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- cross-posted to:
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Telegram and Signal are dangerous because China cant see what people do in there…
Telegram isn’t e2e encrypted.
It’s optional, you can make it e2e encrypted with the secret chat option, which the CCP doesn’t like.
They roll their own crypto which is a big no-no in information security.
which means it’s not on, by default.
which just means it’s not
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Some people are going to care enough about the CCP not reading their chats to use Secret Chats… and those people are exactly the ones the CCP wants to spy on, so it’s a problem.
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Even without Secret Chats, messages are still encrypted, just not E2E encrypted. They are encrypted until they reach Telegram’s servers, where they are decrypted, backed up, reencrypted and forwarded to the recipient. This is done to enable chat synchronisation across devices, but all chats, Secret or not, are encrypted at all points outside of Telegram’s servers. The CCP doesn’t control the servers, ergo the CCP can’t see the chats (unless they find a way to snoop on the user end, but this is harder for them to do and easier for users to circumvent).
yes I know how tls works, thanks. my point is if they did care, they’d enable e2e by default. but they don’t, because they know that the average user will just not use it. They even don’t have a setting that says “I want all my chats to be encrypted”. you have to opt in, for each individual conversation. manually.
if you want a secure messaging app, use one that encrypts by default, so it’s impossible to mess it up. Telegram is not it.
Wether Telegram cares is beside the point. The original comment explained why Telegram is inconvenient for the CCP, to which you interject that it is not E2EE. All conversations on Telegram are encryted in one way or another, which is a major problem for the CCP, and people who desire privacy and use Telegram are likely to go out of their way and use the E2EE feature as well. Regular chats being decrypted in the backend is uncool for sure, but if you live under an oppressive regime that murders dissidents and their families, targeted ads are the least of your worries.
Telegram may not be good for theday-to-day privacy needs of the West, but it’s pretty great for fighting oppression. Not only is it encrypted, no other encrypted messenger (that I know of) has the organisational utilities that Telegram has, such as channels and 200k groups. If I had to organise any sort of dissident activism in an oppressive, censorship-happy state, I’d probably use Telegram.
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You don’t need e2e encryption of the servers are hosted in a jurisdiction your government can’t reach.
I know but they don’t work with governments so they can’t really do shit.
That’s very debatable. Their transparency report channel is empty, where there are verified reports of them sharing data. My problem is not so much that they comply with court orders, but the lack of transparency. That’s definition of shady behaviour.
Yeah that’s a bad thing.
You know Telegram is strong on privacy because every government in the world is trying to ban it. Across the political spectrum too. America, Germany, Iran, Russia, China all hate it.
Russia trying to ban Telegram is a whole epopeya that produced a lot of memes and animated videos back in the days.
Now it’s a piece of history.
A story about what heppened (it’s hilarious, read it):
Essentially, there’s a gov agency called Roscomnadzor (from Russian communication surveillance) that is responsible for “keeping the internet a safe space”, so to say.
After another law, wanted by nobody, was passed, it allowed for Roscomnadzor to request the encryption keys from all social media. Since Telegram “doesn’t have those”, Roscomnadzor took it to court for non-complience.
Telegram lost the case and was ordered to pay 1mil rub (about 17000USD at the time I believe) and to provide the keys. The society started joking about how that’s the cheapest PR a company could get for such outreach. Overall sentiment was “Not only do they get so many people to hear about Telegram for pennies, but they also make Telegram look like a safe place to chat” (which is debatable, but w/e, that’s what people thought, mind you Telegram was a very new product then)
It’s also important to note that Telegram’s creator, Pavel Durov, is also the creator of largest Russian social medial called VKontakte (tl. InContact) which he was robbed of and forced to leave the country.
And so, once Roscomnadzor started trying to block Telegram for, yet again, non-complience, people started beeing dissatisfied and set up a date to let paper planes out of their windows to show their support for Telegram.
Now starts the fun part.
Just in one week over 18mil IP adresses were blocked. Whilst trying to block Telegram, Roscomnadzor managed to accidentially block: Viber, some paying services, some services for selling airplane tickets, a service selling OSAGO (mandatory car insurance), ResearchGate, central repository of Java, Skolkovo Tech websited (aka Russian Silver Valley), a lot of universities’ websited (including the biggest ones), some scientific archives.
They even managed to block some of Google’s services, like YouTube or it’s main page, Twitter, Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki (Russian social media for boomers and country bumkins, tld as “Classmates”), Yahoo, Some Russian gov sites and I believe even it’s own website.
What did you not see on that list? That’s right! Telegram is still fully operational.
This has caused a massive surge of memes and videos portraying Roscomnadzor as an anime character Roscomnadzor-chan trying to block all of the wicked stuff off the net, but ultimately failing all the time. She has goons, which look kinda like those half life solders, which are all secretly into all that stuff they block.
Roscomandzor also acquired a new nickname, “Roscompozor”, where “pozor” means “disgraceful”, think “I"m ashamed of you” kind of meaning.
Since then Telegram was blocked, but through use of VPN many people still accessed it. Including government officials (a lot of them). In fact, it was used so much that some years after they striked a deal (involving giving user’s data to Russia ofc) where Telegram was fully unblocked and still is to this day.
Yeah, that was epic.
On a side note, “nadzor” from Roscomnadzor would be better translated as “oversight”, and “pozor” is the noun “disgrace”, not the adjective “disgraceful”, which, I believe, would be “pozorny”.
Not being end to end encrypted by default is the opposite of privacy.
Thats not a problem when your company absolutely does not work with anyone… Like they probably don’t even open Letters…
I thought that it was already banned as in if you are caught with it on your device and aren’t someone like an ambassador you’d be getting a visit from the police…
The fact they’re flagging it tells me I’m probably wrong.
Well I’d also flag a Russian spyware app as suspicious if I had a say in it.
Russia tried to ban Telegram.
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