Telegram will start moderating private chats after CEO’s arrest
Telegram will start moderating private chats after CEO’s arrest
archive.ph
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.
Why Telegram over Signal?
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
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
Oh and backdoor access to your severs.
Telegram has a few different chat type options:
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.
Why would private companies encrypt your chats