French authorities arrest Telegram’s CEO
ᗪᗩᗰᑎ @ KLISHDFSDF @lemmy.ml Posts 4Comments 455Joined 4 yr. ago

The fact that Signal has not run into legal trouble when Telegram has.
Because Signal cooperates as much as they can with law enforcement. Signal happily gives all the data they have and thankfully, for its users, the only data they have is the date/time the account was created and the date (not time) a client last pinged their servers; both in unix timestamp format, they don't even convert it to a proper date.
Additionally, Signal has no "public groups" like Telegram. Everything's private, end-to-end encrypted by default.
Also Signal has some really shady practices, such as rejecting and killing all third party clients.
Yeah, so that's outdated misinformation:
Three of these have existed for multiple years and have not been asked to stop development. The gurk-rs dev even commented (on reddit, unfortunately I can't find the source) that it reports to Signal's server as a non-official client and that if the Signal devs wanted to block it, they could easily do so.
I want extensions
Sounds like you do care about the rendering engine as that would basically give you a true mobile Firefox experience and access to all the extensions.
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yeah that doesn't make sense, I meant private forum, public forums belong to the "public" thus nobody can be held accountable.
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The law will then say E2EE is forbidden.
They've already been trying to add backdoors to encrypted platforms already.
next step is making Telegram as a prime example to strip out E2EE because “Look how many bad guys we can catch without E2EE”.
It's going to be hard to ban E2EE globally. If they do propose laws to ban encryption we'll just need to fight back. The issue with Telegram is completely unrelated to E2EE as they've implemented it so poorly, I wouldn't conflate the two issues.
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Does that mean if you provide an E2EE service, you are a criminal too ...
Nope! Not if you believe privacy is a human right.
It’s like having a mall with no surveillance or security.
It's more like renting an apartment or office space and not being liable for crimes that you cannot see. Malls are generally viewed as a public space (think unencrypted chat rooms). If you own a Mall and have no surveillance and security and continue to allow crime to happen after you've been asked to remediate the issue, you are aiding criminals, much like Pavel and Telegram if you consider that Telegram is not encrypted and they have the ability to view everything going on in their platform.
Apartments and business offices are more like "encrypted" chat rooms. You can't be held liable if you're unable to see crimes being committed.
Doesn't the concept of using a CA (which are generally also central authorities) go against the idea of E2EE that only required to (or more) endpoints or am I missing something? Signal group messages (and the protocol/concept behind it) work without a CA. I think I'm missing something, can you connect the dots for me?
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So you want so start seeing platforms practice mass censorship? That’s what’s going to happen as they aren’t going to take on risk.
Platforms are already not taking a risk and practice mass censorship. This is why you have words like "unalive" and "grape" becoming part of the American lexicon. It's not even nefarious. Advertisers don't want their content near negative content so platforms (without being asked by their government) auto-enforce these kind of policies.
What’s worse is that spells the end of the fediverse and smaller hosted media.
Serious doubt. All the fediverse has to do is comply with the law when asked, it really is that simple. Telegram was specifically not complying with the law, which is why illegal content is so easy to find on there, and thus why they were being targeted.
Admins can’t moderate everything and there will always be content that is illegal somewhere.
Frankly, if you can't keep your house in order, you're not taking your responsibility seriously enough. Nobody's forcing lemmy, mastodon, peertube, pixelfed, etc admins to give free accounts to more people than they can manage.
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Thanks for the reply. Yeah, losing Telegram as a platform for updates would be pretty unfortunate. Is there something unique about Telegram that prevents alternatives from being used? Is it the group size? Its ubiquity?
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If you own a house, can see crime is being committed there and take no action to stop it you are a criminal and should be arrested. If you own a farm, can see crime is being committed there and take no action to stop it you are a criminal and should be arrested. If you own a school, can see crime is being committed there and take no action to stop it you are a criminal and should be arrested. If you own an office building, can see crime is being committed there and take no action to stop it you are a criminal and should be arrested. If you own an internet service provider (ISP), can see see crime is being committed there and take no action to stop it you are a criminal and should be arrested. If you own any land, can see crime is being committed there and take no action to stop it you are a criminal and should be arrested. If you own a public forum, can see crime is being committed there and take no action to stop it you are a criminal and should be arrested. If you own a public messenger (because Telegram is very much not private or encrypted) can see crime is being committed there and take no action to stop it you are a criminal and should be arrested.
I don't see this as a slippery slope.
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a lot of things it does feel iffy and don’t make me trust it.
Like what? It's open source and has many cryptographer's eyes on it as it's the "golden standard" of encrypted messaging apps.
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But's not just a messaging app. Telegram is a public forum (non-private and unencrypted btw) where they know crimes are being committed and are taking no action to mitigate them.
If you let people commit crimes in your house you are a criminal. If you own a mall and let people commit crimes in it, you are a criminal. If you own a boat and let people commit crimes in it you are a criminal. Same concept here. Pavel Durov created a public forum and not only allows crime to happen, but lies to people telling them its secure and private.
If I were a tinfoil wearing kind of person, I'd think Pavel was in on the whole thing and helping some 3-letter agency because Telegram has been a "privacy" scam from the beginning and it seems criminals are too dumb to realize they fell for playbook similar to Anom, just on a bigger scale.
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This is a actually pretty worrying
Why?
Telegram is not an encrypted platform, so they're not going after him for providing end-to-end encrypted services. They're going after him because they have full insight into what's going on in their platform and not taking appropriate action and in some cases completely ignoring it. It's pretty common that if you're providing a public platform that you comply with authorities. Signal doesn't have this problem, they have no insight into anything their user base is doing; you can't be asked to enforce things you can't see.
that's really good to know! thanks
I also tried logseq and couldn't really stick with it. Tried a few others like obsidian, joplin, Zettlr, Simplenote, even just vim and vscode with various plugins, but they all had their own drawbacks I couldn't get over, like a lack of built-in cross-platform support, syncing, encryption, not being open source, etc.
I eventually found Notesnook which strikes a good balance for my needs: open source, end-to-end encrypted, easy to use, decent UI, doesn't mangle code/formatting when copy/pasting, feature parity across platforms; I use MacOS, Windows, Linux and Android and they all have clients that have feature parity - even the web client is really good!
The only thing I would say it's currently missing is to release the source code for the server, but that's on their roadmap and actively worked on. It was this commitment to openness that lead me to try it and after some brief time start paying for it.
Mullvad browser is based off the Tor browser, which is based off of Firefox. It's basically a secure/hardened Tor browser minus Tor, which makes it slightly more usable for private.
Source: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-and-the-tor-project-team-up-to-release-the-mullvad-browser
agree with your general sentiment. I've actually been using it and its very rough around the edges, in addition to being "slow" feeling overall, and I'm just testing it out between one other person and myself on other devices. it's not something I can recommend to anyone yet, but definitely keeping my eye on it.
greed incentivizing unethical contraptions.
Crypto is a tool, just like anything else. Is the internet a greed incentivizing unethical contraption? Because the internet spawned Google, Instagram, Facebook, 4Chan, and various other shady and illicit sites and services. Should we hate the internet because of this?
Crypto isn't inherently bad. It's the people trying to take advantage and duplicate the "success" of Bitcoin that make crypto bad. I'm telling you this as a person who used to believe in "crypto" and was an early adopter.
You may be deleting your comments in the hopes that it will pull some value away from Reddit. That’s not true, in fact, the opposite is more likely.
I would disagree.
If reddit was only about linking websites you would be correct, but that's not where all the value comes from. Some of the value comes from the comments. Comments provide insights, provide celebrity interaction (snoop, arnold, bill gates, etc), a sense of community, technical knowledge, stories, warnings, context as well as many other things that end-users find valuable.
Remove the comments, ipso facto, you remove value.
It's okay to not tolerate hatred, fascists and misinformation.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance