Brazil's Supreme Court Bans Telegram (reuters.com) 31
According to Reuters, Brazil's Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the suspension of Telegram, claiming it had "repeatedly refused to adhere to judicial orders or comply with the country's laws." From the report: Moraes' decision, which is likely to stoke debate about freedom of speech in politically polarized Brazil, represents the latest chapter in the crusading justice's battle with far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies. The president and his supporters have increasingly come to rely on Telegram as a form of mass communication as larger tech companies like Meta, which owns messaging app WhatsApp, Google and Twitter have been forced by the Supreme Court to drop offending accounts over allegedly spreading disinformation.
Moraes has been leading a series of Supreme Court probes into the president and his supporters for disseminating fake news that have enraged many on the right and sparked questions of judicial overreach. According to Moraes' ruling, Telegram has repeatedly failed to block offending accounts and ignored the court's decisions. He gave Wilson Diniz Wellisch, the head of telecoms regulator Anatel, 24 hours to implement the suspension, which would stand until Telegram complies with outstanding judicial orders, pays a series of fines, and presents a country representative before the court. Moraes also ordered Apple and Google to help block users on their platforms from being able to use Telegram in Brazil.
Moraes has been leading a series of Supreme Court probes into the president and his supporters for disseminating fake news that have enraged many on the right and sparked questions of judicial overreach. According to Moraes' ruling, Telegram has repeatedly failed to block offending accounts and ignored the court's decisions. He gave Wilson Diniz Wellisch, the head of telecoms regulator Anatel, 24 hours to implement the suspension, which would stand until Telegram complies with outstanding judicial orders, pays a series of fines, and presents a country representative before the court. Moraes also ordered Apple and Google to help block users on their platforms from being able to use Telegram in Brazil.
Good luck with that (Score:2)
Curious to see how it goes.
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It is depressing to see right-wing populists like Bolsonar spread their lies.
It is equally depressing to see their opponents using censorship and bans to counter them.
Is there no hope for democracy?
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Let me guess: you voted for Biden.
Nope. I supported Bill Weld in the primary and voted for Gary Johnson in the general election.
They are neither populists nor advocates of censorship. With 3% of the vote, those are obviously not popular positions.
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Just because leftists disagree with you on what fundamental values are, doesn't mean that they're abnormal or anti-human.
Re: Good luck with that (Score:1)
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. I was reading that Telegram was designed from the start to be extremely difficult to block. It's a distributed protocol, with servers all over the world, often hiding in cloud providers like AWS so trying to block it ends up blocking other applications too. They end up playing whack-a-mole with IPs.
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Telegram has a proper desktop client as well as having multiple open source clones for the API.
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But Apple gets to control what you do with your phone. If they kick telegram out of the store, you won't be able to reaquire it on the Apple platform.
Does anyone know if Apple can send a command to your phone to disable or otherwise uninstall an app without your permission? Being an Android user, I don't know about Iphone so much.
I do know in Android land, I have access to multiple app stores and that's without hacking my own phone.
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The "off" switch is in Dubai
Use Signal instead (Score:3)
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Signal is an SMS/texting replacement not even close to Telegram. It's not a 1:1 at all. Encrypted? Yes. The same, not even close.
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Yeah not the same. Signal doesn't leak your group chats into a Cloud backup like Telegram.
Seriously, are people really going to argue that Telegram is better than Signal in 2022?
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Yes. No one who doesn't have extreme privacy concerns cares about Signal. It's a great case of security gone too far impacting usability with bothering people for their pin regularly (until they recently allowed you to turn that "security theat... ahem feature" off) and not even doing automated backups to the cloud and local backups requiring remembering a complex randomised numeric codes.
I literally ended up doing that thing that you do when your sysadmin is and utter retard and believes that password shou
Re: Use Signal instead (Score:2)
It's an good middle of the road compromise between usability and security
It obviously depends on the threat model. But when it comes to public communication, there's no such thing as a "compromise": the currently greatest and most powerful threat is from state actors, to communication metadata (i.e. primarily who with whom, when, but also others). The 2nd greatest threat is from private companies spying on your content for targeted advertising.
While Telegram apparently isn't end-to-end encrypted by default, you at least can turn it on, with limitations.
But the metadata is still
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This is the autistic view of someone who never did any actual security, or of one of those early sysadmins who did security because they understood the technical side of it. And then were shocked, SHOCKED that users didn't follow their instructions.
Modern security understands that security is fundamentally the opposite side of usability. In almost all cases, increasing one compromises the other. That means that a correct threat assessment is the first thing one should do. And in case of messaging apps, almo
Re: Use Signal instead (Score:2)
All good'n nice, but what you describe is not security; we have a different word for that, one you've used extensively, and which is... wait for it... a compromise. Not security. Compromise.
Different words to describe different things.
And yes, there is no simple way to security. Actually even Signal gets this wrong, the only system that actually does it right is Matrix.
Yet my 70-ish parents and in-laws are perfectly capable and content of using Signal. I don't even have to set it up, they just download it a
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Like I said, this is the autistic view of someone who fundamentally doesn't understand security. They merely understand security related technology and fail to grasp that security related technology is merely one small link in massive chain that is security, where failure of any link causes failure of the chain. For example, if your security technology makes your secure messaging up so cumbersome to use that few if any will use it, it means that your chain has had a catastrophic failure, because your secure
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If people were explained the technical details, they would want privacy and no ads. Most don't even realize there are options or how badly they are being spied upon.
You are smart enough to know this so it just seems like you are being disingenuous.
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That's what I thought too. Then I read the actual reports and studies and understood that my inference based on my preferences did not match that of large majority.
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And the desktop version on my Mac is so ugly it is unbelievable.
Telegram is certainly not pretty, but certainly also not ugly. But Signal is super ugly, can not even make the sidebar small. It takes literally a quarter of my whole laptop screen, so I move the window to the left out of screen to hide the contacts, and only bring it back when I get messages from a different contact.
Signal does not even allow to edit an old message, to fix a typo. Retarded. And Every few weeks/months I need to re-identify myse
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To be fair, there's now an option to not be constantly bothered with "do your remember your pin? Please enter it again" "We're not sure if you still remember your pin. Please re-enter it". That idiotic part of security theatre is now bypassable.
The ridiculous fully random, long numeric "passphrase" to recover backup is still in, and it's such a phenomenally stupid idea that for those of us who don't just go "oh, it's one of those apps for practicing pedophiles who need everything they chat about to be autom
Nor should they. (Score:2)
Was wondering when the other shoe would drop and governments would realize they can't really compel a tech company to do anything if they don't have any operations in a country.
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They don't need to compel tech company providing blocked service to do anything. They just need to compel tech companies that are in their jurisdiction, namely ISPs.
If you add enough friction to be able to use a service that brings convenience to the point where it becomes inconvenient, most people stop using it.
Pavel Durov replied (Score:2)
Telegram's founder said they gave the supreme court a dedicated email to communicate with them but it kept using an old general-purpose email address in further attempts to reach them.
https://t.me/durov/180 [t.me]
I guess with the imminent block of the service they "found" the previously ignored court requests...