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Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

And soon mother Russia might have access to almost everyones conversations. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-20/telegram-...

If that is not already the case...

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"To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data.

Thanks to this structure, we can ensure that no single government or block of like-minded countries can intrude on people's privacy and freedom of expression. Telegram can be forced to give up data only if an issue is grave and universal enough to pass the scrutiny of several different legal systems around the world.

To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments."

https://telegram.org/faq

If telegram continues to have a legal presence in Russia and/or not be blocked, they will have to do what the Russian authorities say.

Looks like they are willing to let Russian authorities block the app.

https://twitter.com/durov/status/976083990938517509

1. Sure they say that. Doesn't mean it's true.

2. No keys splitting will protect you if fsb has hold on the company (and they most likely have)

It's a pity 200M people do not understand that

Edit: formatting

Crazy that this gets downvoted.

Telegram is ran by Russian oligarchs that built the local equivalent of facebook. Telegram was developed in the st. Petersburg offices of the local facebook equivalent.

Telegram developers have deliberately made encrypted conversations impossible to use, despite selling their app on it’s “encryption”. Telegram developers also choose to use pretty questionable crypto, why?

Why are people so inclined to trust Telegram?

It's fast, free, has native apps on every platform, has good APIs and fun stuff (stickers, etc).

I don't understand why chat apps are so hard for large companies.

How to make a good chat app:

Just copy Telegram, but end to end encrypt everything by default.

I wish that someone would just do this. Signal could have been great but the usability is crap in comparison to Telegram

This is incorrect. The oligarchs took vk.com away from Pavel Durov (the founder of vk.com and later Telegram) by force with some help from FSB, then banished him from Russia. Both Pavel Durov and Telegram are now out of the reach of these oligarchs, and Durov has no desire to aid people who robbed and exiled him.

Do you work for the Durovs? It sounds like you might :)

https://twitter.com/bershidsky/status/910169626989953024

https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/910186197598838784

https://theoutline.com/post/2348/what-isn-t-telegram-saying-...

Oddly enough, your exilee friend Pavel has been a regular sight in St. Petersburg despite supposedly eluding the reach of the Russian authorities https://tjournal.ru/52954-durov-back-in-ussr

He even assaulted someone in 2017 because they were trying to take a photo of him in St Petersburg https://lenta.ru/news/2017/03/20/durov/

>Durov has no desire to aid people who robbed and exiled him.

It seems strange to think that he'd have a choice.

And anyway, Telegram is designed in a manner which allows its operators to easily read ~99% of the conversations between users. The same is not at all true of Signal or Whatsapp. Do you think that's a coincidence?

It's cute that you link to lenta.ru as if it's undoubtedly a reliable source. Wikipedia says:

"On March 12, 2014 the owner, Alexander Mamut, fired the Editor-in-Chief Galina Timchenko and replaced her with Alexey Goreslavsky. 39 employees out of the total 84, including Director-general Yuliya Minder, lost their jobs. This includes 32 writing journalists, all photo-editors (5 people) and 6 administrators. The employees of Lenta.ru issued a statement that the purpose of the move was to install a new Editor-in-Chief directly controlled by the Kremlin and turn the website into a propaganda tool. Dunja Mijatović, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, referred to the move as a manifestation of censorship."

Welcome to Runet!

I'm not sure what your point is, but to me this makes it more likely that this is an article made to smear Durov than anything else considering it's literally a government mouthpiece.

I can never trust their DIY crypto

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegr...

At least the Russian government doesn't have many ways to meddle in my life. I would be far more worried about my own government having access to my conversations.

You cannot be sure that Durov will not share or sell your data to your government. Once you gave him the data you have no control over them.

Or how about this one.

Putin gives the Trump administration information on activists in the US, people part of the so called resistance, that are using telegram. Pavel Durov is told to keep quiet, or he'll get to eat some polonium.

A modern COINTELPRO.

I'm not saying that's likely, however given history, it also wouldn't be surprising.

Thats true. But would they trust the Russians to give real information?

Durov already has your contact list and all of your messages on his servers. He can sell it to whoever he wants and you won't be able to prevent this.

Why are you using the therm "mother Russia"? Are you trying to politicize this conversation?

People should stop worrying about whatsapp, telegream etc.

The biggest security hole are the keyboards on your phone. Especially on android. Has anyone bothers to check what data for example Swiftkey collects or potentially could?

Just because B is potentially worse than A, lets forget about A and discuss how bad B is.

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