (what you are describing)

2. Tools allegedly catering to criminality (burner phone numbers, cryptocurrency transactions...)

Note that for now, no judgement has taken place yet. So none of this has been determined by the judicial system to be illegal.

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#906

Post by LtWorf »

a0123 wrote: post #297
chucke1992 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe there are any western nations that want non-locally-backdoored messaging of any sort But that's what exactly they want no? EU is literally implementing a regulation that will allow to "circumvent end-to-end encryption to address child sexual abuse material". I believe it failed to pass recently, but they will try again - and nothing stops countries to implement it independently. I think France is th…

To be clear, the legislation in France and in the EU that is most likely behind this arrest is that companies have to at least try to do some moderation. There is an understanding that not everything can be moderated (obviously, the entire Internet would be banned otherwise) but there has to be a genuine attempt. Which every company does more or less. The fact that Telegram doesn't reach this extremely low, very low…

They occasionally remove copyright violating files, so they do something.

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#907

Post by tillulen »

sansii wrote: post #781
mlindner wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it highly amusing that people on here actually think secure messaging platforms are "locally backdoored". Despite what the article says, Telegram is not even a nominally end-to-end encrypted platform. You need to jump through hoops to get end-to-end encryption on the platform.

"You need to jump through hoops to get end-to-end encryption on the platform." What do you mean by this?

On Telegram, even private messages are not end-to-end encrypted by default. The so-called secret chats are end-to-end encrypted but are a major pain to use.

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#908

Post by LtWorf »

riedel wrote: post #890
mrtksn wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a system put in place against the legal system but it's not a technical limitation. For example, he will be able to look into the chats of his ex without the need of court orders of multiple unfriendly countries proving that the situation is grave and universal one. When the limitation is not technical, your only guarantee is the integrity of the operators and the lack of interest of your attackers coercing th…

Funny thing is that now Russia says they France needs to guarantee access to the Russian embassy for him (not really sure if he wants that). But wikipedia says he has UAE and French citizenship...

And russian...

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#909

Post by LtWorf »

codedokode wrote: post #447
vwkd wrote: post #435

https://x.com/christogrozev/status/1827450631462048023 > I wonder what caught up with him first: the undisturbed sale of hard drugs vIa telegram, or the undisturbed recruitment of freelancers for GRU's terrorist attacks across Europe. Seems there could be some truth to the accusations.

Cannot terrorist-freelancers (whatever that means) be recruited with Element, Signal, VK or email on Yandex?

Yes but those are probably backdoored by USA so ok.

Re: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

#910

Post by dumbfounder »

n2d4 wrote: post #455
dumbfounder wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard that YC alums have more voting power than others.

Not true — also, why would YC alums be less likely to upvote a post about Pavel Durov getting arrested?

I heard it directly from a YC alum who said he helped me push a post to the top. But this was several years ago. I didn't mean that YC alums would be less likely to upvote that particular article, but it does make the rankings much more unpredictable.
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