Telegram will start moderating private chats after CEO’s arrest
Telegram will start moderating private chats after CEO’s arrest
The company has updated its FAQ page to say that private chats are no longer shielded from moderation.
Telegram has quietly removed language from its FAQ page that said private chats were protected from moderation requests. The change comes nearly two weeks after its CEO, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France for allegedly allowing “criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.”
Earlier today, Durov issued his first public statement since his arrest, promising to moderate content more on the platform, a noticeable change in tone after the company initially said he had “nothing to hide.”
“Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform,” he wrote in the statement shared on Thursday. “That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon.”
Translation: Durov is completely compromised and will do whatever NATO tells him to do. Do not trust in the security of Telegram, which frankly was never that good to begin with. And do not trust anything else even remotely connected to the company or Durov personally.
Are private chats not end to end encrypted? They should be, so it shouldn't be possible to moderate.
If not, it sounds like the app is a complete joke.
They never were and never advertised as such. There's secret chat's that only work from the originating device to the receiving device that are e2e.
Group chats were never encrypted because they're convenience chats, not places to tell secrets. IE you can look back at all the history and shared files from any device you log into. You can search for a message from 2 years ago to remember something that was discussed previously.
I'm a big telegram defender because it's the nicest cross platform chat app to stop your parents from creating the n+1th mms group chat from their iphones, torturing all android users. It's also not a Meta app, and doesn't have the nerd requirements of an actual encrypted chat.
It will be interesting to see if anyone on the payroll at Signal is subjected to the same process.
I don't trust Signal one bit. Never have. The original creator Moxie Marlinspike has been neck-deep in Silicon Valley culture for decades. During his tenure in charge of Signal's technical development he made a lot of strange decisions. Forcing his "Mobilecoin" cryptocoin scam in the standard Signal app. Denigrating the concept of warrant canaries. Refusing to allow non-Signal-owned servers to communicate with Signal apps. Requiring that only Signal apps distributed on Google and Apple's app stores be allowed to communicate with Signal-owned servers, etc. Requiring phone numbers for account creation. I don't buy for a moment that he or his colleagues are pro-privacy activists.
The "hacker community" in the US which it springs from is so buddy buddy with the US security state that I don't think a public humiliation like this will be needed. I don't have any evidence signal is compromised, but I suspect they've at least picked an architecture that the security state is okay with. And it isn't used for mass media like telegram was, it doesn't scale like that.
Signal is CIA
If not, it sounds like the app is a complete joke.
It is a joke and always was. Only advantage was that it wasn't based in the US and wasn't censorious (but they have servers there and in every other shitty spying country so dubious advantage really.)
I'm in a bunch of chatrooms that are bridged across platforms with bots and all the worst spam always came from telegram.
To be fair, end to end encryption, especially if you want to protect metadata as much as possible, is probably pretty hard to scale to tens of thousands of members which is common on telegram. But they already had a division between groups and channels, so idk
Let us place this man in the middle thingy here. Our built in text analyzer to flag topics there. And thanks for cooperation 
Oh and backdoor access to your severs.
Are private chats not end to end encrypted? They should be, so it shouldn't be possible to moderate.
Telegram has a few different chat type options:
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Public, which is what it sounds like, available for groups. Server-side encryption, so Telegram (the company) can see everything.
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Private, which is like an unlisted/unsearchable public group chat, same encryption limitations.
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Secret, which are strictly one-on-one, and default to server-side encryption. The user can select end-to-end encryption for these on a per-chat basis. It can't be made the default.
If not, it sounds like the app is a complete joke.
Oh it always has been from a security perspective. They use a homegrown E2EE known-to-be-flawed protocol called MTProto instead of using a professionally-audited one like in Matrix.
If I were to choose one app, it would probably be Matrix due to the fact that is supports E2EE not only in private messages, but in chatrooms, and due to the fact that you can self-host it (this is a simple requirement which all these other "apps" fail). But it Matrix isn't a panacea either. From my understanding, while the cryptography is considered to be sound, the protocol itself reveals a lot of metadata. If I were going to use Matrix for ninja shit, it would absolutely not be on a publicly federated server. It would be a private, unadvertized server which only the cool kids get told about.
If it were a matter of life or death, the only thing I'd really trust is GPG and dead drops.
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Why would private companies encrypt your chats
They're going to plug the NSA/GCHQ/eyes into Telegram and they're never going to leave. They're going to start altering content, using their access to arrest anti-imperialist activists, shut down anti-imperialist speech as "Russian disinfo" or whatever, etc, etc.
If you for some reason use Telegram for organizing, or even just for distributing anti-imperialist memes and info please move it elsewhere ASAP or at least prepare and spread info about a backup elsewhere.
Unfortunately this may proceed a very harsh cut-off of info from Russian sources as this was the last readily available in the west tool that also fully functioned in Russia. I don't know if westerners can sign up for VK or whatever else the Russian replacement is likely to be. With their control of this they can sever a major artery of info from Russian sources (private, amateur, and government) to the west about the truth in Ukraine and elsewhere. It feels increasingly like total information control. The closing of a bubble, the removal of pesky alternative sources of info, the criminalization and harassment of RT employees and anyone else connected with a country like Russia (or China).
And you can bet despite all this talk there will still be plenty of pedos channels on Telegram for without getting booted (they'll bust a few of the big ones and make a big show of how this was possible thanks to the arrest and compromising Telegram then probably go back to ignoring them in favor of information manipulation, passing info on enemies to western intel for additional targeting with malware, etc). And there will probably be an increase in amounts of tolerated terrorists targeting Russia and China on the app who aren't taken down despite requests from those countries.
It feels increasingly like total information control.
It absolutely is. And with Hexbear being hosted in France, I am deeply worried about the implications if the French government is now going this far on behalf of the Five Eyes and NATO.
any "western" country already does this at the whims of the NSA
So what happens to all of those Telegram channels that we like to go to in the News megathread?
https://hexbear.net/comment/4885763 @SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net
That's exactly why I thought this news was worth discussing.
Realistically nothing; it’s just more apparent how transparent they are. Still going to use them until they’re “removed under local laws” like the pflp, qassam, or Rt
So not private then lol
Also why would you ever trust a company like telegram? Its just another shitty platform owned by someone who just does it for the money.
If you ever trusted this of anything like it then you should reevaluate everyone and everything you currently trust.